New Media Initiatives Blog

Just when you were starting to think we should be retiring the term “Web 2.0″, Nina Simon of Museum 2.0 comes along to remind us that we’ve largely forgotten what it really means. It is not, for instance, flashy AJAX - or at least, not exclusively. It is not just user comments. Web 2.0, as originally fleshed out by Tim O’Reilly, remains an incredibly cool idea to strive for.

Her online preview of a presentation she’ll give Monday is a fantastic reminder of what Web 2.0 is and what it means for museums — most importantly, the gentle nudge that it doesn’t have to be online to be Web 2.0. I for one am kind of excited by the idea of an exhibition in “perpetual beta,” growing and evolving on the floor, rather than a static and final “release.” Or even something that mixes both worlds, like Brooklyn’s Click exhibition.

If “Web 2.0″ has lost its luster for you, you owe it to yourself to watch and listen to her presentation. It will remind you why it still matters.

The museum technical community got some good news today: MuseTechCentral officially launched. Billing itself as the MCN Project Registry, the site seeks to “provide a place for the MCN community to share information about technology-related museum projects”.

After some quick browsing (encouragingly, there are already a good number of entries, including several cell phone tour projects I was interested in) it was easy to see the potential of the site:

• When starting a new project, it’s smart to see if this problem has been solved before. If so, how? And for how much? Is it worth the investment? Or is there a vendor to avoid? Now you can find out.
• Vice versa, upon completing a project, you may find yourself being hit up constantly for information requests. Now you can now simply refer people to your project page on MuseTechCentral.

While I was there I created an account and added our Art on Call project to the registry. The site is full of ajaxy goodness that makes form entry and navigation a breeze, although I do wish you could bookmark filtered results.

So far the projects seems to be fairly art-museum-centric, but hopefully that will change as more institutions start to contribute. The registry will be most useful if it truly represents the museum community, so if you’ve got a project to add… go add it!

Overall, this is a great effort by the Museum Computer Network and the Museum Software Foundation. Looking forward to future browsing and adding many more projects!

[via Musematic]

• Teddy Banks, writing for Design Observer, shares some commentary on Olia Lialina’s newest article: Vernacular Web 2. The article is a great read on it’s own, and as Banks tells us, should be a must read for every web designer. Lialina’s work, My boyfriend came back from the war, was featured in the Walker’s online exhibit, Beyond Interface: net art and Art on the Net.

  Lialina touches on the similarties of myspace of today and the web of 10 years ago. Instead of being designed by computer geeks, it’s “designed” by teens and ameteurs, and the music is mp3s and not midi.

• And speaking of MySpace, Danah Boyd has some new thoughts posted on myspace and remix culture. Seb Chan offers some thoughts on what this means for institutions that offer graphics and resources that can be remixed (legitimately or otherwise).
• Here’s an interesting article on the paradox of large displays, written by Jeff Attwood. He quotes Dan’s Data:
  

  Users of 30-inch monitors face the terrible, terrible problem of how to effectively use all of that space. You don’t often want to maximise a folder or document window on a screen this big; either you’ll end up with a lot of white space and important program buttons separated by a vast expanse of nothing, or you’ll get lines of text 300 or more characters long, which are difficult to read.

  I use three displays at work, two on my main computer and one on the laptop. While synergy makes this a very useful setup when doing video work, it can also be extrmely distracting at times. I find it necessary to sleep my laptop so I can focus on important tasks on my main displays.

• Interactive Architecture had been quiet for a while, but they posted a brief blurb on a conference going on next week that will discuss the many implications of signage in public space. Hopefully some of the papers and presentations from the conference will make it to the web.

• Stats galore: Our account of google analytics has finally been updated to the new version and it rocks! It seems very intuitive and a lot more clear than the old adapted from urchin version.

  And another new stats tool we’re liking a lot is crazyegg. The heatmap tool is especially impressive, since it makes it very easy to visualize what visitors are clicking on.

• Quartz Composer tidbits: Steve Morkis over at fdiv has been doing some very interesting work writing custom patches, so far providing an xcode template, custom inspector how-to, and an apple remote patch, amongst others. I’m interested in seeing a cli patch that would send commands to the terminal and run external scripts. Very exciting, though the QC community is a little unsure about what this means in the face of Leopard.

  I also found out about another interesting app called Millicent that seems like a mash-up of Quartz composer and photoshop, geared towards creating broadcast graphics on a budget. The app is still in beta, feature incomplete and a bit buggy, but it is interesting to see the diversity of work that QC is being used for.

• Exhibition Website: The MFA Boston has an Edward Hopper show going on now and the website is rather well done, if a bit slim on exhibition info. The design is very clean and lets the iconic work of Hopper speak for itself. Allowing visitors to download images as wallpaper is also pretty nifty. Coudal noted: The ’sketchbook’ feature is more than a bit clumsy but it’s well worth fumbling around to get at the goods. Why are big museums so consistently stupid about presenting things online? The sketchbook doesn’t seem too bad to me, and I like that I can zoom in and move around. It is a bit slow and small, but the idea is a good one. It seems google maps has set the new standard for image zooming/panning, and that is a tall technical tree to climb.

WebWalker’s had a bum leg for a month, but we’re on the mend and here’s the proof.

• Web 2.0 Overboard: If you haven’t had enough of the wired/tired/expired Web 2.0 craze, here’s two gems that will knock you out (for better or worse). Check out the Web 2.0 Logo Creatr for all your missing-e and reflection needs. And if that logo is just a little too flickr-y for you, check out this grid of Web 2.0′d logos from Jean Claude Attituder. (via Fallon Planning Blog)
• Seb Chan at Fresh + New beat us to the punch discussing ExhibitFiles, a new social networking site for museum pros. Jim Spadaccini explains the concept:
  

  As a community, we sometimes redesign the wheel as there is no central place for us to find out about the best (and the worst?) practices in exhibit development. This issue is becoming more urgent as many of the exhibit designers who were active in the 1970s and 1980s are beginning to retire. Over the years, important exhibition development information is lost or stored within a museum where it can't be easily shared with the larger community.

  ExhibitFiles is more targeted at science and history museums, but there is still a large potential for use by certain types of professionals within art institutions as well.

• One of my favorite blogs, Create Digital Motion, has a great review of the Blackmagic Intensity, which lets you connect one computer’s DVI video output to another machine as a HDMI input. I don’t see any uses for NMI right now, but it is something that VJs are certainly interested in, because mixing HD can be a very expensive proposition. This thing is only , and shows up as a quicktime compatible source.
• I’ve recently been playing with scripting Adobe Photoshop, which isn’t as daunting as it sounds. I had some experience with scripting Adobe Illustrator several years ago, but at the time Photoshop didn’t have the fancy javascript abilities that Illustrator did. Overall the scriptability is very powerful; there are few things you can’t manipulate programmatically, and with scripts you have far more control than actions. Two useful resources for me so far have been PS-Scripts.com, a great community for photoshop scripting, and the PS-scripts project, which provides an extended library of utilities.

  If you’ve got photoshop CS2, the Scripting folder in your install has all kinds of goodies to learn from (the pdfs in your install are not copy protected like the web versions). And Adobe’s ExtendScript Toolkit app is actually useful for writing and debugging the scripts. I hope to post more on scripting Photoshop (and After Effects?) in the future.

The Walker has had a flickr account for several months, but we have only been using it to hosting photos from Party People. That is changing. We’ve created two additional groups:

• Walker Art Center
  For photos of and around the Walker building.
• Minneapolis Sculpture Garden
  For photos in and around the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden.

The groups are something we’ve been meaning to create for a while, but seeing the Shelley Bernstein and Nicole Caruth present about the Brooklyn Museum’s use of flickr at MW2007 threw another dash of gasoline on our fire. During their presentation, Shelley told us to steal her idea. This is our start.

So if you have photos from your last visit to the Walker or the Sculpture Garden, and are a flickr user, please add them to our group. Not a flickr user? You can still browse as the groups grow. As of this post, there are already 117 photos in the Sculpture Garden Pool, but only 10 in the Walker Art Center Pool.

Some things many museums are concerned about with regard to user created photos on Flickr are photo policies and copyright. As moderator of these groups, we do need to watch out for photos that don’t fit within the photography policy of the Institution. The Walker does not allow photography in the galleries or of artwork. Photography of the building and architecture is allowed. The Sculpture Garden does allow photography, but it needs to be non-commercial in nature. The reasons for these policies are two-fold. First, while the Walker may own the art in the galleries, we don’t always own the copyright. Many of the artists in our collections are alive and still hold the copyright on their work. The Sculpture Garden is a public space so the same rules can’t apply. However, many of the works in the sculpture garden are still copyrighted by the artists. Fair use allows non-commercial use, but commercial use must be licensed by the copyright holder. Wedding photos and that sort of thing need to get a permit from the City of Minneapolis.

Legalities aside, I think our policy makes sense for a few other reasons. We’re more interested in the community aspects of seeing and attending the Walker. I don’t think taking a photo of work hanging on a wall documents that. We already have many of those in our collections database. Secondly, if we did allow photography in our galleries, it can be distracting to visitors and potentially damaging to the artwork. Robin told us that on her recent visit to MOMA, guards were constantly having to deal with visitors who used their flash while photographing artwork. The concentrated light in flashes can be damaging to some types of paint, not to mention distracting to other visitors. Thirdly, as much as I would love to take some macro shots of Charles Ray’s Unpainted Sculpture or Robert Smithson’s Leaning Strata, I would have to get too close to the work and probably would end up touching the work, which can also be damaging to the artwork. As a museum, we have an imparative to preserve the work for everyone to view.

At the same time, we know photos that don’t fit within our guidelines exist. It is possible to snap a photo when a guard walks out of the gallery, the same way it’s possible for someone to put their fist through a painting. We just can’t condone them and ask that people don’t submit them to our pools.

One of my favorite sites, Photojojo, has a roundup of a few different photobooths (they forgot us). The first is very similar to Party People Photos, in that it uses projection to display the shots immediately and has been installed in another museum.

The ability to print photos is a nice touch, since the only thing people like more than seeing themselves on the screen is getting some free personalized schwag to take with them. Of course, if someone really wanted to, they could visit our Flickr page to download and print a photo on their own. The photo’s from Mark’s setup at the Whitney also have a very nice lighting quality, much like ours, which makes all the difference in the world. Their photos are more true to form of the old style black and white photobooth, whereas ours are a more modern fashion-esque interpretation. It also looks like Mark’s setup was a more self contained, appliance-like box rather than the more ad-hoc approach we used. Perhaps we can use the instructions to make our own for the Kara Walker Preview Party. I hope to have automatic uploading to Flickr part of the installation at that point, too.

And, just to make a friendly jab at the Whitney, our installation was three days before theirs. Neener Neener. Sadly, I didn’t see any photos of Ivanka Trump at our party. In Minnesota, we’ve got Al Franken or Prince, neither of which showed up.

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.