#6. IMA's Six Degrees of Separation

LACMA did it, everyone on Facebook is doing it, and now the IMA is turning it up a notch with blog “tagging”. Here it is…what you all have been waiting for…25 Random Things about the IMA. 

The Rules (according to Facebook, of course): Once you’ve been tagged, you are supposed to write a note with 25 random things, facts, habits or goals about you. At the end, choose 25 people to be tagged in your post.

1. General admission to the IMA is FREE!
2. Percival de Luce’s oil on canvas painting, An Anxious Mother, was the Museum’s first acquisition.
3. One person in all of Samoa visited our Web site in 2008. That person looked at five pages and stayed for just over two minutes.
4. Last year, 2,671 visited our site with an iPhone and 36 visited via a PlayStation 3.
5. One person visited the IMA Web site with a 1 bit screen resolution. How is that even possible?
6. Six Degrees of Separation: IMA staff member and blogger Anne Laker is cousins with the America’s Top Model Winner Adrianne Curry, who is married to Christopher Knight (aka Peter Brady), who once guest starred on That ’70s Show with Debra Jo Rupp (Mrs. Forman), who played Phoebe’s sister in-law on Friends, which starred Jennifer Aniston, who played a love interest of Kevin Bacon in the 1997 romantic comedy, Picture Perfect. Whew!
7. There are approximately 164 fluorescent lights mounted to the wall in the IMA’s Pulliam Great Hall. The lights are part of a three-story fluorescent light installation by Robert Irwin entitled Light and Space III, which was specifically designed for the museum’s main 60-foot atrium.
8. The largest painting in the IMA’s collection is Rosy Cardita by Larry Zox, measuring 69” 252”.
9. The smallest painting in the IMA collection is Portrait of Paul Peckham by Lewis Peckham. It measures 1 in. x 1 ¾ in.
10. Nancy Reagan and fashion designer Bill Blass (an Indiana native), donated a red silk, chiffon and taffeta evening dress worn by the former first lady to the Museum’s Textile and Fashion Arts Collection.
11. There was actually a vending machine in the building that sold art – Gallery of the Machine by Matt Eickhoff and Artur Silva. (The vending machine is making its way back to Artur’s studio at the Harrison Center for the Arts for some repairs.)
12. The IMA’s collection includes Vincent Van Gogh’s Landscape at Saint-Remy, which was painted during the final year of the artist’s life.
13. The IMA recently acquired the landmark Miller House and Garden in Columbus, Indiana. Designated as a National Historic Landmark in 2000, it is considered one of the country’s most highly-regarded examples of mid-century Modernist residences.
14. The IMA has its own in-house Nugget Factory which conceptualizes, films, produces and delivers high quality art video for ArtBabble.org.
15. The 52 acres of the IMA campus currently open to the public comprised the town of Woodstock in the early 20th century.
16. Encompassing 152 acres of gardens and grounds, the IMA is among the 10 largest encyclopedic art museums in the United States.
17. Last year, 508 IMA volunteers donated more than 26,000 hours of their time.
18. According to the Dashboard, the IMA’s Horticulture staff planted 30,443 new plants on the IMA grounds in 2008.
19. Martin Luther King Jr. Day is one of the most popular days for the IMA. In 2007, we welcomed 4,500 visitors on MLK day.
20. Within two years of beginning an engineering-based, detailed approach to reducing its energy consumption, the IMA’s average monthly demand for electricity and natural gas was reduced by about 40 percent. The energy conservations also reduced the IMA’s greenhouse gas emissions (CO2) by more than 6,700 tons.
21. The IMA’s Stout Reference Library has more than 100,000 items of information on visual arts including books, periodicals, museum publications, auction catalogs and individual artist files.
22. As one of the 10 oldest general art museums in the country, the Indianapolis Museum of Art was founded during American history’s most remarkable movement in creating museum institutions, starting in the 1870s when New York and Boston established their museums.
23. The Toby was built using 23,642 pounds of recycled material.
24. In 2010, the IMA will open 100 Acres: The Virginia B. Fairbanks Art & Nature Park, which will be one of the largest contemporary museum art parks in the country. The Park will feature artworks commissioned from both emerging and veteran artists, who will create temporary and permanent works in response to the site’s varied geography.
25. The Indianapolis Museum of Art offers FREE general admission! Oh, wait…did I already mention that?

“This is really cool,” he said timidly, referring to the space. Daniel showed him the new animated trailer for ArtBabble, to which he replied, “That was not cool…I mean that was not long enough.” 

Another visitor asked if he could take a nap in the corner because he found the furniture and atmosphere so relaxing. It was a pleasure to watch kids, teens, parents and docents use the computers and ArtBabble video Web site as tools for learning and for fun.

This leads me to a larger question I’ve been asking myself (and some of you): What are the pros and cons of interactive games in art museums, and how far should we go with the concept? The Davis LAB doesn’t include games per se, but getting on a computer and exploring ArtBabble is, like a game, a lot of fun. For the purpose of this post, I’ll classify interactivity as anything from paper scavenger hunts to computer kiosks in the galleries. All these activities turn upside down the traditional museum experience of walking through galleries and looking at the art on the walls with an element of relational interactivity between the visitor and the art.

NPR recently explored the topic in a piece called “Interactive Games Make Museums a Play to Play”, by Elizabeth Blair, which highlighted the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s Luce Foundation Center for an alternative reality game they created. A teacher I know testified that interactive games in museums prompted her students to look more closely at the artwork. NPR noted happiness, clear instructions, feedback, shared experience and being part of something bigger as benefits to interactivity.

I wonder if some museum visitors find interactive games disruptive or cause them to focus less on the physical art as they attempt to check off a work they just found through the interactive game and rush off to the next masterpiece. Should museums use interactive technology like video or audio tours as a revenue generator at the risk of taking attention away from the physical piece of art? Or is it our duty as museum professionals to ensure that the technology only enhances the connection? Are games a marketing tool to woo new audiences to art, or are they the future of art? I have heard the argument that “high brow” art clashes with “low brow” games. Do we need to be entertained at an art museum by something else, or do we go to let the art entertain us?

Developed for IMA's American Galleries in 2005

Rewind a few years.  Does anyone remember the American Gallery handheld project – ArtXplore – that the IMA piloted in 2005?  It was a short-lived project that helped (indirectly)shape much of the current technology strategies at IMA.  It was a difficult project, with some victories, lessons learned and a big part of the technology, evolutionary process at our museum.  Since 2005, we have re-focused our efforts to create digital content that visitors in any location can access. Although we do offer audio tours at the Lilly House, a cell phone tour for the Gardens and Grounds – our primary strategy has to increase the reputation of IMA globally, and share our stories about art with a much larger online audience.  It’s an approach I support, but with the opening of the Art and Nature Park next year, should we try another attempt with some sort of handheld device?  Perhaps.
Information on From Audiotours to iPhones Workshop, case studies, speaker bios, flickr images, you name it, can be found HERE.  It is an amazing basket of information, applicable to anyone interested in the ways museums operate.  The conference represented some of the most innovation and brightest minds working in museums today – excluding myself of course.

You really should visit this wiki!

The workshop featured tales of success, failure and the in between.  It highlighted the brilliant tours created with Antenna Audio/Discovery Communications at Tate Modern and SFMoMA.  It showcased the many devices possible – custom devices, iPod’s, iPhones, PSP’s, Nintendo DS and more.  It delved into the ways information is sent to a device – GPS, infrared, WAP, RFID and OTHER options.  It showed what the biggest and smallest museums are capable of creating, innovating and overcoming.  And it brought out the personalities of these museums – a paleontologist experimenting with different approaches to the visitor experience, a one-person department from the San Jose Museum of Art, and many of the up and coming museums that will soon be influencing and leading the arena of museum technology.

I was honored to be at the Tate Modern, sit on one of the panel discussions, rub elbows with insightful and brilliant colleagues, but most importantly, eager and motivated to create something new at the IMA.

You’ll have to wait and see.