Blogs Media Lab

Walker blogs ping Walker calendar

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Often in our posts we’ll include links to upcoming or current events at the Walker, but those events rarely if ever include links back to the blogs. We’ve always intended to go back into the events and add related links to the blog posts to help foster discussion, but it’s just one of those things [...]

Often in our posts we’ll include links to upcoming or current events at the Walker, but those events rarely if ever include links back to the blogs. We’ve always intended to go back into the events and add related links to the blog posts to help foster discussion, but it’s just one of those things that kept slipping off the radar.

Until now! I just finished writing an XML RPC ping server for Walker content and have set WordPress up to ping it every time we post. The ping server pulls the RSS feed and looks for links back to the Walker site, and then does some magic to add a related link from that page back to the blog post. If all goes well we’ll start to see more traffic between the calendar and the blogs and vice versa, and best of all it will happen automatically whenever we post about an event.

Telling More Of The Story With Technology

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Today I was forwarded a post (hat tip: Alttext) by Paul Bausch of Onfocus, entitled The Former Audience in Meatspace. In it he recounts his experience with a tour guide at the High Desert Museum in Bend, OR, where he received much more information about an exhibit than he ever would have had he not [...]

Today I was forwarded a post (hat tip: Alttext) by Paul Bausch of Onfocus, entitled The Former Audience in Meatspace. In it he recounts his experience with a tour guide at the High Desert Museum in Bend, OR, where he received much more information about an exhibit than he ever would have had he not gotten the tour. He then wonders why more of this great information isn’t online, or used in the actual exhibits for other people to hear.

The tour guide relayed stuff that wouldn’t make it onto the official wall text describing the exhibits, but the extra layer of information helped bring the scene to life. [...] I thought that the tragedy of this is that all of this knowledge vanishes when he’s not around. In fact, I’d been to the museum several times and hadn’t hit this vein of information. With this info, the museum was a completely different experience.

I think he hits the nail on the head why new media is so important in the museum space. It allows us to enrich the museum experience beyond just putting a painting on a wall or fossilized bones on a pedistal, and it also goes beyond the walls of the museum itself. It gives the patron a way to experience the museum in a different light, in different way, and in their own unique way.

This is something we really prescribe to with our new media projects at the Walker. Art on Call gives people the opportunity to listen to comments from artists, curators and yes, tour guides, whether you’re at home or standing right in front of an artwork in the galleries.

Our blogs give people behind the scenes info on exhibitions, technical how-to’s, interviews, and just plain arty fun, giving people yet another side to the Walker. Even our Minneapolis Sculpture Garden website has it’s own video tours! All of this is available at the kiosks in our front lobby, or from the comfort of your own home.

When I read Mr. Bausch’s post it really made me think about all of the work we’ve accomplished and realize that we’re moving in the right direction. It also made me realize that in this age of increasing technology, more museums should be moving in this direction as well. It’s obvious from his post that being interactive, customizable and “deep” is where the trends are moving to. You need look no further than the web itself to see it. Technology adds more layers to the information, it adds more to the experience, and it adds more to the overall museum community. It would be a disservice to ourselves and our patrons to ignore that.

Photos from After Hours are up!

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I’ve uploaded everything to flickr and put it in our group. Don’t forget to join our group and add your photos to the pool once you’ve joined the group!

IMG_4387.jpg

I’ve uploaded everything to flickr and put it in our group. Don’t forget to join our group and add your photos to the pool once you’ve joined the group!

Announcing Party People Photos

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At this Friday’s After Hours event, we’ll be debuting our latest crowd pleaser. “Party People Photos” is an installation that lets people take their own photos and have them projected onto several screens during the party. Additionally, we’ll be putting all the photos up in a Flickr Pool for all to see and even add [...]

At this Friday’s After Hours event, we’ll be debuting our latest crowd pleaser. “Party People Photos” is an installation that lets people take their own photos and have them projected onto several screens during the party. Additionally, we’ll be putting all the photos up in a Flickr Pool for all to see and even add their own photos to the pool.

The idea for the project grew out of the theme of the ads for the party, “Party People”, which uses images of people from the expansion opening party back in 2005. We like the opening photos, but we want more of them and we want everyone to be able to experience the party. We did a test run of the installation on monday and it went quite good. Word got out among some of the staff and we captured quite a few photos. Funny, sassy, weird… Exactly what we’re hoping for.

Below is a screenshot of the projection movie from the test, which is what it will look like on Friday night.

After Hours Projection
Quicktime h.264, 880K

Capturing

We’re using an iMac with a built-in iSight to capture the images. The iMac is hooked up to a Canon Eos 10D via USB, which is the camera that actually takes your picture when triggered. To trigger the capture, we have a big red button connected to the computer via an i-pac. I soldered up the connection for the button and the iPaq, which marks the first time I’ve ever got to do soldering at my day job. The button took some googling to find, but it turns out the company that makes it is actually located in Roseville, MN. The flash on the camera is a ring flash, so they have a sexy, fashion photo feel.

Tying all of the inputs together is Max/MSP + Jitter. When the button is hit, it acts as if the “x” key has been hit on the keyboard, which starts the countdown. At 7 seconds, the camera capture is started. As I talked about in a previous post, we’re using gphoto2 to handle the capture. It takes a few seconds for it to happen, but goes off at right about 0. The built-in iSight on the iMac is used to give a preview image so people can compose their shot with the proper amount of sass and pizzaz (heavy on the sass, please).

Some geek porn:
max patch for after hours capture station

Once the photo is downloaded, it is dropped in a folder where launchd sees it and triggers a script that rysync’s it to the projection computers. At this point, the capture station is ready to take another photo.

Projection

The projection isn’t quite a slide show, but achieves the same goals as a slide show in that it shows a collection of images. We’re using quartz composer to do this, since it’s the hottest graphic tool on OS X and makes this kind of thing very easy and very smooth. In this patch, the images around the edges randomly pick an image from the pool of available images and display it. The center images have a simple algorithm that displays a mix of the most recently taken images, but some other random ones as well. This way, if you’ve just gotten your picture taken, you’ll be able to see it big, but you’ll also have an opportunity to see other photos.

Even more geek porn:
quartz composition patch for after hours

If all goes well, the projection will be showing on “The Rock” in the Bazinet Garden Lobby and on the shades in the Cargill lounge.

On the Web

Once the party is over, we want the fun to keep rolling, so all the photos are going up on flickr. Not only do we want an easy way to show the photos, and flickr has one of the best web-based interfaces for that, but we also want people to be able to add their own. We’ve set up a group for the After Hours parties, where we’ll be putting our photos. If you go to the event and take some photos with your phone or digicam, join our group and add it to ourAfter Hours Flickr Pool. We’ve also set up a page on the walker site that has some info about After Hours and the flickr group.

One small note: By attending the party and getting your pictures taken in the photo booth, you give us the rights to use your photo in documentation of the party and project. This is all covered on the back of your ticket for the event, so it is basically a condition for getting in the building. If you add your photos to our pool, they’re covered by whatever copyright restriction you put on them in Flickr.

So, go to the party, get your picture taken, take some photos of your own (just not in the galleries), join our flickr group, and upload your pictures. If you have any feedback, we’d love to hear it.

Social networking for hardware

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We Make Money Not Art has an interview with Burak Arikan up, who is the lead developer of OpenIO and Pinkie. Prior to reading the interview, I had no idea what either were, but they sound very cool, like most things that come out of the Media Lab: Pinkie is a network based electronics prototyping [...]

We Make Money Not Art has an interview with Burak Arikan up, who is the lead developer of OpenIO and Pinkie. Prior to reading the interview, I had no idea what either were, but they sound very cool, like most things that come out of the Media Lab:

Pinkie is a network based electronics prototyping board. Pinkie has been designed to easily compose sensors and actuators that reside in different locations. Pinkies are inherently invisible, they hide behind the structures and only serve as facilitators to interface the physical world to the digital network.

Open I/O works like a peer-to-peer file sharing program, rather then sharing media files in your PC, you share data sensed from your physical environment. While Pinkies are organizing the low-level information (e.g., sensing the world), Open I/O is for higher concepts such as managing distributed devices, collaboration, and social networking.

This sounds to be a very interesting project. It seems like the floodgates are starting to open on small hardware devices that are open and easily programmable. Since there are so many of these devices, it seems only natural that they need social networking.

Mori Art Center Signage

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While i was digging through old video for my last post i found these. I usually pay attention to the signage in museum lobbies and entrances, especially when it involves some sort of media presentation. I was pretty excited to see what the Mori Art Museum would do with their lobby. As you can see [...]

While i was digging through old video for my last post i found these. I usually pay attention to the signage in museum lobbies and entrances, especially when it involves some sort of media presentation. I was pretty excited to see what the Mori Art Museum would do with their lobby. As you can see from this video it is straight forward and dull at the desk. I was expecting something a more experimental and fun like the MoMA did with their desk. They did have a large back projected screen in the corner of their lobby that was integrated into the architecture, it was just showing a still slide show and when I tried to take video of it their very attentive gaurd shooed me away (but you can still see it a little).

Front Desk of Mori Art Center

Mori video signage and gaurd

Notion Organize Project at Omotesando Hills

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Omotesando Hills, an upscale shopping mall in the Aoyama district of Tokyo has an integrated media component called Notion Organization Project. I’ve been meaning to write something about it since my visit to Tokyo earlier this year unfortunately I could not find many articles written in English so I’m relying heavily on my poor Japanese [...]

Omotesando Hills, an upscale shopping mall in the Aoyama district of Tokyo has an integrated media component called Notion Organization Project. I’ve been meaning to write something about it since my visit to Tokyo earlier this year unfortunately I could not find many articles written in English so I’m relying heavily on my poor Japanese skills and translation programs.The project consists of LED screens on the outside facing Omotesando Street. The LED wall is low resolution but large scale so close up it image seems like a rather disconcerting jumble of flashing screens. From across the street or down the block however the illuminated wall is quite striking. Legs in sillouette are the most interesting video, the display alternates between that and an abstract color wash. At first I thought the pedestrians walking by on the side walk were creating the visuals above. That proved to be an illusion but brought to mind the Podium Lights or Memory Wall projects which would be very interesting to see in a busy space like this.

Video taken from a pedestrian bridge over Omotesando Street.

This is a close up view of the LED wall, you can see it is quite low resolution but very large.

Inside the project continues as a projection of light and image from the ceiling. There are directional speakers playing layers of music and natural sound effects, which i suppose is soothing and condusive to shopping. Both the projection and directional speakers are on motors which allow them to trace a path up and down the malls long stairs creating an effect of water cascading down. The imagery on the interior projections is close up video of the famous trees lining Omotesando Street and nearby rivers. Theatrical lights provide color which changes to reflect the current season. Unfortunately they wouldn’t let me take any video of the inside but there are some photos of it on their site. The effect indoors is less spectacular than the outside but it is mesmerizing if your walking down the long stairs.

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