Walker Blogs

New Media Initiatives

“Gamechanger”: Early reviews of the new Walker website

Posted December 5, 2011 at 12:49 pm — Filed under:

Launched late last week, the new Walker website is generating plenty of reactions from art bloggers, journalists and our colleagues in the museum world.

Tyler Green of Modern Art Notes offered a quick response last week, calling the site a “game-changer, the website that every art museum will have to consider from this point forward.” He followed that up with a more in-depth piece today that both praised the Walker (“no American art museum is more prepared to produce journalism than is the Walker”) and offered some challenges (“How probative will the Walker site be about its own institution, which dominates the presentation of contemporary art in a huge section of the country?”).

“Art museum websites typically pretend that the museum is an island unto itself,” he writes. “The new Walker website rejects that approach by presenting the Walker as both a physical and a virtual community hub — and it defines its community appropriately broadly, as both the art world and the Walker’s home state of Minnesota. With its audience thus defined, the new website promises to provide not just information about the Walker, but information about art and artists wherever they are, with an special and appropriate focus on its home region. That’s smart. Next up: We’ll see how the website delivers on that promise.”

Alexis Madrigal at The Atlantic writes that the site “should be a model for other institutions of all kinds.” He writes: “What I love most about what the Walker is attempting to do is that they seem to have realized that they can do more than stave off a slow spiral into irrelevance. The Internet means that the Walker can become a global art powerhouse from the comfort of the upper Midwest.”

Seb Chan, recently named director of digital and emerging media at the Cooper Hewitt, National Design Museum, interviewed Walker staff about the technology side of the site, noting that “it represents a potential paradigm shift for institutional websites.”

Museum Nerd, the popular anonymous art-tweeter and blogger, followed up a tweet from Friday (below), with a fleshed out analysis at Artlog. Calling the site an “earth-shaking gamechanger,” Museum Nerd writes, “They’re not just positioning themselves as an arbiter of taste (the connoisseurship thing has long been in every art museum’s bailiwick): the Walker is also placing themselves at the center of the conversation that their mission is all about.”

Marianne Combs at MPR: “As a reporter, I find this shift particularly interesting, because it marks a significant step forward in an ongoing trend. Namely arts organizations, faced with a lack of media coverage, are creating their own coverage, and taking the dialogue directly to their audiences.”

Secrets of the City: “[P]retty darn cool. The new look moves the site into more of a content focused direction, but also makes it easier to see what’s happening in the galleries.”

The Getty:

Minneapolis Institute of Arts:

ICA Philadelphia:

MoMA:

The Mattress Factory:

Museumnerd:

I’ll continue to update this post as more reviews come in.

Updates

12.06.11: Nina Simon at Museum 2.0:

“Here’s what I see: a website as a unique core offering–alongside, but not subservient to, the physical institution. Walkerart.org is not about the Walker Art Center. It is the Walker Art Center, in digital form.”

 

12.08.11: The Independent (UK):

“It’s curation, but not as we (or other galleries) know it yet. It ought to help hugely the Walker’s role on the arts stage…”

Minnov8:

“To say I was impressed is an understatement: the design is fresh, exciting to view and the content compelling. The breadth and depth of coverage of art and design quickly shifted my mind toward a completely different place, one of consideration, thought and ideas instead of my typical focus on the tech ‘flipper-flappers’ and ‘eye candy’ of this new website they’d delivered.”

12.09.11: It’s Nice That (UK):

“It’s a great step forward that should be welcomed by all creative types – the writing is excellent and it looks great too with lots of interesting web design tricks producing a thing of real beauty.”

 12.20.11: Alissa Walker, GOOD:

“A vibrant and thoughtful portal for the local creative community… Museums everywhere should take note, yes, but publications should be paying attention as well.”

Simple iTunes U stats aggregation with python and xlrd

Posted May 19, 2010 at 11:53 am — Filed under:

Like many institutions, we put numbers for our various online presences in our annual report and other presentations: YouTube views, Twitter followers, Facebook fans, etc. For most services, this is very easy to do: log in, go to the stats page, write the big number down. We also want to include the iTunes U numbers, but for iTunes U, there is no centralized stats reporting outside of the Microsoft Excel file Apple sends iTunes U administrators every week. Tabulating the stats by hand would be time consuming and error-prone, so I wrote a short python script to automate it. Here is is:

[python]
#!/usr/bin/env python
# encoding: utf-8
"""
itunesUstats.py
Created by Justin Heideman on 2010-05-19.
"""

import sys, os, glob, xlrd

def main():
#change this to the path where your stats are
path = ‘itunes_U_stats/all/’
totalDownloads = 0

for infile in glob.glob( os.path.join(path, ‘*.xls’) ):
# open the file
wb = xlrd.open_workbook(infile)

# get the most recent days’s tracks
sh = wb.sheet_by_index(1)

# get the downloads from that day
downloads = sh.col_values(1)

#first entry is u’Count’, whcih we don’t want
downloads.pop(0)

#sum it up
totalDownloads += sum(downloads)

# show a little progress
print sum(downloads)

#done, output results
print "—————————————————-"
print "Total downloads: %d" % totalDownloads

if __name__ == ‘__main__’:
main()
[/python]

This script uses the excellent xlrd python module to read the Excel files (simple xlrd tutorial here), which is roughly 27.314 times easier than trying to use an Excel macro to do the same thing. To use this, simply change the path on line 13 to a directory containing all your iTunes stats files, and run the script from the command line. You’ll get output like this:

929.0
732.0
779.0
854.0
1000.0
987.0
765.0
812.0
1275.0
1333.0
1114.0
1581.0
1278.0
1568.0
1854.0
2102.0
1108.0
1078.0
----------------------------------------------------
Total downloads: 21149

Do note that the script is tied to the excel format Apple has been using, so if they change it, this will break. Apple explains the iTunes report fields here. This script tells you ” all the iTunes U tracks users downloaded that week through the DownloadTrack, DownloadTracks, and SubscriptionEnclosure actions”.

Announcing the new Walker Channel — HD video, improved design, search, accessibility

Posted March 10, 2010 at 1:19 pm — Filed under:

The Walker Channel, in existence since 2003, has recently undergone a re-design. The old Walker Channel was originally built to serve Real Video and stream live webcasts using Real Video. It had slowly evolved over time to use more friendly MPEG-4 and H.264 video, and even moved from Real Video for live streaming to the better ustream.tv. But it never really caught up to the modern, YouTube era of video. The re-design we just completed did that, and added a few other goodies.

Visual Design


Quite obviously, the site has undergone a major visual overhaul. The old site had almost no hierarchy to the video archive, which worked OK with a handful of video, but with 200+ in the archive, it became unwieldy to find a particular video or just browse.

Just like with our iTunes U site, we’ve split our internal, museum centric departments into more logical genres. For example, instead of just “Performing Arts”, we have Dance, Theater and Music. We also highlight content by it’s recentness, and, more importantly by it’s popularity (view count). None of this is ground-breaking in 2010, but it’s a big upgrade from 2003.

Streaming H.264 Video

We’re now serving all our video content as streaming h.264 video. This means you can watch a video and jump to any place in the timeline before it has buffered to that spot. Using h.264 enables us to easily switch to HTML5 and support other devices down the road. We converted all our older Real Media video into h.264 mp4s.

We also utilize YouTube to serve many of our newer videos. We have already been putting all our Channel content on YouTube for about a year, so there’s no need to upload it twice. YouTube serves a relatively high-quality FLV or MP4 file, and this means we do not pay for bandwidth, which is not an insignificant cost consideration.

Where we’re not using YouTube, we’re using Amazon CloudFront and their new Adobe Streaming Media Server. This means that we don’t have to run our own instances of EC2 and Wowza to encode & stream the video. We upload our video manually, so we don’t need to encode our video in “the cloud”.

High Definition Video

We also upgraded our camera and video capture equipment to enter the beautiful HD world. We now capture all lectures in HD and webcast them live at 640×360. Going forward, archived versions will be posted at 720P (1280×720). Drawn Here (and there): HouMinn Practice is our first video posted in HD, and it looks great. Here’s a visual representation of what this new video means, comparing the resolutions we have from older content:

Click to enlarge and get the full effect.

We have also added a video switcher to our hardware repertoire. The switcher lets us show the presenter’s slides, in-stream, rather than just pointing the camera at the projection screen. This switcher enables a dramatic improvement in video quality, and will be especially useful for Architecture / Design lectures, which typically feature many slides.

Transcripts and captions

Starting with our new recordings in 2010, we’re adding closed captions and transcripts for nearly every video. This video is a good example. That means a couple things:

  • Videos are more accessible for deaf or hard of hearing viewers
  • It enables you to visually scan the contents of a video to key on a section you want to watch. In the  example video, clicking on the time code on the right jumps the playhead to that point in the video.
  • It gives us much more meaningful text to search on. Search engines are still text based, so having more than just the video description to search, is a great thing.

We create our transcripts by sending our video to CastingWords. The transcripts that CastingWords generates is then fed into YouTube’s machine caption processing feature, generating a captions for the video in the form of a .SBV file. The .SBV file is then pulled back into the Walker Channel, where we convert it on the fly to W3C TimedText format for use in jwplayer as captions.

We also re-format the captions as a transcript for display in the Transcript tab on the video. Captions tend to be broken up not by sentence, but by how the speaker is talking and how they’ll fit on screen. Transcripts, on the other hand, are read more traditionally, and should be read in complete sentences. So we break the captions up and re-form them in complete sentences with associated timecodes. Here’s an example screenshot:

Note the fragmented captions (in video) with transcript (below), in full sentences.

Comments and video jumping

We’ve added comments! Like what you see or want to add your thoughts? Leave a note. One neat thing in the comments that we convert mentions of specific time into a link to jump the video playhead. So if you leave a comment with 3:13 in it, it will turn into a link to that spot in the video.

Similarly, when that happens we change the hash for the page to a link to that spot. The URL will change from

http://channel.walkerart.org/play/my-video/

to

http://channel.walkerart.org/play/my-video/<strong>#t=3m3s</strong>

. Using that link anywhere else will jump the playhead to that point in the video. YouTube does the same thing, so we borrowed the idea.

Search and backend

We’re using solr for the search engine on the channel. Nate had great success with solr on ArtsConnectEd, so using solr was a no-brainer for us. The rest of the logic for the channel is built using Django, a python web framework that I also worked with for the My Yard Our Message project. To connect Django and solr, we’re using django-solr-search (aka “solango”). It was necessary to sub-class parts of solango to get it to present solr’s more-like-this functionality that we use for the “Related Media”. In retrospect, I probably should have used Haystack Search instead, since it supports that natively. As we move forward using solr and django in other areas of the Walker’s website, we’ll probably switch to using Haystack.

Funding

Funding for aspects of these updates came from the Bush Foundation, under a grant entitled “Expanding the Rules of Engagement with Artists and Audiences and Fostering Creative Capital in our Community“. This grant has many applications within the Walker as a whole, but for the online Walker Channel, it is specifically funding the upgrade of our camera and video equipment.

Tips and tricks: How to convert ancient real media video into a modern h.264 mp4

Posted February 22, 2010 at 2:13 pm — Filed under:

First of all, I’d like to apologize to all the people on twitter that follow me and had to endure my ranting about the trials and tribulations of converting real media files: I’m sorry.

So let’s say you have a pile of real media video that was recorded sometime earlier in the decade when real video was still relevant, but you realize any sane person these days doesn’t have RealPlayer installed and can’t view it. What you really want is that video to exist in an mp4 so you can stream it to a flash player, or eventually use <video> in html5 (once they work that codec stuff out). If you do a little googling on how to convert real video into h.264 mp4, you’ll find lots of programs and forum posts claiming they know to do it. But it’s mostly programs that don’t actually work and forum posts that are no longer relevant or strewn with blocking issues.

Thankfully, there is a better way, and I will lay it out for you.

Step one: Download the actual media
In our scenario, you have a list of 80 or so real media files that you need to convert. The URLs for those things probably look something like

http://media.walkerart.org/av/Channel/Gowda.ram

. If you were to download that .ram file, you’d notice that it’s about 59 bytes; clearly not enough to be the actual video file. What it is, is a pointer to the streaming location for the file. If you open up that .ram file in a text editor, you’ll see it points to

rtsp://ice.walkerart.org:8080/translocations/media/Gowda.rm

, which is the location for our real media streaming server here at the Walker.The thing we really want is the .rm file, but it can be a little hard to get via rtsp. Since we’re not stream ripping someone else’s content (that would be wrong, dontcha know), we can just log in to the server and based on that file path it’s looking for, grab the .rm via SCP or a file transfer mechanism of our choice. I happened to know that all our .rm files are actually accessible via HTTP, so I just did a little find/replacing in the URLs and built a list with

wget

to download them.

Step two: Convert the real media files to mp4
If you were trying to do this back in the day this would be a major pain. You’d have to use

mencoder

and the longest, most convoluted command-line arguments you’ve ever seen. Thankfully, Real recently came out with an updated version of RealPlayer that has a handy little thing in it called RealPlayer Converter. Sounds too good to be true, right? It is.

For larger files, it only works well on Windows, and it doesn’t give you a lot of options for encoding. The mac version will hang at 95% encoding for most files, and that’s pretty annoying. Save yourself the trouble and use a Windows box. Once you have RealPlayer installed, open up the converter, drag your .rm files in, and set the conversion settings. Depending on what your original sources are, you might need to fiddle with the options. I used the h.246 for iPod and iPhone, because that fit the size (320×240) that my source files were. I cranked down the bitrate to 512kbps and 128kbps, because my source .rm files were about 384kbps and 64kbps to start with. This will give you a .m4v file, which is basically a .mp4 file with a different extension, but should work OK for most stuff.

Queue everything up and let it rip. On a two year old PC, it took about a day to process 48 hours worth of video.

Step three: Check your files
This is the part where your curse a little bit, realizing that in half the video you just encoded, the audio is out of sync with the video. This is a common problem when converting real video, and Real’s own tool doesn’t do a good job of handling it, never mind the fact that if you just play the video in RealPlayer, it plays in sync just fine. If you were to open the .m4v up in QuickTime Pro and look at the movie properties, you’d see something like this:

Notice the problem there? The video and audio tracks have different lengths, the video track being shorter than the audio. There is a way to fix this.

Step four: Synchronize the audio and video
There is a handy mac program that helps you fix just this synchronization issue. It’s called QT Sync. Operation is pretty simple. You open up a video file and it shows you fiddle with the video/audio offset until it is synced up. Here’s a screenshot:

Ideally, proper sync will occur when the number of frames is equal for both the audio and video. In my experience, most of my videos were synced when the video frame count was about 10 short of the audio frames, but your mileage may vary. Some of the videos I worked with would also slowly drift out of sync over time, and unfortunately, there isn’t a way to fix those. Just sync them up the the beginning and rest easy knowing you’ve done what you can.

Step four-and-a-half: Save the video
This is where things get tricky again. How you save the video depends on what you’re going to do with it. If your output target is just for iPods and iPhone, and you’re not going to be streaming it from a streaming server, you have it good. If you are planning on streaming, skip to step five. You can save the video from QT Sync without re-encoding. You’ll just be writing the audio and video streams in a new .mp4 wrapper, this time with a proper delay set up for one of the streams. To save the .mp4, you file > export, and use “Movie to mpeg-4″ as the format. Go into the options, and you want to use “Pass through” as the format for both audio and video, and do not check anything in the streaming tab. Here’s what it looks like:

This will take a moment to write the file, but it won’t re-encode. If you open the resulting mp4 up in QuickTime Pro and look at the properties, you should see something like this:

Note how the video track has a start time 6 seconds later than the audio. This is good and should play in sync. If Rinse and repeat for each of your videos that is out of sync and you’re done.

Step five: Save the video
If you’re reading this, it’s because you want to take your converted video and stream it to a flash player, using something like Adobe Streaming Media Server. If you were to take that synced, fixed up mp4 from step 4.5 and put it on your streaming media server and started streaming, you’d notice that the audio and video were out of sync again. See, Adobe Streaming Media Server doesn’t respect the delay or start time in an .mp4 file. I didn’t test other streaming servers like Wowza, but I’m guessing the suffer from the same issue. It sucks, but I can kind of see it making sense for a streaming server to expect them to be in sync.

Instead, we are stuck fixing the video the hard way. You have the video sync’d up in QT Sync, but instead of saving it as a .mp4 as in step 4.5, save it as a reference movie with a .mov extension. We’re doing this because we’ve got to re-encode the video, again, essentially hard-coding the audio or video delay into the streams, rather than just the .mp4 wrapper.

Step six: Encode the video (again)
So, now you have a bunch of .mov referrence files that are ready to be batch processed. You can use whatever software you like to do this, but I like MPEG Streamclip, which I wrote about a little in this post about iTunes U. It is way faster than Compressor, and it does batch processing really nicely.

You want to use settings that are similar to what your file is already using. I outlined that above, but here’s what the settings screen looks like:

Yes, you’re losing a bit of quality here encoding the video for the second time, but there isn’t a way around it. In looking, I couldn’t notice a difference between the original .rm file, the first version m4v, and the fixed and synced .mp4. There is no doubt some loss, but it is an acceptable trade-off to get a usable video format.

Don’t Sleep on It: Time-lapse and post-mortem

Posted May 18, 2009 at 12:39 pm — Filed under:

Now that Don’t Sleep on It is over and everyone has caught up on some sleep, I thought I’d share a bit more on the technical setup and a lesson learned. Witt told me he thought that it was one of the best, if not THE best, event that WACTAC has ever done. I tend to agree.

As I explored in a previous post, we used a digital still camera to take our single frame images, then stitch them together in quicktime as a longer move. For the event itself, we used two cameras. The primary camera, a Canon 10D, was equipped with a 16mm wide-angle lens that gave us a really good shot of the entire space. The second camera, a Canon G9, wasn’t quite as wide-angle, but would be a good backup camera in case something happened to the 10D. A sample of the space:

dont_sleep_on_it_space

We taped off sight lines, just out of frame, so the artists would know what was in frame and what was not.

Our events & media production team set up a very nice mount for the cameras, as you can sort of see in this blurry, hastily snapped iPhone shot:

camera_mount

Unfortunately, every good plan has it’s own particular achilies heel. In this case, that heel was electronics’ desire for an uninterrupted flow of electricity. Midway through the evening on Friday night, the circuit breaker that powered the computer and cameras was tripped. Power was quickly restored, and the computers were turned back on. However, the startup procedure to get the time-lapse running was not something that could be scripted or automated, so the capture did not start again until 9 AM the next morning when I cam to check on things.

The lesson here: Time lapse is awesome, but next time, use an uninterpretable power supply. Preferably one that has a loud audible warning. I probably should have thought of this, but it really didn’t occur to me how chaotic and crazy the event would actually be (I mean that in the most endearing way possible).

The fact that we lost 12 hours of the time-lapse does stink, but it also means we still captured 12 hours of the event. I’ve assembled the video, and it has been posted to YouTube, but the quailty is not as good as a quicktime file. Here is a higher-quality quicktime MP4:

[quicktime width="640" height="441" placeholder="http://blogs.walkerart.org/newmedia/files/2009/05/dont_sleep_on_it_still.jpg" useplaceholder="1"]http://walkerart.s3.amazonaws.com/channel/09/dont_sleep_on_it_web.mp4[/quicktime]
Click to play, or download the original file.

To fill some of the 12-hour gap, we hastily collected photos from whoever was available and had taken photos. They’ve been put together as a short slideshow filling a portion of the 12-hour missing period.

Working with iTunes U

Posted November 14, 2008 at 5:26 pm — Filed under:
Walker Art Center iTunes U page

Walker Art Center iTunes U page.

Several weeks ago, Robin posted about the Walker Channel on iTunes U. I am going to follow up on her initial announcement with a more info about the process of designing an iTunes U Page, the preparation of content, and putting content online.

Designing an iTunes U Page

There are a number of different designs for pages in iTunes U. Some institutions that have been in the store for a while have a three column layout. However, Apple has now standardized on a two column layout for iTunes U pages. There options for customizing a page are limited, but not restrictive. Colors for backgrounds, borders, and text can be changed. An overall header image that is 600px by 300px is used on the top of the main page. The downside of a two column layout is that it does not re-size to a smaller iTunes window as nicely as a the three column layout.

A three column iTunes U page

A three column iTunes U page.

Within the main page, you can create separate content groups. We decided to go with three sections: Featured, Exhibitions, and Topics. Within these sections, you create course pages. Each course can be customized with an icon, description, author/instructor, and links. In each course, there can be multiple tabs for different groupings of content. We’re using “Tracks” for most, which are a mix of video and audio content. A few exhibitions courses also have tabs for Art on Call content.

In order to design our site, I ended up doing some of the initial work right in iTunes. I figured out our color scheme and organizational structure, then took a few screenshots of iTunes. The screenshots were pasted together in photoshop, and I layered the header and course images onto it. Thankfully, the iconography choices were straight forward. The exhibitions use images from an exhibition, either artwork or an installation view. For Subjects or Featured courses, the icons are all similar, just using color, pattern, and language changes, each referencing the different artistic program pages that are already on the Walker web site.

Encoding video for the iPod using h.264

The h.264 codec is both amazing and vexing. It has very high compression, good quality, and is a widely supported standard. Working with h.264, especially for devices, can be complicated. Since the 5th generation, iPods have been able to play h.264 encoded video. They can even play 640×480 video and downscale it to their 320×240 screen, which is great since a 640×480 video will look good on a larger screen too. The real trickery with h.264 comes in with profiles.

Exporting to mp4 in Quicktime Pro. Not iPod compatible.

The MPEG Streamclip settings we use.

The MPEG Streamclip settings we use


Most of the time, if you just export a movie from quicktime using h.264, you use the main profile. However, for a device like the iPod, which doesn’t have a fast processor, Apple specifies that you need to use the low-complexity profile. There technical differences are mostly beyond me, but the low-complexity profile drops some of the more advanced hinting and shape features, but will mean a less processor intensive decode process that the iPod can handle.

Getting video encoded into a low-complexity h.264 profile is not a clear process. Apple’s own QuickTime Pro doesn’t let you encode to low-complexity and have any control over the output. If you want to make a movie compatible for the iPod, you must use the Movie to iPod or Movie to iPhone preset. Both of these presets encode at a very high bitrate, which makes for good quality. However, if you have the scenario we have– long movies of not a lot of action–a high bitrate is both filesize prohibitive and not necessary to maintain quality.

Some time ago, we switched to saving all our channel videos in a mp4 file, using the h.264 codec, thinking that it would make them iTunes compatible. We apparently missed the low-complexity part, and discovered that our videos were, in fact, not iPod compatible. This meant we would need to re-encode our video files to make them more useful in iTunes U. I looked at several different pieces of software to do this, but eventually decided upon MPEG Streamclip.

As I noted above, Quicktime Pro would not work for this. I also looked at Compressor, basically the Pro version of QuickTime Pro. Compressor offers much more customizability than QuickTime Pro in terms of codec configuarion and workflow. Compressor, for some reason, takes an inexplicably long time to encode a iPod compatible mp4. On a high-end Mac Pro, encoding a 640×480 was taking well beyond 8 hours. The output look really good, but given that we had 50 files to convert, it was simply not an option, even when using distributed encoding.

I also looked at FFmpegX and VisualHub (now defunct). Both of them are essentially wrappers around FFmpeg, and they produce good results, are very efficent encoders, and let you adjust every setting (almost to a fault). However, FFmpeg suffers from being written to expect a PC gamma of 2.2, and the resulting videos looked considerably darkened when compared to the original.

In the end, MPEG Streamclip worked the best. It offers the same speed of FFMpeg, much of the same control over settings, and deals with the gamma–outputting the a proper video for the iPod. At a bitrate of about 950kpbs, a typical two hour lecture comes in between 450-500 MB, just below the iTunes U limit of 500 MB.

Putting Content into iTunes U

The processes of editing content and putting tracks into iTunes U straight forward, though frustrating, since it involves a lot of clicking and waiting. iTunes has evolved considerably over time, and certainly letting a huge range of users edit parts of the iTunes Music store was not one of the original design specifications. The process is a bit clunky and Web 1.0-style, but it works. Uploading content is done through a browser, which can be a very finicky, especially with large files. After some trial and error, I figured out that setting Firefox as my default browser and using that for uploading worked better than Safari. Safari will time out the upload after a period of time, whereas Firefox keeps on chugging.

Before files are uploaded, they need to be properly loaded with metadata. iTunes U doesn’t let you edit much on the site (just title and artist) so other fields must be filled in on iTunes on your computer before uploading. When you edit the metadata fields, iTunes commits the changes to the movie files itself. When you upload the movie files, iTunes U will pick up on this and display it. One thing I found a little confusing that artwork is not displayed in the store or when you are previewing a file. Apple says that artwork on movie files is used to display on the iPod, but never in iTunes. This is all covered pretty well in the iTunes U User’s Guide.

Despite the time spent figuring out codecs and monkeying around with uploading, we’re very happy to have our content in another venue and excited to keep adding more.

Other Photobooths

Posted November 30, 2006 at 4:55 pm — Filed under:

Whitney's Photobooth

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.

TV ad remixes

Posted September 28, 2006 at 4:12 pm — Filed under:

Remix culture is something that I am interested in. Before I worked for the Walker, both of the workshops I co-taught for teen programs as part of The Revolutionary Party dealt with remix culture very directly. In the first workshop, we created remixes of television advertisments. The second workshop remixed a broader range of material, this time with music, in a live event. It looks like Computer Music stumbled upon a couple of remixed tv ads. If you’re a fan of drum and bass music and read Adbusters, you might like it.

And the other remix. Hat tip to my friend Paul for sending me the link.

Is that interesting, or just negative publicity?

Posted March 20, 2006 at 9:32 am — Filed under:

The exhibition House of Oracles closed here at the Walker a few weeks ago (it opened at Mass MoCA March 18). The exhibition was generally well received by local and national press and also generated several lengthy blog posts on the Visual Arts Blog. One, titled The Herpetology of Huang, sparked an impassioned string of comments that exposed our blog’s potential to amplify negative publicity. Since this is a concern for many people starting blogs and a point we are going to address in our workshop later this week, I thought I’d outline how we dealt with it and what we are doing going forward.

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Podcasting on mnartists.org

Posted October 28, 2005 at 3:47 pm — Filed under:

There was an expansion of the podcasting offerings on mnartists.org recently. For an example, go look at the Radio mnartists page. The podcast is the same link as the RSS (the graphic on the right of the header, near the center of the page). Copy the link off that page, or just use the direct link below, and subscribe to the feed in your favorite podcast player.

Direct link to the podcast:

Radio mnartists: http://mnartists.org/resourceList.do?action=rss&rid=82170&pid=219

Subscribing to a podcast with iTunes

Copy the direct link. Open up iTunes. Pull down the “Advanced” menu and go down to “Subscribe to Podcast…” then a window pops up and you paste the url into it and hit return. Then iTunes will automatially check mnartist.org for updates to that set and download them for you.

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