“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
“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.
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.
‘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 16th 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.
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.
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.
* 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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Last weekend I had my first real-life demonstration of Layar. It was pretty impressive and it occured to me that you just can’t appreciate how it works as you move the phone, when viewing a demo of it on a computer monitor. Listening to KCRW’s Design and Archtecture podcast, I hit on the begininnings of an idea. They reviewed the film (500) Days of Summer which has an architecture driven plot. The film’s co-writer, Scott Neustadter talked about filming in Los Angeles, using only pre-1940 buildings as a backdrop. The premise for this was that the main character ‘…sees beauty and meaning only in the past.’
41c Angelus Temple by Kansas_Sebastian. Used under Creative Commons.
So, say he has a phone with Layar on it. It might work best for him by showing him information not about what is there currently, but was was there in the past. A museum of information through time and space. If you think about it, this is what Google Street View will become. Their 2008/2009 images of the world are a snapshot; an archive of a moment.How often will they update them? What will they do with the old ones? I hope they keep the images available and build onto them.
Could museums and archives use old photographs, plans and title deeds of places to construct this kind of historical augmented reality treasure trove? It would be a massive undertaking admittedly, but I would love to see it.
Incidentally, on the same podcast there is an interesting interview with architect Richard Best. In a gamble to be proactive in the recession he went on a reality TV show with a real estate theme. And won. It paid off for him, but the thought of reality tv makes me shudder.
Sony’s Reader Daily Edition was critiqued by APM’s Future Tense. They postulated that it might overtake the market leader, Amazon’s Kindle. It will be able to facilitate wireless downloading of books, has a touch screen and will be able to read pdf files and google books. The most interesting thing for me is that Sony are linking with a scheme for borrowing library books in e-form. The loan will then expire in three weeks, like a normal library return. This seems like a great idea. Especially as buying e-books has not always meant that you got to keep them. This type of loaning service seems indicative of a point made in JISC’s recent documentary Libraries of the Future. That ‘…technology is adapting to meet the needs of users’.
Lastly, a great video from New Scientist showing how new laboratory techniques can be used to make you feel as if you are your virtual avatar by inducing an ‘out of body experience’. I don’t know how this might be used in museums and galleries, but I do like it. Enter, stranger.
I was asked a while back why I’m so interested in Augmented Reality. To me, it’s the polar opposite of a computer “kiosk”, something I’ve hated on several times regardless of touch/multi-touch capabilities. Is comes down to a question of design intent or, more specifically, platform. Brooklyn Museum’s Shelley Berstein has written a blog post about kiosks, so I want to share some thoughts.
First, a story.
I’ll keep the name of this particular museum hidden. I use them as an example for my criticism, not to negatively criticise that particular institution. At the time, they had just gone through a massive renovation. Everything was now behind steel-framed reinforced glass and proper lighting. So the space looked good.
There was quite a large amount of objects on display. More than I would have thought necessary. Rows upon shelves of them with only very small one sentence descriptions on labels. I was no expert on the subjects and felt a little overwhelmed by what I was supposed to be looking at.
I asked a question of the people on the desk. Admittedly, I don’t think they were curators but I only asked if they had a particular object. They took me to a computer. It was broken. They took me to a another computer. That was broken as well. They told me to go home and look at the database online. I did, and found the object I was looking for as well as plenty of other information.
This is what Shelley calls a “Lose” situation; the website in a kiosk. I go a bit further and say its the “Not Better Than the Internet” situation. I went home and got something better than what the museum was offering. Even if the kiosks were working, what was I gaining from turning my head and looking at the objects?
What museums do well is material Reality. They have that sussed. Objects as authenticity is almost intrinsic to the definition of what a museum is. Even when “Intangible Heritage” was the vogue, it was still in terms of the actions surrounding objects. (This seemed to mean the conservation of dance, theatre and skills in Third World or Far East countries to stave off the impending “Western” Monoculture, if UNESCO is anything to go by).
The treatment of technology in museums is still in this materialistic Real way: The Kiosk, just another object on display. A monitor with touchscreen or a keyboard, bolted to a wall or given its own plinth, technology on display just like any other object.
Before I get hundreds of suggestion of good kiosks, I will admit that Shelley’s comment book computer is a sensible idea, so there would be good and bad kiosks just as there is good and bad AR. The point I’m trying to make is about design and, as always, the future. A kiosk approach to technology in the museum concentrates that platform into a limited space, which was fine many years ago when that was cutting edge. Without meaning to sound like a post-cyberpunk novel, but technology is now a homogenised aspect of our everyday lives.
To put it simply, my phone is better than your kiosk is ever going to be.
A kiosk also breeds a bad habit I’ve noticed in museum. They get installed somewhere then forgotten about. They are never updated and ignored until they break. This may be why I think they always look so dated. They’re as static as the objects next to them. I imagine there are kiosk-types that do update with use, like the comment book computer, if the comments are viewable by all. I admit that’s acceptable. At least it’s doing something. I think about the use of kiosks at the Mattress Factory, but I like to think they have the right idea of it being a node of technology within their overall technology overlay.
Overlay. I can stand anywhere in a museum and use my phone and get information. I could get artist’s biographies, historical articles, even news about what’s in front of me. But that’s still contained within a device. Okay, a far more mobile one that I have total control over and with less limitations. It’s still a concentrated device connected to the Other Place known as the Intarwubs. What excites me about Augmented Reality is how it can fill the gap between the superabundance of information out there and our actual lives. Updating Apps could associate huge amounts of updating information right in front of the objects the museum wants us to give a damn about. And we would be able to control it… or at least keep asking for more and ask for it in a language that won’t completely offend your intelligence.
Look at this and look at the possible future an Augmented Reality platform in museums has. What’s the latest advancement in kiosk? Now, you can use more than one finger.
Maybe Augmented Reality won’t stay on phones and we’ll have goggles or visors or contact lenses and control our infomation hallucinations with Pranav Mistry’s Sixth Sense technology (four fingers!). Maybe, crazy idea, the Augmented Reality platform could perform actions to the objects…
I spoke about Cross Reality before. The use of sensors to bridge Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality. Again, more possibilities being tested because technology is permeating every fabric of our lives and culture and dragging that funny universe on our computers into this Reality. I wonder if, through this and the increasing complexity of fabricators, the next phase of museum digitisation will be scanning of objects into 3D models.
God knows what that will do to our authentic Museum Reality.
Since listening to theMuseum of Science, Bostonpodcast about vaccines a couple of weeks ago, I have been mulling over ideas. They discussed developments in cancer innoculations, but I have been considering the concept that museum visits could be prescribed as defence against aspects of the human condition.
‘Visits as vaccines!
Don’t end up complacant, bigoted or bored: attend your local gallery now!’
A vaccine introduces a little of the disease into your system to produce antibodies against it. How could this work in a museum situation? Could visiting the slavery exhibits and education sessions at the Royal Naval Museum help to vaccinate against bullying? Too harsh? What about a prescription to view some Gilbert and George to dissuade homophobia? Could it be a way for museum education to branch out in the future?
Of course, these visits could also be prescribed as alleviators of existing symtoms. Tate Britain did this with leaflets a couple of years ago. They were pretty good, as I remember but I think it could go further than ‘maybe go and see this if you like cheerful yellow’.
I watched a wine podcast this week. I came away from it all gung-ho for trying out some red wine, and frankly I don’t even like it all that much. The point is that the presenter was really enthusiastic about his subject. I’d love museums to be that ebullient about their objects sometimes too. With some thought, this could work alongside the visits as vaccines idea.
This wine review had certain elements:
A bit about the region, how the wine is made, how much was produced, which were the best vintages, what the soil is like in the vineyard, a little about the owner, the maker, occasions you might drink it, and obviously its bouquet and palate. This would be a great way to talk about an object (well, except for the tasting). In fact it is exactly the way we are taught to look at an object. Hang on…
As I said, I don’t know much about wine and I particularly value the ‘what to eat with it’ part of a review. Its something I don’t yet have the intrinsic judgement for. This could be used to aid cautious museum visitors. How about a ‘what to view next if you liked this, or it made you feel better?’ kind of application for museums? Leaving behind the leaflets of the Tate, augmented reality could really bring this idea into play. How about a trail that could vaccinate against first-date nerves or feeling down? All through viewing objects and learning about them. Imagine a virtual curator asking you what kind of mood you are in and suggesting that you go and view this sculpture because it sounds just right for you. And enthusiastically telling you a bit about why once you got there. In simple terms it would be like one of those flow charts where the answer to a question might lead you in a number of directions. Through the museum? Outside to see some public art? To another museum entirely?
Enthusiasm for a subject can get people to try something new. It might even change their whole outlook and improve their life. Don’t you think museums should try these ideas out?
Twitter – I block spam and snake-oil salesmen. I don’t tend to follow those who I can’t work out. I follow cultural and creative people like artists, museum workers, some designers/architects and the occasional “magazine” twitter. I’m very careful who I follow and who follows me so you can be sure that my twitter circle is a coherent network. I don’t like “Thanks for following” messages that feel automated or empty.
Facebook – I befriend pretty much anyone who looks like a real person. People tend to use this as a way to communicate with me/show me stuff like every comment is a mini-forum, which I’m quite happy with. I think I’ve only unfriended one person who sent constant Send-To-All messages about the most inane things. Invite me to interesting groups. Don’t bother inviting me to events.
Tumblr – Images of interesting stuff I don’t blog but want to make a note of. I’ve made some really interesting connections on there so would like to continue that.
Delicious – A daily reading list/research directory that I DON’T CHARGE YOU FOR. I’ve not yet fully worked out the network features on this, but feel free to “fan”. I like being sent interesting links.
Cafepress Shop – Buy a mug. Buy a t-shirt. What little money I make from this goes into bandwidth costs. I’ll put some more up soon.
Flickr – I use this mainly to search for Creative Commons photos, but if you want to be a contact, go right ahead. I am grabbing that feed of latest photos so I will notice. Maybe, in the future, I’ll take a photo and put it on here.
Last.fm – My listening habits for all to see. This has something of an inner-circle of my social networks so announce who you are if I won’t recognise your username. There is also Radio Newcurator, same rules as twitter.
As always, I am contactable via email pete(at)newcurator.com
A recent email told me that the Museums Association is holding a seminar on podcasting. I expect that this will be about the technicalities of recording and producing; content, delivery and publicity. Listening to so many podcasts each week I often consider the pros and cons of each. Consequently I have in my mind my ‘ideal podcast’. Perfect not in subject matter so much as usability.
There is an abundance of cultural podcasts out there, created by museums, galleries, arts organisations and individuals. What makes some stand out from the crowd is not only engaging content but also ease of use. Too often these things seem mutually exclusive. Here are some things that I’ve noted.
Tl;dl With many of the most interesting ones running close to an hour, sometimes the sheer length of podcasts is offputting. Take the chance (given previous form) or skip altogether? A quick introduction always helps to get a feel for the content and its running order. Chicago’s Art Institute Musecast does a good one on their albeit short podcast.
Shownotes and Links Although their podcast is at times rambling, Bad at Sports has good show notes on its website which give an overview of the episode, enabling strategic fast-forwarding if short on listening time. Kansas Historical Society’s Cool Things in the Collection goes a step further with an essay on their featured object and outside links to relevant sites for further research.
Chapters I love chapters. If I’m not all that interested in a particular segment, I can jump to the next and not have to hunt around getting frustrated. It is like the difference between using cassette tapes and CDs. For such a seemingly simple function is available on very few podcasts. The National Gallery, I salute you.
Images While some cultural institutions produce video podcasts, they are in the minority. Images, like chapters are available on enhanced versions of audio podcasts, but again are seldom used. It is particularly frustrating when the recording is a commentary from a slide presentation. The National Archives, for instance could have made much more of their Summer of 69 episode had we been able to see the images of what was even billed in the RSS feed notes as an ‘illustrated talk’.
Update Regularly Please! Or if not, then say that you’re doing a limited run like the Monocle Summer Series and then having a break. Don’t just leave the listener hanging.
Presentation and Content Learning something new and unexpected is always welcome. Like dipping into a magazine, mixing up the presentation or not spending too long on each idea works well in podcasts. Arts.21: The Cultural Magazine‘s videos and Museum of Science, Boston‘s audio podcasts both have this down albeit in differering styles. Having a gimmick can also sometimes work. I’m not sure whether I’d have learned about intelligent search if it wasn’t for Tea with the Economist.
So, my perfect podcast is one which makes available a contents list, is easy to navigate, has images and notes to go with the recording, updates frequently and piques my interest in new areas. All this stuff adds value for me. Makes me subscribe to the RSS feed, recommend it to friends. Basically it makes me come back for more. Isn’t that what it is all about? What do you look for? Are cultural podcasters catering to that? If you are the person who makes your museum or gallery’s podcast, what are your views?
You can contact me at august(at)newcurator(dot)com or leave your thoughts in the comments.
You heard it here first. These new partners see the arrivals of two new states being represented in the Norman Rockwell Museum and Art Institute of Chicago as well as ArtBabble’s first partner from outside the US, the Van Gogh Museum. I imagine this won’t be the last international partner.
I’ve become fascinated by the potential of the KQED partnership and will hope to find out more soon. Also personally stoked at what the Guggenheim has to offer. Hopefully they’ll involve the other global members of the Foundation.
All of the content will be available on ArtBabble.org some time Tuesday 28th as they’re still adding at of this moment. Babble On.
Nina preaches a particular brand of participatory design that I only partially understand myself, but I guess this is why Nina gets paid to give talks on the subject. I understand it as a movement in museum ideology from passive to active to social. This last part is exceedingly difficult to manufacture. What Nina is aiming for is getting a dialogue going that comes so easily in that mass-social-experiment known as Web 2.0, where complete strangers form communities over common themes. The trick is getting that 2.0 goodness off the Internet and into the physical museum. There’s no point in having a dualism of high web-based participation and a passive museum space. Nina fears this becoming a widening gulf. So do I: my beloved AR can’t happen otherwise.
In most museums, technologists are still seen as service providers, not experience developers. They live in well-defined (and self-protected) silos. There are stereotypes flying in many directions—that curators won’t give up authority, that technologists don’t respect traditional museum practice, that educators are too preachy, that marketers just want to get more live bodies in the door.
This is why Nina dreams of a museum that’s also a bar. It an attempt to move museuming into a established model community structure. (Nina – if that ever gets off the ground, I’ll drop everything and come be a barman/curator)
There’s nothing I think isn’t fair in what Nina said. Rob called it “misinformed” and I disagree. It’s justifiable to base a critique upon a single visit. It may be the toughest challenge, but if you can’t grab someone on their first visit, how likely are you to get a second. It’s brutal, I know, but people have 300 other things vying for their attention. So if someone goes to your gallery and doesn’t feel the same involvement as the Internet, that could be considered a curatorial weakness.
First off, I’d like to argue against lumping all sorts of museums together in this discussion. I think the relationship between virtual and in-person offerings is necessarily different when the museum is an art museum.
Standing Order 6: Don’t Fork (the Insurgency). I believe a museum is a museum. If we start finding reason to exclude art museums, then why not maritime museums or archaeological museums? Every taxonomy of museum has different issues. Hell, every institution has different issues. We’re not dealing with magic bullets or surgical scalpels here. We’re talking about the movement of museums towards the future. That movement is going to stagger and lurch. It would be a shame if the lurch made the technology side of museums merely an accessory, in an art museum or otherwise.
This is why I harp on about Augmented Reality. This is why Nina was talking about loyalty cards. (Not “interactives”, whatever that means. That words sounds so 90s, like “multimedia”). These things can be homogenised right through a museum.
When I talked with Rob Stein, the IMA’s CIO, about my frustration, he suggested that “institutional change has to start somewhere.”
Rob was clearly a bit sore about Nina visiting the IMA as a regular visitor and coming up with this very hard criticism. And it was very hard. Not harsh or snarky. Hard. That was Nina in full cultural critic mode, analytical and evaluative. There are lessons to learn, as proven by the large amount of discussion it generated.
Do I think the IMA deserved it? No. There are far worse museums committing far worse sins. I do believe it has to start somewhere and the IMA is doing great work. Looking at the list Rob made, things like Project IMA or the “Multi-User Collection Browsing with Physical User Interface” have some really exciting elements in this field. I can’t think of many museums seriously trying to make this much effort to establish web-and-reality communities. As Rob states about innovation in museums:
At times it seems to be ephemeral… a gossamer to be grasped at. Other times, you find yourself standing right in the middle of it without knowing how you arrived.
So, Nina went into a gallery and found it sparse compared to the online experience. Rob states the what they have done (albeit, in short term projects rather than total museum integration. Fair comment?) and then talks about the very interesting things they’re working on to get that experience. I like to think that they’ll “get around to that sparse gallery space”. It has to start somewhere.
Nina gives us a warning about a potential ghettoising of museum tech. I think it’s unfortunate that it was the IMA that inspired such a warning. Rob tells us where they are with the current museum tech movement. Where we are and what we should be concerned about. Two points along a line we can make judgements from. There’s a lot to learn here for us well-informed museum people, especially when we need to start thinking like the uninformed public that can’t drag out important members of the museum staff. Was is it that we’ve learnt?
Instead of large-print black and white barcodes to be scan at close-range (like my QR code), a Bokode is a tiny dot that can be scanned at a distance of a few metres.
A lot of this video may take a more science-geared mind to understand. In short, it’s smaller, has a greater range and can be “interpreted” quicker by cameras (hence the AR models didn’t twitch). I like how the video instantly see it’s potential use in a museum.
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