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Category Archives: Technology

The advancements of technology inside museums involving presentation, conservation, communication and anything else involving new stuff.

Jan 23 0 comments

Individualism, Technology

PlateaKnit

An Xiao’s @Platea project has always been a source for interesting collaborative art over various social media networks. I’ve been involved in a couple.

They’re up to Project VI now, what they are calling PlateaKnit. It’s being lead by one-time ArtFriday alumnus Ingrid Murnane.

Using the twitter hashtag #plateaknit, “instructors” call out instructions using the abbreviations set out and “makers” get to dip in and out of the feed and follow whatever comes out of it.

Ingrid herself plans to knit with the full instructions.

This performance goes on between January 25th and 27th. There’s many ways to get involved or to watch the outcomes. Of course, the main blog will be tracking progress. Knitting-social-network Ravelry has a group, as does Facebook. Photos of your work-in-progress can go into the Flickr pool. But most of all, be sure to follow them on twitter.

Jan 19 0 comments

Internationalism, Museum Expansionism, Technology

Google UNESCO World Heritage Streetview

More partnerships from Google to work with with museums and heritage. This time working with UNESCO to provide Google Streetviews of World Heritage sites.

Go to google.com/unesco to find out more and use the Google Map app.

Jan 07 3 comments

Technology

Museum Burglary Game

Dundee based games developer Gentlemen of Fortune are working on a game called Quick as Thieves, a “Physics based Action-stealth game”, which means you play a comedy-style burglar with a swagbag robbing a museum blind. As you can see, everything and anything can go into the swagbag. The bag gets bigger and can be used for other things.

Yeah, okay, it actually sounds like an innovative idea for a game and looks quite fun as well. But it goes to prove that museums are never a setting for anything else apart from crime (stealing stuff), supernatural/superstition (magic/cursed objects) or both (stealing magic/cursed objects).

Dec 12 5 comments

Architecture, Individualism, Politics, Presentism, Technology

Museum Future Predictions

The Centre for the Future of Musuems made five predictions about the museum of the future. They said Green, Personalised, Comfortable, Interactive and Flexible. Read the article to get the explanation of each one (especially “Interactive”. They means something a bit more advanced. I think a better word would have been something from the Nina Simon lexicon “Participatory”)

I pretty much agree with these predictions, so I would like to offer five of my own.

I predict the museum of the future will be:

1) Closed. As in the doors are shut and the staff laid off. Whilst the financial and business world are slowly recalibrating themselves to try to deal with the new systems in places, I imagine there are a great number of museums that just will not have the ability to adapt for whatever reason, or the reasons will be out of their hands.

2) Enslaved. I think this to be the best antonym for autonomous. What I mean is that there will be ever increasing influences or a museum program from outside the museum. Corporate sponsorship of exhibitions, oppressive criteria for funding, government social engineering agendas and media lynch-mobs of ignorance. The actual museum will be very few decision left to make.

3) 3D digital. A more positive one. It only makes sense that the current digitisation projects will move into the next phase and an extra dimension. Considering there are people doing basic 3D scanning using only a webcam and other people doing amazing handheld highly-detailed scanning, museums are going to have to start soon.

Autodesk University 2009: Z Corp from Core77 on Vimeo.

4) Sillier. I agree with the CFM’s statement that future museums will be Flexible, but I feel that’s a statement about requirement rather than actuality. Distributed sites and chameleon spaces are sensible suggestions but urban regeneration through the construction of massive monuments isn’t going to go out of fashion. Well, it’s not as long as our concept of a city doesn’t change too much. As nobody has a set idea about what a museum or art gallery has to look like, they can build ever more bizarre buildings in attempts to be iconic.

5) Curatorless. Celebrity curators (like Shaq rather than Koons) or tyranny-by-majority decision making processes to pick out favourites. I wouldn’t be surprised if the task of curators is outsourced either to voting schemes or freelancers. Those banks sitting on large art collections will probably have more need for curators anyway.

Those are my five. Anyone else want to come up with five of their own?

Dec 12 4 comments

Museum Expansionism, Technology

Google Goggles

I”ve been playing with the new Android app by Google called Goggles. The name’s a little daft and means I’m rereading every mention of it to make sure I haven’t confused the spelling.

I am very impressed with this. You take a picture, its gets scanned with something that looks like an edge-detect and it seraches results based upon that. This little video explains it.

Visual search technology. At last, we have something that could use all that effort we put into digitisation. It works too. Despite the limitations that they admit to, it’s really quite powerful. As a test, I took a rather blurry scan of a postcard of one of my favourite buildings, the Hundertwasserhaus in Vienna. Top result was the Wikipedia page.

In a truely incredible feat that makes this even more relevant to museums, I scanned this postcard I picked up from the Imperial War Museum.

This somewhat staggered me. The top result it offered was this image from the London Transport Museum.

It had found the image I scanned inside another image hosted by a museum. The link took me to the artist’s biography.

At first, I was doubting some people’s claim that this was an augmented reality app. I could see how the technology could be used with other things and the “pointing at businesses” was a little thin, but I just saw a new form of Search. This is still a Google Labs product. Is it much of a jump to think that real-time video could be scanned/searched? Right now, we take a picture to be analysed. One day, we just need to stare at something for the revelant Google results to appear.

And in real-time, no doubt. Looks like we won’t be needing those QR codes after all. No wait, it scans those as well. And text. Amazing.

If there’s ever a time for museums to get their photography policy sorted, it’s right now. People will be wanting to scan stuff to get more information. Do you really want to deny that?

Nov 28 0 comments

Museum Expansionism, Technology

Britain Loves Wikipedia

Speaking of Nick Poole, seems he wants to do a Britian-centric version of previous Wikipedia projects such as Wikipedia Loves Art.

Britain Loves Wikipedia. Click to find out more details, but the idea is to get 10-20 UK museums involved. I would love to see this be successful. I don’t think enough UK Museums are getting involved in this sort of thing. Hell, I don’t see enough UK museums on twitter.

Contact Nick via email nick(at)collectionstrust.org.uk or on twitter @NickPoole1 to find out more and hopefully partner up.

WikiBrit? House of Creative Commons?

Nov 27 1 comments

Politics, Technology

Museums and Google

Back in April, I wondered why there wasn’t some efforts by Google to work with museums. They had put some ultra-high definition photos from the Prado Museum into Google Earth in January, but that seemed to be an exercise in photographic technologies and some much needed publicity for one of Google’s products.

I mean, can you think of any link between art and mapping? Of all the visualisations available on Google Earth, 14 images places upon a single geolocation in Spain seems a little odd. I mean, what’s the purpose?

It was announced recently that Google are going to put the collections of the Iraq Museum online.

What are they up to? Of all things, a digitisation project? 14,000 photos of the 5,000 remaining objects in the museum.

Does anyone else think this feels like a story from about 8-9 years ago?

I hope, no, I wish this will be something more than just interesting PR for Google. They can be game-changes to almost anything they get involved in, and it seems like they will photograph collections! And put them online! There are museums up and down the UK photographing stuff. Most of them are using volunteers.

Another websites with more searchable images. Joy. I have to agree to Nick Poole.

Unless they can do something amazing with it. Unless this is a test for some greater plan that will blast inferior collection management software out of the water and begin some decent level of connectivity between museums. I suppose we will have to wait for “early 2010″ to see the results.

Nov 24 1 comments

Technology

3D Scanning with a Webcam

I knew that 3D scanning would be right around the corner. I thought the first 3D scanners would be something like a cupboard-sized MRI machine.

This should be a valuable lesson. There will always be a software solution before a hardware approach.

This video comes via Futurismic. Cambridge University people have come up with 3D scanning using nothing but a webcam and a serious amount of programming.

Just amazing. We could start getting 3D digitisation projects for museums going tomorrow. Okay, best to wait for the thing to be ready first. But then you have all kinds of options opening up.

There are many things the scans could be used for. When fabricating gets going, a museum could have a set of blueprints for models. Museum objects could start appearing in games (and some games have better economies than countries).

I want this technology in my phone. Its have a camera so it makes sense. And all consumer technology is moving towards increasing levels of mobility. I want to 3D-scan objects on the fly. We will need a word for this, I think.

Also, imagine what this would do to copyright discussions. I await the sign in the museum that says “No Flash Photography -- No 3D Scanning”.

Nov 10 0 comments

Individualism, Technology

Several Interruptions

The Arts Council has a new website. Good thing really as I remember the last one being very difficult to get around. Now, they’ve gone for something feeling more like an arts magazine approach. It was clearly time for an image change. The Arts Council has been taking a bit of a kicking recently in a few mainstream newspaper articles.

To go with the launch of the new site, they commissioned artists Thomson & Craighead to make a short piece of video art, Several Interruption. Nice simple idea. I wonder who it was who would have said, “You’re the Arts Council, how about some art on the website for the Launch?”

Here is the Thomson & Craighead video. (Requires flash, Javascript to be unblocked and sound)

DISCLOSURE: Yeah, I get paid for you watching this video. I get a few pennies per play (all the way through, I think). This is the deal. You watch this interesting piece of video art and I get to pay my hosting fees. I promise to only do these things if they are relevant to newcurator’s editorial, so I won’t be running adverts for films or something. And I’ll say every time if I get paid. Deal?

Nov 09 1 comments

Museum Expansionism, Presentism, Technology

Guest Post: Megan Blankenship

Recently, I read an article about arts engagement, and a quote the author plucked from a poem by Aleda Shirley struck me as appropriate in describing the precarious position the museum assumes when exhibiting work that could or does stir up controversy. Shirley, in The Rivers Where They Touch, writes “Falling backwards from his boat, the diver would see, beneath the surface busy with leaves and eels, how the rivers don’t seem separate after all and perhaps tell us what night so often tells the pilot, the cartographer, the pair of lovers sighing from a bridge: that an edge is never a simple or a sudden thing”(1).

Without too prosaically dissecting the museum with this quote, it is useful to ponder the edges that arise neither suddenly or simply in museums, most tangibly in the intersection of values, rhetoric, and experience that is the art exhibition. At a macro-level, with the whole picture spread before us, when a museum exhibits art that could be deemed controversial or incite conservative ire, it is seemingly justified by how it communicates the goals of the institution as a space for talking about the “tough stuff.” However, from a staff’s perspective, often what we see is the here and now, a scary drop into the dark abyss ahead as we attempt to appease the public, to push the boundaries of art and conversation, as well as sate the aesthetic tastes of our funders. Navigating sharp edges that appear to push and pull in a myriad different directions. How do we delve below the surface, as the diver in Shirley’ poem, and see where these many currents fuse as one?

In response, I want to explore Marking Portland: The Art of Tattoo, a popular culture exhibit at the Portland Art Museum.

As part of the Marking Portland exhibit, visitors could stand behind this monitor and get pictures taken with superimposed tattoos on their bodies. This is another example of the museum bringing in the public as part to the exhibit and not simply as spectators.

I had the fortune of interning there this past summer and witnessed first-hand the public outpouring of support for Marking Portland, which was actually kept up for longer than planned because it was so popular. The show took place in what I call the thoroughfare gallery; the museum is two buildings and this gallery space connects the two in a long, wide corridor. Here, a projector screen was placed on one wall and images of tattoos were projected in a rotating fashion for the public to view. The photos were all publicly-sourced; the museum set up a Flickr account strictly for the purpose of collecting images of body art from Portland residents or whoever had a mind to post their photos. Every day, a crowd gathered in front of the screen and on the benches in the gallery for long periods of time, as if watching a movie. The statistic that states that visitors only stand in front of an art work for an average of 3 seconds, or an equally dismal figure, did not apply here. The shared authority evidenced in this exhibit allowed the public a conduit for contribution, and ensured that meaningful dialogue around Marking Portland was not simply the responsibility of the museum, but was shared by the public. Of course, not everyone who saw the show thought it was something the museum should be exhibiting. But on a larger scale, the museum must be commended for smartly attempting to connect the popular culture aspects of the tattooing with examples of tattoos in its ancient Asian art collection. For some, this helped elevate the topic from mere spectacle as it linked it to the wider art historical narrative.

Fiona Cameron writes, “In attempts to marginalise conflict, many institutions deny the inherent politicalness of topics and audiences and instead promote the public reinforcement of a particular set of values” (2). Here, Cameron like Aleda Shirley, is addressing edges, not simply from a safe aerial view, but below the surface where institutional narrative and community values are not so divergent. They can successfully be united around a controversial exhibit as the Portland Art Museum demonstrated through the shared authority that made Marking Portland a success and not simply another attempt by a museum to institutionalize popular culture or become a gimmick for attracting a younger, hipper audience.

(1) Katz, Jonathan. Understanding the past; Envisioning the future. WESTAF Symposium Proceedings: Re-envisioning state arts agencies, 71-78.

(2) Cameron, F. (2006). Beyond surface representations: Museums, edgy topics, civic responsibilities and modes of engagement. Open Museum Journal, August 2006. Retrieved November 1, 2009, from http://archive.amol.org.au/omj/volume8_index.asp

Megan Blankenship is a graduate student in the arts and administration program at the University of Oregon, blogs at MJ Writes, and is currently immersed in researching the role of the art museum in facilitating dialogue concerning controversial exhibitions. Questions, comments, and wine recommendations can be directed to mjwritesblog(at)gmail.com.

Nov 04 0 comments

Museum Expansionism, Presentism, Technology

Guest Post: Noell Wolfgram Evans

Participating Contributors

“The creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act.” Marcel Duchamp

Say what you will about his art, Duchamp was right in his idea of turning spectators into contributors. While this is an important concept in art appreciation, it’s perhaps even more important as a survival philosophy for museums and historical societies.

From the beginning, museum spectators (visitors) have taken a passive stance in their relationship to their museum. This, it goes without saying, needs to change. The continued growth of social media tools can not only be beneficial in enabling museums to start intentional conversations with their visitors but also can be used to turn those visitors into participating contributors. It’s allowing visitors to do everything from helping to shape the direction an exhibit will take to supplying some of the content to be displayed.

The advantages to developing this relationship with the visitor are numerous. At the top of the list though may be the way that this entrenches a visitor within your (or perhaps more accurately their) museum. Additionally, a visitor with items on display is perhaps the strongest advocate a museum could have. With a personal connection to something to talk/Tweet/Blog about the contributing visitor is now not only part of the curatorial team but also part of the marketing unit as well.

Let’s look at a few examples of this concept. As you consider these remember that there are opportunities to integrate visitors through technology no matter the size of your organization.

One of the best examples can be found at the Ontario Science Centre. In a space that focuses on Toronto, they have an exhibit that explores the city by using a web-enabled kiosk loaded with a map from Yahoo! Maps. The exhibit encourages people to take pictures of themselves around the city, tag the photos, and then upload them to the museum’s Flckr account. These photos are then pulled directly into the exhibit map so that when the visitor tries to learn more about say the local coffee shop, the image that comes up is the one of that visitor at the coffee shop which they took and uploaded before leaving for the museum

In a completely different environment, The US Army created a mobile exhibit trailer for its recruiting efforts. When you enter the trailer, there is a touch screen panel whose initial graphic is a map of the United States. You can use that map to find your region and there watch videos which were created and uploaded to the site by other potential recruits.

At a different level, The Summit County (Ohio) Historical Society (in conjunction with other local organizations) has established the Summit Memory Project. It’s a place that allows people to share everything from postcards to first person accounts of the area’s history. People submit their photos and stories and then members of the Historical Society scan and format the material to maintain a consistency.

These are just three examples of many. While museums continue to work on social media as a method of communicating, there should also be equal time spent on exploring how those tools can be combined with existing exhibits or used separately as a standalone exhibition tool. If the goal is to move visitors from Duchamp’s passive “spectators” to participating contributors, what better way is there to do that then by re-purposing the tools they are already using?

Noell Wolfgram Evans is the Senior Writer/Producer at Mills James. You can follow him on Twitter at Noell_MJ. He can also be reached at nwolfgramevans[at]mjp.com

Nov 01 2 comments

Museum Expansionism, Presentism, Technology

Guest Post: Vanessa VanAlstyne

“I want to be in New York City,” said my friend Paul Slocum, who ran a predominant new media gallery in Texas called And/Or. I’m definitely thinking about what he just said. No one is born in a small market that doesn’t dream about being able to move to New York or Los Angeles and thrive. It’s romantic; the whole art world is full of that romance stuff, and so few of us do anything but dream about what could be.

I look out the window and see the storefronts around the gallery space, thriving a few years ago, now mostly empty, with little hope now that the art events will feed them with people. I don’t think Paul knows what he gave to everyone around him, but with the economy, and the limited amount of people in his field working around him, he felt it was time to move on.

If it wasn’t for And/Or gallery, I’d never have seen a physical Corey Archangel piece, I wouldn’t know who Micheal Bell Smith is, I would have never encountered JODI in a gallery setting, and I wouldn’t have thought YTMND’s could actually be transformed into a quirky show. If it wasn’t for his small gallery endeavor, I don’t think the digital art scene in Texas would even be what little it is. Paul worked like a shaman, spinning the air of technology around himself and drawing us all into his web of laptop death matches and 8-bit chicanery. He is always calm, calculating, and smart, and the few months his gallery has been closed have felt like a black hole ripped open in the fabric of our little regional continuum. I feel like those of us who are staying behind are holding our breath and wondering if the promise of budding art communities in smaller cities – once a hot spot of attention – will continue to have any relevance now that the patrons of the big art markets are feeling the money pinch.

The rest of the country is feeling it too; weekly you hear about another gallery shutting its doors locally or in one of the larger markets. The people who tell you “hey did you hear XYZ is closing” look at you with watery, fear-soaked eyes, like they want a solution and just don’t know what to do. The answer isn’t that simple. As long as the United States art community refuses to do anything but hold onto the traditional gallery setup, which lofts anything displayed in a few overpriced and barely livable cities, things are going to take a very long time to recover. The investors who fuel the art market just aren’t going to invest when times get tough. Galleries and artists seem to respond to this by just bearing down and hoping that if they can forge the long winter, things will be fruitful again when the ice thaws.

I can’t help but look at And/Or’s doors closing, its contribution to the small scene it was in, and wonder if more people would be willing to just put together shows right now, in any space – virtual or physical – if this would help push more artists through this difficult time. Paul’s space was never doggedly traditional, and he paid for it with a day job and by living in a closed-in area in the back, but what he did that was amazing was expose otherwise isolated people to new things. He brought in artists from around the country and world, and I don’t think this is something local collectives, online collectives, or progressive people should be unable to do. After all how many artists have Flickr accounts, YouTube channels, twitter, etc? How many artists are just an e-mail away? If the art world wants to thrive instead of just falter, it needs to start thinking about working together in less ordinary, and more extraordinary ways.

Vanessa VanAlstyne is a digital artist in her third year of an MFA. You can see more of her work on her website, her blog and follow her on twitter.

Oct 16 2 comments

Education, Individualism, Museum Expansionism, Technology

Listen to the Gears: 14

There were plenty of fascinating and diverse topics to listen to this week, but I am drawing these together in order to think about two tier systems.

New policy and technology podcast, Surprisingly Free Conversation had an interview with Tim Lee. He advocated for bottom-up processes where nobody is in charge (eg wikipedia or linux) rather than top-down processes like government (or microsoft) where you can easily lay the blame on one entity, which we seem hard-wired to do. In discussion, they considered the inefficiencies of top-down organisations, but realised that it would be hard to run some of them bottom-up.

It is an interesting concept to think about in terms of cultural institutions. Are most museums bottom-up or top-down systems? I think that there are probably both out there and also many shades of grey inbetween. I would suggest most are top-down systems: we’re always having to get permission to do something, aren’t we? Collections management systems are one place that bottom-up processes take place in a lot of museums. Records can be added to and altered as time passes. How could bottom-up systems be spread to other areas of museum and gallery running?

Also somewhat tied into a two-tier model is the dissemination of research. JISC talk about the recent report ‘Communicating knowledge: how and why UK researchers publish and disseminate their findings‘ published by the Research Information Network. What emerged is the same old argument about the traditional versus the new. Once more it all appears governed by money and what they described as the ‘value-for-money aspect’ of research funding. The report found the continued dominance of journal articles as a ‘highly legitimate form of scholarly communication’. This basically means that it is the method of dissemination which will attract you the most funding. Tell us something new?

They went on to discuss the ‘more rapid dissemination’ of conferences, briefings and working papers (still pretty traditional, there) and only latterly digital technology. For people who were debating something on a podcast, they didn’t seem to think that digital technology was all that great as a tool for publications or publicity. That given, they did admit change needs to happen, but that in research and academia these things take (aeons of) time to catch on. Apparently the theoretical physicists are blazing the trail with their wikis, blogs and podcasts.

I think museum people are pretty good at doing this too. How do you all disseminate your research? If it is via the more traditional methods, do you additionally get it out there via digital technology? If not, is it because it won’t attract the funding, as suggested? I’d be interested to know how this has affected your research.

Lastly, something on a lighter note. You might well wonder why I am asking you to watch Threadbanger’s video tutorial on how to make a Michael Jackson costume for Halloween (apart from that you might be looking for costume ideas for this year). Real reason is: I would love to see this kind of tutorial for costumed interpreters or museum re-enactors to use. It challenges the notion that you have to spend exorbitant amounts of money to gain good costumes. There are so many people with making skills and with a little appropriate research, what a resource it could be for museums and freelancers on a budget.

Sep 25 0 comments

Education, Internationalism, Museum Expansionism, Technology

Listen to the Gears: 11

‘What’s the real story, then?’ asked a man of his eight or nine year old grandson, who had said that the museum’s text about the portrait of a 16^th century gentleman farmer ‘wasn’t right.’ The boy told him an epic tale of bullfighting instead. It was fascinating to listen to and underlined for me the power of images on the imagination.

Photographer Taryn Simon’s recent TED presentation was about her work taking images of ‘secret sites and worlds we wouldn’t normally get to see’. She discussed two projects: photographs of other-wordly, behind-the-scenes locations, and wrongfully convicted people at crime scenes. Simon is interested in the multiple truths attached to images and opined here that the viewer’s perception hinges on the intent of the creator. She brings forth some compelling ideas about the use of photographs in criminal convictions for instance. In explaining the intent behind her own photographs, she outlines her own intent in presenting them, but what if she didn’t? What would we think? As she suggested, I would bet that it might not be exactly what she had just explained to us. There are always other stories surrounding the work: the idea of the other, the alternative.

The reading of art changes over time and with new evidence or thinking comes reinterpretation. Traditionally we learn from art historians about the meanings behind works. ArtBabble’s newest partners, SmartHistory made use of new technology to present a different kind of discussion about classical art. Describing themselves as a ‘dynamic substitute’ for traditional art history learning, they used Second Life ‘correspondents’ (real-life art historians) to interpret using a recreation of Michelangelo’s ceiling to the Sistine Chapel. In conversation they explained its significance, making, which techniques were used and focus on particular scenes, all of which you might expect from a traditional lecture. What made the difference is that it being Second Life, it can be viewed in the round and they can also fly about to see things close up. I would love to see this used to greater effect giving alternative explanations and with opposing historians and interpreters having debates in-situ in Second Life.

Or what about some children giving their opinions? In the Our City podcasts, schoolchildren made recordings about their hometowns in a worldwide learning experiment. I do wonder how much input the children have into what they think is important in their city and how much the adults guide them. The episodes I have listened to describe their cities in rather pedestrian terms. Whilst I realise that there has to be guidance, they could use the children’s own language and creativity to a greater extent.

This leads me to an idea. Make a podcast wherein children could to tell others about both the real and imagined stories of the paintings. What would it be like to step inside a Gainsborough or a Mondrian. Would it be hot or cold, would there be other people or creatures in there? What might have happened just before that captured moment? This could lead to a large-scale outreach project set up between museums and galleries worldwide to supplement traditional art history and promote wider engagement between children and paintings.

Kind of like a cross between the Dictionary of Imaginary Places and a Jasper Fforde novel, but in a podcast.

Sep 18 0 comments

Education, Individualism, Museum Expansionism, Technology

Listen to the Gears: 10

There was a storyteller in residence recently at my local gallery, as part of an archaeological exhibition about the Stone Age. Performing at the height of the school holidays, he held swathes of children rapt with tales of hunting, fishing and trading. More than the life-sized wall painting of a mammoth or the guess-the-smell-of-the-stone-age boxes, he really brought the period to life for the visitors. They could ask him questions and recieve an accurate answer (I believe that he was an archaeologist who was also an amateur actor); they could see how a Stone Age person would dress and how he would use weapons. But none of this would have really come together had it not been for his verbal delivery. That made it come alive.

I have already addressed what makes a ‘good’ podcast (for me). I came up with a number of suggestions for ease of use and interest. One thing that I didn’t mention was the perhaps the most important: the style of presentation. When listening to podcasts and watching videos, I’m sure you notice as I do that no matter how interested you are in the subject, sometimes the presenter just bores the pants off you. That’s when I find my mind wandering from the latest developments in exhibition design to what I’m going to have for dinner, or what might be on at the cinema. This is clearly not what the makers of these media intended.

One of the most charismatic podcasts for storytelling that I have found (well, apart from The Moth, of course) is The Memory Palace. The latest episode reported on German prisoners of war escaping an Arizona prison camp in the 1940s. While this might not sound all that enthralling to you on the face of it, the presenter Nate DiMeo has that same great delivery as the Stone Age man. This coupled with an evocative backing track that lent itself to the spirit of the story really kept my attention.

I think it is well worth museums utilising people who can deliver the stories into museums and galleries to bring their exhibitions alive: even if only for special events. Get your podcast-makers to lay more emphasis on the delivery of the content too. The podcast and its presentation is one more layer of the interpretation, and one which needs equal standing with the gallery exhibits. In fact, it could even be just one part of the whole of the exhibit or collection, where you have to listen to the podcast to gain specific information in a museum version of transmedia storytelling.

I like to think of it like this. The most important person in the museum for the visitor is the assistant at the front desk who can tell them about that day’s tours and events, why the museum has loads of Simian ware but little flint and where is good nearby for lunch. The most important person to the podcast listener or video viewer is the presenter. They are the public face; the first impression for the whole outfit. It’s all in the delivery, people.

You can contact me at August(at)newcurator(dot)com.

Sep 17 0 comments

Technology

I Had To Share: AR and Google Earth

Okay, let’s ignore the potentially horrifying uses this may conjure up immediately, and think about the cool uses first.

If nothing else, you could become a town planner and pretend you’re playing a real-time, augmented version of SimCity.

Sep 11 0 comments

Individualism, Museum Expansionism, Politics, Presentism, Technology

The New Mutant Curator

I don’t strictly know what to make of this. I’ve long been saying that museums are a media and can learn a lot from the problems of other media industries. Especially when it comes to adapting to the future methods of consuming media. One warning is when the media is entirely consumed by the methods. The music industry will long be used as the example of non-adaption. Newspapers and journalism seem to be the next ones seriously thinking about this. My Death of the Curator articles were about a similar trend where the role of the curator would change beyond what it is recognisable now by crowdsourcing or social media being used to make curatorial decisions.

Four articles that came to me over the past couple of days has caused a major rethink. I took the “Death of the Curator” scenario to be part of the similar early movements like copyright-infringing MP3 downloads and Myspace Music or “citizen journalism” and free online news content. But there appears to be a line of thinking towards a bizarre convergence. The Curator may die but in it’s place will be New Mutant Curator.

I was originally going to talk about two more instances of Death of the Curator that offer glimpses of the new role I was originally talking about.

Via Nerdgam’s excellent tumblr (because, curiously, none of the links work) is London’s Next Top Curator by Salon Contemporary (No, me neither). Six contestants each run a pop-up gallery to compete for a final put to public vote on the website. This must be the first time I’ve seen curators put to vote in this way. Heh, maybe I should enter.

Another project is ArtPrize, but again seems to be mainly an artist competition with an interesting use of several social media outlets. I like how Art:21 called it “decentralised curation“. From what I can tell, it’s the role of curators and galleries in this competition that needs to be noted. Whilst their final decision-making privileges are put on hold, they get the chance to influence:

…playing a large role the formation of the event, each presenting a collection of entries that reflect their own sensibilities and expertise.

Fascinating. We’ll come back to this.

Continuing on the theme of learning from other media industries, Jeff Jarvis of Buzzmachine continues to try and save newspapers. His latest delightful neologism is “Hyperdistribution”. But hold on, let’s pick through this strategy a bit.

* Reverse-syndication – Okay, maybe this one is newspaper-orientated, but it generally means acting as a base for a network of people to distribute. “In the link economy, value is created by he who creates content and she who delivers audience.” Hell, I get a lot of messages from museums telling me about their stuff. Social networks do this sort of thing, especially on twitter. But maybe there’s an organisational model here to make affiliate bloggers.

* The embeddable paper – Getting content out there? Getting other people highly involved in your content and to pass it around? Can you say “The Commons“? How about Powerhouse putting their collection documentation under a Creative Commons license? I would list Brooklyn Museum’s stuff but there’s too many of them, but they have certainly branded each and every one very well.

* API – Ahaha. Brooklyn Museum again. Science Museum too. V&A. Powerhouse Museum. There’s bloody loads.

* Specialization – I could argue that museums are too generalised, I could argue that they’re not. There aren’t too many general museums that aren’t ancient and successful anyway. But I have noticed more newer museums pointing towards a particular theme.

* Social engagement – Museums are all over this.

Well, so much for learning from other media. It seems museums are ahead on the innovation scale. Newspapers need to become more like museums. Hold on, aren’t museums already going through a period of intense cutbacks? Saving newspapers by using social networks, technology and media to deliver hyperdistributed content… just like Brooklyn Museum, who still took a financial kicking recently.

Tim Leberecht of Design Mind analysed and responded to Jeff Jarvis and ran more along the lines of “Specialization”, calling it “Hyperbranding”. There, he uses Monocle Magazine as a prime example of smart branding (and exquisite design) into a niche market, relying upon a smaller, sustainable distribution.

Wait, wait, wait. Didn’t I say museums should be more like Monocle Magazine back in April?

And now it’s being said that “Curation is the new role of media professionals“. Relying upon a person’s expertise and style to act as a information filter for you tastes. They use Arianna Huffington as an example, but I could throw in the Boing Boing crew, Warren Ellis and Tyler Brûlé and any number of people, experts in their interests, organising research, delivering in a unique and interesting way. Hell, I could argue that Bill O’Reilly and Keith Olbermann fit this model. Personalities bigger than the news they’re supposed to represent, acting as filter and commentator to a specialised audience.

All my talk of museums learning from other media innovations and mistakes and now they’re all talking about becoming museums! Just try to draw a diagram of this! And museums curators are slowly being replaced by audience-participation-heavy social media experiments, instead taking on the role of… an expert… a filter… a commentator… relying upon the force of their personality and position to influence and direct a particular audience.

The Curator is Dead. God only knows what this new Über-Media Mutant Curator of the Information Superabundance Age coming to replace it will be like. But there will be many of them. In a less dramatic way, the convergence of many media roles into a “Curator-class” seems inevitable.

Sep 08 1 comments

Presentism, Technology

Guest Post: Maryann Devine

Why real-time arts marketing is now a must

Marketing through social media and social networking is nothing new. Integrating your blog, your museum’s Facebook page, and twitter stream into your marketing plan is the smartest way to do it. But I want to talk to you today about real-time marketing and the opportunities it presents.

What’s real-time marketing?

I swiped the term from Paul Dunay, who writes about the idea on the Marketing Profs Daily Fix. He talks about a customer-service issue that was resolved in 15 minutes using twitter. Dunay offers the analogy: “if you had a leak in your basement would you wait 45 days for a consultant to put on a webinar on How to fix your leaky basement?”

People want your attention now.

As I was reading Dunay’s post, I was in the middle of listening to the audio book version of Groundswell (2008) by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff.

There’s a great chapter on listening in Groundswell. The authors talk about companies that carry out market research by creating online social networks for their customers. One example is the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, one of several cancer centers in the U.S. that have introduced patient social networks. M.D. Anderson didn’t need foster community – there was already a vocal community of cancer patients connecting online. Inviting these patients into this new environment helped them learn where they were failing their patients, and try out new ideas — in real time. M.D. Anderson got feedback in real time, instead of putting together focus groups, planning complicated surveys, and probably asking the wrong questions anyway.

At the same time, I was reviewing a new report by Universal McCann, called Wave 4. The Wave reports annually highlight research into online social media and social network usage world wide, and break it down country by country. More than 22,000 people who reported that they used the Internet every day or every other day in 38 countries were surveyed.

Wave 4 sees active Internet users consolidating their content creation and sharing in their online social networks of choice – Facebook, MySpace, Orkut, etc. — rather than through stand-alone sites like Flickr, YouTube, or Blogger. And social network users are sharing stuff more than ever: 76% upload photos, up from 45% in the previous survey; 33% upload videos, up from 16.9%.

Skeptics say that people join social networks and then never use their accounts. UM’s study says that nearly two-thirds of Internet users have managed their own social network page, and 71.1% of users have visited a friend’s page.

Online social networks nowadays emphasize real-time communication, and people are using them.

People want information in real time. They want entertainment in real time, they want sharing in real time, and they want an answer in real time.

According to twitter lead engineer Evan Weaver, 80% of twitter usage happens through third party programs on computers or mobile devices. That means if someone is visiting your museum, not only do they have the means to comment on the excellent or awful experience, they are likely to do so.

There is an opportunity here for marketing the arts, and by marketing I mean just about everything everyone in your institution does.

Lots of museums are using twitter now. Lots of them are using Facebook. And most of these are using real-time communication to send advertising messages.

This is the part of the post where I’m supposed to talk about conversations and engagement.

But I’m thinking more about listening and responding.

Are you using tools like BackTweets to find out who is linking to your site and what they’re saying about it?

Are you using Twitter Search to listen to the chatter (or lack thereof) about your museum, or your upcoming exhibition, or the lecture that happened last week?

And if you are, how do you plan to respond?

It’s a customer service opportunity – someone driving around with their family looking in vain for parking around your building could be directed to the parking deck with the discount for museum visitors.

It’s a market research opportunity – are people talking about the Surrealist posters they got at your gift shop when you thought they’d be raving about the more art-historical aspects of your Dali blockbuster? Is your approaching exhibition on Galileo on anyone’s radar screen?

It’s a museum marketing opportunity – let’s say registration is slow for your family workshop next Saturday. Can you create a promotion on the fly to share on your Facebook page, something that encourages parents to spread the word?

I’m not saying we should abandon marketing planning. But in 2009, planning should be flexible. You have the opportunity to use online tools to listen more closely and react faster, and take advantage of real time communication that counts. If you show up in their Facebook updates, people pay attention to you.

Today, the more nimble you are, the better able you are to respond to crises big and small. If you work for a large museum, this may seem like trying to turn around the Titanic. But the opportunity is there. Champion the idea of real-time marketing inside your institution or risk being sunk in the long run.

Maryann Devine gives the tough arts marketing love at smArts & Culture, where you can take her free arts marketing course. Find out more here.

This post is Creative Commons licensed by Maryann Devine. Some rights reserved.

Sep 04 0 comments

Architecture, Individualism, Presentism, Technology

Listen to the Gears: 9

Crowdsourcing or curating, or a bit of each? It’s the talk of New Curator and the talk of the airwaves. Since Pete’s posts Death of the Curator I and II, I have noticed aspects of this debate turning up more and more in podcasts. None in the realm of museums themselves admittedly, but in areas like business and architecture: you’ve got to think laterally here. During the past week, I’ve picked up on these three.

Harvard Business Ideacast discussed the pros and cons of giving the consumer what they have asked for. Does it really work? In talking about business strategies in the recession they championed ‘Innovation that transforms the meaning of things.’ (Isn’t that kind of what curators do in interpretation?) Business professor Roberto Verganti argued that the Wii would never have been invented if Nintendo had listened to the gamers. Players wanted more powerful passive consoles with more functions. Seems they didn’t know they wanted something to get them up and actively moving and interacting until it was presented to them. His argument was basically, if you ask people you get more of the same and nothing new. While I realise that not all curators will go for radical reinterpretations of their collections either, this does appear a good case in point against relying too heavily on market research or crowdsourcing. It will just be the same old, same old.

On the other hand…

Carol Coletta’s Smart City radio show took the theme of city planning in response to emotions this week. Talking to Vancouver planner Larry Beasley, Coletta asked why experiential planning was better than the more traditional efficiency-of-services based way. Beasley argued that designing at the level of the human being, appealing to our emotions, would make us want to live in cities again and ‘feel true affection for them’. It is not made explicit but it seems that they have done extensive market research to come up with these conclusions, which are then actioned by ‘the city’. Obviously there is an element of selection going on, or Vancouver could have have ended up with giant candy floss trees and bright yellow municipal buildings. Essentially though, the idea is that the city can then choreograph an innovative vision for their community in accordance with all the things that its people need for feelings of wellbeing.

In the middle of talking about magazines branching out onto the web, NPR Pop Culture put forward that the magazine is the only medium with a distinct point of view, that of the editor, and this distinguishes it from all others. This comment made me stop and think. Of course, I have to disagree. Museums do this too. Exhibitions, galleries and whole museums are put together from the point of view of their editor: the curator(s). So, if we took crowdsourcing to its logical conclusion, museums would not have the distinct point of view of their editor anymore, the curator. Does that matter?

The debate continues.

Sep 01 4 comments

Individualism, Politics, Presentism, Technology

Death of the Curator II

Remember this? Crowdsourcing, the darling of business 2.0, being able to replace the work of a curator trying to create a coherent set of displays. Even more worrying if the crowdsourcing if based upon the low-brow model of reality TV.

Thinking of algorithms for recommendation systems, I instantly think about last.fm. Music recommended to me based upon the listening habits of thousands of other people who have similar tastes as I do, offering to “fill in the gaps” to my listening collection.

Brooklyn Museum pull another rabbit out of the hat with BrklynMuse, a mobile-friendly recommendation system. A “Gallery Guide powered by people”. It takes the data of other people’s likes (and their moods) and offers you things you may like. I asked Shelley Burnstein (in a rather vague way, I admit. I wasn’t sure how to frame the question) if they were tracking stats that could be used to passively crowdsource curatorial decisions, like a Brooklyn Museum Top Ten. I’m kinda glad Shelley said they weren’t. But you see how such a system could be used as a market research/performace rating system for objects. I believe Brooklyn Museum are focusing this as a guide than anything else.

I mean, you’d want to use this to get people to walk all over your museum, not narrowing their attention.

Five months after I said it, and a year after Brooklyn Museum’s Click! exhibition, TEC-CH Blog talks about a design exhibition called Democracy. Tagline: The Curator is Dead. Long Live Democracy, which irks me because it suggest that curators are not part of a democratic process. If anything, curators within museums are providing (often free) access to education, historical information, art and culture. I would say they are fundamental to a democratic society as a free press.

Powerhouse Museum are doing (organising? Particopating in?) a community curated event, Common Ground. A projection of each institution’s top 25 images in the Commons as voted by the community.

I antagonised a lot of people when I said the curator was dead. Perhaps intentionally. I didn’t want to say “The Change of the Curator” because that happening all the time. This change is sudden and quick and could be a real shift in methodology. Not that I think curators would vanish. To me, I would consider Shelley and her team to be the curators behind Click!, creating systems rather than completed products. Or tell that to people like the BoingBoing crew. Xeni Jardin calls herself a “Curator of Internet Esoterica, Anomalies, and Curiosities” on her twitter account. I think she’s doing alright for herself.

That may be the little death that brings total oblivion for curators: Fear of having to become famous.

The Centre for the Future of Museum did an article about museum crowdsourcing. They suggested three other things for crowdsouring: Institutional Planning, New building/expansion design and Collections planning.

I already spoken about this kind of thing before. Microvolunteering (Or Voluntwittering), Web Community Museum Trustees and this article where I unpicked these ideas further (and came up with microtrustees).

If it not going to cause the death/paradigm shift in curators directly, crowdsourcing can very likely affect it indirectly and cause a shift anyway.

Or curators could all be working for banks anyway.