Indianapolis Museum of Art Blog

Drum roll please.  After months of planning, coding, designing, critiquing, laughter, inappropriate laughter, sweat, blood, encoding, decisions, indecisions, mistakes, moments of ctrl-alt-del, late nights, early mornings, epiphanies, and many other things, I am pleased to announce both The Davis LAB, and officially ArtBabble.  To quote the artist, Willis ‘Bing’ Davis – It’s been a whole journey of love.

A couple of weeks ago, I blogged about plans for The Davis LAB, and shared some early design concepts.  Well, on Saturday it opens and you can see it for yourself.  Phil & Noelle in marketing, just sent out a Facebook invite to all of the IMA Fans.  If you’re free on Saturday, stop by our new space to meet staff, check out the final designs, maybe get some free stuff and…that’s about it.

Computer interface for The Davis LAB -We have some amazing designers on staff.

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New Media, Developers, our IT staff, members of the Design Studio, and Marketing are currently working on a new space in the museum.  It’s an area that in the past has experimented with visitor-focused technology.  Some of these projects have included an interactive approach to exploring highlights of IMA’s collection, a chance to interact with Asian objects in a dream-like, 3-D environment, and the opportunity to explore the Roman Forum, virtually of course.

The X Room, shortly after the IMA reopened in 2005

2009 will bring a new approach to this tech environment, that I hope encourages our museum visitors to talk back to us.

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I was down in exhibition holding the other day, talking with some of the Installation guys about a Tim Hawkinson piece called Moebius Ship. The piece is huge – about 9 feet across – and the conversation brought to mind how Contemporary art poses unique challenges to Security staff that aren’t usually an issue with more traditional art.

Contemporary art is frequently made up of everyday materials and items familiar to normal, everyday people. As such, visitors are not always sure how to react to the art and oftentimes behave contrary to what we would wish. IMA has artwork composed of everything from TVs (Nam June Paik), projectors (Kara Walker), and common furniture (Vito Acconci, Bill Woodrow) to electronic signs (Jenny Holzer) and neon lights (Robert Irwin, soon). We even have flat art on the floor instead of on the wall (Adrian Schiess). Visitors want to sit on the furniture and play with the electronic equipment. They want to TOUCH the stuff, for crying out loud!

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