But here I am, typing my post from home while watching the latest re-run of Family Guy. Two of my fellow nuggeteers are also out of the office at the SXSW conference in Austin.

I hope we all get an update tomorrow from Daniel’s next post. By the way, have you noticed a pattern yet? We have taken to blogging more regularly so that all of our dedicated readers can wait excitedly for their favorite IMA author’s post.

Back to the business at hand…On a tip from Noelle, I am working up a post centered around an article in the most recent Wired magazine, but in my mini-vacay state-of-mind I would prefer to keep this one more casual. So look for that next week.

This week I am looking for some perspective and spending some time selfishly trying on shoes and other similarly indulgent endeavors like surfing the web.

Are you similarly looking to waste time or find yourself? Here are some websites that will help you on either journey:

BAPE – Getting in the mood for Breaking the Mode? When I think of Japanese fashion, I first think of street fashion. This site is one of my favorite surfing experiences and also features an awesome hip-hop influenced Japanese street design brand, A Bathing Ape. You have to download some stuff for the site to work, but you should. It’s worth it for the soundtrack alone.

http://cubo.cc/
This one is amazing. Recommended to me by my endlessly interesting boyfriend (that’s not sarcasm), it is fun and unique. Click on the link, give it a moment to load and then cursor around the screen. Not for those with slow internet connections. You can click the link for more info, but you won’t get any. You will get a whole new kind of crazy fun, though.

Maken Trance Project – This is my favorite JPOP song right now. I can listen to it over and over again in my car, singing all the parts I know and making stuff up for the parts I haven’t yet memorized. And the video is giggly and fun. This song make me want to create my own para para choreography. Maybe I can spend some of my vacation time working on that.

Kid Robot – Love contemporary art? Then you might like this…it might be too low-brow for you, but for me, well, it is just right. There is room in my life for admiring contemporary art that I can’t afford AND buying little toys that I can. Besides, if vinyl toys as art is wrong, then I just don’t want to be right. On a related note, the IMA store is starting to stock some of this stuff. You know the best way to encourage that? Buy some.

Hope you enjoy visiting some of these sites and find something new to obsess over. Until next week…

This post is about our new video on the new installation by Julianne Swartz. It actually wasn’t on the schedule, but our team created it anyway. When there is a chance to capture some nuggets, we’ll be there. So here’s the breakdown –

Sunday Jan 27 – Lisa Freiman, curator of contemporary art, calls me at home. I’m relaxing drinking champagne and eating lobster. Lisa informs me that Julianne has arrived and the installation work has begun – can I stop by and get some footage of the initial work? I drive a hard bargain and arrive 15 minutes later. The entire oval entry floor is covered in what looks like a netting. Lisa introduces me to Julianne who is sweet, friendly and thoughtful. This is going to be a great installation.

January 28 – Feb 1 – I update the rest of the nugget factory (new media) team (Dan, Danny and Despi). We all agree to capture the rest of the installation process over the next 8 days. This means Dan and Danny periodically visit the installation and film. They’ve done this a million times, and it will look great. Danny convinces Brad Dilger, installation technician, to take him 30’ in the air for the perfect shot. Dan and I accidentally walk into his shot several times…and then several more times on purpose.

Friday Feb 1 – Despi has worked with the contemporary department to setup an exclusive video interview with Julianne. We try to do this with every artist that comes to the museum. It’s a video series we’re calling In the Factory (coming soon!). It’s the end of day on Friday, after a long, intensive week, but Julianne gives a great interview, dropping plenty of nuggets.

Wednesday February 6 – We film a segment for the Director’s Journal, a monthly series featuring IMA’s Director and various staff. Our boss, Max Anderson, discusses the installation with Julianne and Sarah Green from IMA’s contemporary department. It’s a three camera shoot in the oval entry using all members of the Nugget Factory. Everyone nails it. It’s a wrap.

February 18-22 – Dan, Danny and Despi wrap up all of the work for the Breaking the Mode website. It’s an inordinate amount of digital content – sixteen designer profile videos (shot and produced in-house), flickr pool images, an iMix, streaming audio and much more. Without stopping to reflect on a job well done, Danny moves onto editing the Julianne Swartz video.

Friday Feb 22 – Danny completes the video and all members of new media review it. We invite people to the Nugget Factory to view the piece (its standard operating procedure). Lisa and Sarah stop by, hang out, check out the video and ….drum roll….approve it! High fives all around.

Monday Feb 25 – The video is uploaded to our YouTube channel and takes its place as a nugglette on imamuseum.org.

Now it’s up to you to watch it!

In many ways museums have been required to wear many hats for a while now. They have found themselves in precarious places, needing to get a piece of that proverbial cash pie, necessitating competition with movies, sporting events, zoos and other, much flashier leisure time attractions. This unfamiliar and uncomfortable competition led to horrible things like the invention of the word “edu-tainment.” As a museum educator turned new media super-star I have seen this scenario from a couple of angles. One was the need to tie everything a museum did to some educational goal that had to do with something more obviously valuable than “art.” Art and science, art and math: boy, were art museums thankful for da Vinci! Of course, for many of us, a more enlightened 21^st century point of view has evolved and now we are comfortable asserting that art is valuable, all by itself. Learning about art and how people make it is a worthwhile endeavor for every man, woman and child, and sometimes by chance, or even on purpose, art actually relates to those other things that kids learn in school.

But even after this realization, we are still multi-tasking, still trying to find a variety of angles that will allow us to pitch our work to the world. You’ve read IMA blog posts about social networking, seen us on iTunes U, and we have engaged in other technological exploits. These are examples of how IMA is trying to insert itself into the lives of unsuspecting internet users all over the world by using the same tools gimmicky (and successful) companies use. As a member of the new media team, I can honestly say that all we do is multi-task, sometimes to the point of exhaustion. But it is definitely a different variety of juggling from the previous thematic exploits of many museums. These days we look at an exhibition, a program, a topic and think about all the potential audiences and ask, who are they really and what do we want them to know? Why would they care about Roman art, or contemporary art or any kind of art? In order to get answers that matter, new media talks to marketing and both of them talk to education and curatorial reps. We struggle to keep up with all this communicating, but we work really hard at it in the hopes that if we can pull it all together we might find the best way to tell you about what we’re all doing at IMA. Thus we blog, maintain a Facebook page, create web content, edit videos, and we have those galleries full of art, too. We have trouble figuring it all out and keeping it all straight. What is marketing’s job? What does new media do exactly? How should we divide it all up? The short answer, I think, is we shouldn’t. Instead we should do what we’ve been doing, rolling with the punches, talking a lot and trying not to be fussy about who does what until someone does nothing. Daniel is best at this, but I am trying hard to get up to speed.

Under Daniel’s leadership we (the royal we) have taken these ideas to heart, as a cross-departmental team, and created firm plans with great ambition that combine the best of many worlds. Collaboration on many levels is the thing that makes us genre-defying. You might find new media poking around in conservation (supervised and with permission, of course) or in the greenhouse shooting a video about that. We work with education to coordinate video for guest lecturers and talk to artists when they visit IMA thanks to tip-offs from the contemporary department. All of this internal networking results in all the stuff you see from us on the web.

Now that technology has a hold on all of us, it is essential that museums understand how to harness it. And IMA is working hard. Watch for some big things this year. We might still be students in some regard, but at least we show up for class. So when 2008 wraps, don’t be surprised to find that IMA is listed among all the other genre-defying juggernauts out there. And if we’re not…well, then you’re not reading the right blogs.

P.S. – I tried really hard to work in a reference to Aerosmith and RUN DMC being genre-defying, and I am really sad I couldn’t, thus the existence of this pathetic add-on.