Indianapolis Museum of Art Blog

There are countless intriguing stories at the IMA, sometimes untold. Here is one of them.

Look like a rerun of X-Files? It’s not. If you’ve been around the Museum after dark recently, you may have spotted the new LED light installation in The Sutphin Fountain. Jeff Earl, head electrician at the IMA, replaced all the original white halogen lights, many submerged underwater, with the new technology.  Read the rest of this entry »

July 3rd, 2009 marked the 3 year anniversary of the passing of an Indianapolis arts, music and culture hero DJ Mpozi Tolbert. To mark the anniversary, amongst the multiple celebrations, solar powered lighting was installed on the north wall of Spin Nightclub in Broad Ripple to highlight the mural painted by local Indy artists in 2008.

The Mpozi mural at Spin in Broad Ripple gets solar lighting. Photo by @Muirwoody

Here is a video, produced by IndyStar, documenting the making of the mural dedicated to Mpozi Tolbert. Much more after the jump…

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One might say that I’ve been addicted to efficiency for quite a while. Even before learning about the need to conserve fuel and reduce CO₂ emissions, I would organize my activities and errands so that I could take care of them in as few excursions as possible. The logistics of ordering these tasks was almost an odd form of entertainment for a mind trained by late nights playing board games in college (computer science and engineering may have had some effect as well). These days, however, my mind has turned to other – perhaps more practical – conservation decisions involving hybrid cars, rain barrels, and energy efficiency.

This device monitors voltage, power, and cost

In today’s post I would like to share some investigations that I have done with a couple of cool energy efficiency tools. Perhaps you’ve heard of vampire energy. I’ve suspected that some of my home appliances are vampires, and a few weeks ago I decided to start doing some investigation of my own by purchasing a consumer-grade energy meter to measure the amount of energy that various electronics around my house consume. I haven’t done much analysis yet, but I have found that during normal use over a month, my entertainment center uses 75.04kWh and costs me $10.20 in electricity. This amounts to $122.40 over the course of a year. When everything is in standby, these undead electronics suck down 36kWh in a month (I need to run this test with the DVR on another outlet). Leaving the system in standby for a year would still cost me about $60.
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The IMA’s Previews member magazine goes into design next week. I thought it would be fun to give readers a behind the pages look at the process and another chance to weigh in.

Last October, a team of us who work on Previews sat down with stacks of magazines from all walks of life, including publications from other museums. We talked about appearance — the layout, design, fonts, colors, photos. We hashed out content — article type, member information, length, the calendar. We also considered the paper used to print the magazine on and asked ourselves ‘How green can we be?’ Read the rest of this entry »