Filed under: Art and Nature Park, Technology

Andrea Zittel, American, b. 1965, “Indy Island,” 2010. Commissioned by the Indianapolis Museum of Art, Courtesy of the Artist and Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York.

As you may or may not already know, the IMA organizes an artist residency each summer on Andrea Zittel’s Indy Island within 100 Acres.  This year, the park will be inhabited by A. Bitterman and the project is called Indigenous.  As part of the project, Mr. Bitterman wants to provide spectators an opportunity to track the artist.

To accomplish this, we first looked into commercial GPS solutions that would allow us to send realtime GPS data over the web that could then be plotted on a map.  The closest thing we found is the Garmin Communicator API that works with select devices.  Unfortunately this came with limitations on how often data could be polled, so it turned out to be less then a desirable solution.

Enter Arduino.

What is this strange word and what does it have to do with tracking artists?  Arduino is an open source microcontroller for scientists, engineers, programmers, and hobbyists.  Stopping short of my personal opinion that this little device will revolutionize hardware like Linux revolutionized software, I will say it was exactly what we needed.

Most any store that sells an Arduino also sells what are called “shields.” These shields allow you to attach different electronic circuits to the Arduino so that you can program your software to control and utilize them.  For our application, we needed a GPS shield to track our artist and a cellular GSM shield to transmit the data back to us over the cellphone network.

All of the data aquired is plotted on a map using a hex binning algorithm

WARNING: the following contents are about to get very technical and nerdy.  If you aren’t interested in the technical bits and just want to see where the artist is, you can jump straight to the website to “track the artist.”

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Filed under: Art and Nature Park, Technology

Last week, I was lucky enough to attend the American Association of Museums Annual Meeting in Minneapolis with 5,000 of my closest museum friends. What an experience! One reason I enjoy going to this conference is the opportunity to connect with colleagues from across the museum field. There’s nothing like a little cross-departmental collabo to broaden your perspectives about what can be done in a museum.

A packed schedule of events

Sunday, I met up with several hundred #musetech friends as the Media and Technology committee announced winners at the 23^rd Annual Muse Awards. The winning entries in a dozen categories came from museums around the world and represented the most innovative and awe-inspiring digital projects happening in museums. The IMA won a Bronze Award in Public Outreach for our video XLVI Reasons to Visit the IMA.

These lucite awards are dang hard to photograph.

The sessions this year were really inspiring. The IMA is evaluating a lot of our mobile experiences (more to follow on this soon) and I feel so inspired by all of the thoughtful approaches presented at the conference. I have written down a couple thoughts and quotes from the sessions I attended- sorry if you saw a lot of these on Twitter already! I have tried to give credit where credit is due, but please let me know if I have taken credit for something you said!

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Filed under: IMA Staff, New Media, Technology

This morning, in a room at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, I joined a group of museum colleagues (representing 151 institutions, from 40 countries!) and journalists for the launch of the next iteration of the Google Art Project. For those of us who worked on the project, this was our first look at the results of an all-hands-on-deck effort to prepare images and gather contextual information about the works in our respective collections. Each participating museum’s logo flashed on the screen as the revved up to the big reveal. Sorry for the blurry photo, but I got a little excited at this moment!

The big reveal

Google has made an incredible 30,000 + high-res images available in this wave of the project. At the IMA, we selected over 200 works from our collection to feature – a number that will continue to grow as we add more to the site. For us, this opportunity came at a moment when we were beginning to re-assess the content that’s available on the collection pages of our own website, coinciding perfectly with a major effort to expand this information and re-think the layout of these pages (more to come on this later!).

Art Project organizer Amit Snood revealed a number of features throughout the site demo, including search options that allow users to browse by artist’s name, artwork, type of art, museum, country, collections and the time period. To highlight the cross-collection capabilities, Amit walked us through a search he did for Van Gogh’s The Bedroom, which revealed not only the three versions on view at the Art Institute of Chicago, Van Gogh Museum and Musée d’Orsay, but also pulled in an artist he was previously unfamiliar with named Kyung Min Nam, who was inspired by Van Gogh’s work.

Search functionality demonstration

Users have the capability to create their own collections by saving their favorite works into galleries, adding comments, and sharing with friends.  Amit also featured the expanded street view and gigapixel options with a view of the galleries below us at the Musée d’Orsay:

Street view of the Musée d'Orsay

Of course, as soon as the demo was over we all made a beeline to the computers in the hallway to check it out, necks craning over shoulders to scope out our neighbor’s museum and our own.

Exploring the site for the first time, plus another shameless IMA plug

I’m looking forward to delving into the site further to look at the IMA’s collection in context with other works of art across the globe. Looking around the room this morning, Google’s goal of developing connections and providing access seems to be off to a pretty good start. Take a look and see what you think.

The IMA on Google Art Project

Filed under: Around the Web, Technology, The Collection

The approaching New Year is bringing great and exciting changes at the IMA. In the Publishing and Media department, we are working towards an update of our much heralded art video site, ArtBabble.

After receiving praise from the New York Times in September for its easy-to-use interface and wealth of content, we are planning to build upon our success and make ArtBabble even better. Since its 2009 inception, ArtBabble has garnered an exceptional roster of partners from around the world and is currently host to over 1,200 videos from not only the IMA, but other prestigious institutions like the Smithsonian, the Met, MoMA, LACMA, and the National Gallery of Art. Thanks to one of our newest partners, Museo del Prado in Madrid, content is now also available in Spanish. So how can we make ArtBabble, an already amazing resource, even better? As a Masters of Library Science student at IU Bloomington, I can tell you my answer: organize, organize, organize!

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Filed under: New Media, Technology