I have the distinct pleasure of being in Daniel’s class this fall, Museums and Technology.  While it is surprising for my classmates that I would take a class about something I do already, I am excited for the opportunity to explore more thoroughly the meaning of technology for the museum experience and how the visitor is affected by these changes. I see continual parallels between issues encountered with visitors in physical space and issues we are encountering all over again in our digital spaces. I’ve talked about Twitter before and I have been thinking about how it is harnessed by museums and where we are going wrong.

We were talking about Twitter again in a recent class, more specifically what we consider to be a successful museum tweet, and why. It’s very hard to nail down, and even harder to do. The main reason is because it’s so hard to avoid becoming a marketing ploy, something which happens without rapt attention. A museums use of twitter now stands as an analogy for the way the actual museum interacts with its visitors and the traditional barrier between the inner workings of an institution and the public at large. So many museums need to release their stranglehold on twitter feeds to actually let interesting information get out.

I was at the Indianapolis Greek Festival this past weekend, and I couldn’t help to think that they were doing something right.

There were throngs of people, tons of Greek food, everyone jostling and yelling and having a great time, but here’s the part that baffled me- you had to pay to get in, and the food was delicious, but quite pricey. What is the Holy Trinity parish doing that connects so much with their audience that museums cannot seem to do? I think we can be the Agora marketplace discussed by Dr. Steven Zucker (@drszucker) and Dr. Nancy Proctor (@nancyproctor) a vibrant place for community and discussion, in the same way that the Greek festival is. I think the problem is balance- how do we sell ourselves as experts in our field while maintaining that we want everyone else’s opinion, too?

Some people are getting it right, figuring out how to sift through all the noise and clutter to connect with their audience while maintaining their voice. One such person is the British musician Imogen Heap, who felt a divide between herself and her fans before she started to utilize blogs and Twitter, not dissimilar to the separation between and institution and it’s community. In a recent interview with Melissa Block on NPR, she describes the divide quite succinctly. She then discusses what it’s like to have that direct connection throughout the process of making her music.

It’s been so amazing. I’ve always struggled with this barrier that I felt like I’d had up until blogging came along. Just one comment from somebody really sparks something in me. It doesn’t need to be this huge wall between me and the listeners anymore. I really thrive on that.”

@ImogenHeap gets it- the audience has become part of the process, and there’s no going back.

So to better describe what my words can’t, here is a screen shot of the Metro Paris iPhone app.  This application provides users with the locations of the nearest subway stations in their area along with nearby businesses.

Métro Paris application

Here is a video of the application in action (its in French but shows all of the apps functionality).

For museums this technology could provide a new experience for a visitor.  Not only could they see the wonderful works of art but it would allow them to view more information about each work just by pointing their cell phone camera.  Maybe an ArtBabble video is displayed or some expanded information about the creator.  Or what if it pointed the visitor in the direction of every work by a particular artist they were interested in?

A lot of people probably are thinking, ‘I’m not going to hold up my phone and walk around like that.’ but it has to be safer than texting while walking.  Just watch out for open manholes in the street.

This technology is still very new and as our mobile devices continue to get more powerful these applications should become more powerful as well.  So keep an eye out for these applications as more are getting developed every day and developers are just starting to get acquainted with the new technology.

Moving Time

Yes that’s right, I moved here from the center of America, Sioux Falls, South Dakota.  I actually am a native Hoosier but moved further out west a few years ago.  South Dakota is an interesting place, it is very flat and has a lot of wind.  There are a lot of windmill farms popping up all over the state.  We enjoyed living in South Dakota but the opportunity at the museum was a good excuse to move back.

My family freezing in South Dakota. I will not miss the long cold winters.

Enough about me, now to something interesting I found over the summer.

While browsing the web I found and became an avid watcher of a design contest called Layer Tennis.  This contest pitted designers against each other in a challenge to build off of each others work.  Here is the description from the website:

We’ll be playing matches using video, animation, sound, photos, type and lots more, but the basic idea is the same no matter what tools are in use. Two competitors will swap a file back and forth in real-time, adding to and embellishing the work. Each artist gets fifteen minutes to complete a “volley” and then we post it to the site live. A third participant, a writer, provides play-by-play commentary on the action, as it happens.

There were a lot of interesting designs that came out of this contest.  I thought it was really exciting to see how each designer was able to take a quick 15 minutes and really add their own style to the work.

One of my favorite series of images came from this ‘volley‘ where Chris Glass and Aaron Draplin ended in a draw.  This fall they will be having another challenge so keep an eye on the the site if you liked what you saw from this series.

What most disturbs me about Nina’s argument is the clear lack of background work she put into crafting what amounts to a pretty scathing opinion of the IMA.  It seems from Nina’s comments that she is basing her views on a single visit to our galleries during a conference reception. I have no way of knowing how many of those 3 hours Nina spent in our exhibitions and galleries, but it seems that she didn’t bother to ask any staff members of the IMA about efforts we might be making to engage our visitors on-site and around the city.  Aside from a brief two minute encounter in the conference hall after her comments, Nina failed to probe in any depth about what (if any) strategy their might be behind our efforts on-site.

Experience and Engagement

In case you haven’t noticed, Art Museums are frequently considered to be the “stuffier”, less “engaging” older brothers to our sibling science, technology, and “experience” museums.  Nina draws at least some of her professional experience from this field, so perhaps we should cut her a little slack for missing a crucial challenge faced by art museums.

Here's one kiosk I'd love to see in our Museum

Many experiences in art museums can tend to be more subjective… more personal… deeply moving but indeed sometimes less factual than in other types of museums.  This isn’t denying that an understanding of the underlying contexts and histories of these works is important.  Just that this knowledge is a means to an end. Facilitating and encouraging these types of experiences is a primary challenge in creating engaging experiences inside art museums.  Balancing engaging exhibits with a gallery aesthetic which still supports and encourages individual interpretation is not an easy problem to solve.

Perhaps the lack of 10 year old kiosks and flashy interpretive signage makes it appear that we are not attempting to engage our audiences?

There still remains an outstanding debate in my mind regarding whether or not even well designed “experiences” in art museums offer an appreciably better connection to works of art than more unobtrusive offerings of information which allow audiences to pick-and-choose their own experiences with works of art.  Apart from leading audiences by a nose-ring through what they should think/experience there must be a place for a clean, open and personal interpretation of our collections.  These are questions we’re wrestling with here at the IMA as I’m sure many of you are in your own institutions.  Why rush to an answer before we’ve studied our own audiences and local needs?

Missing the Mark

Maybe Nina missed the chance to talk to Tiffany Leason – who was also at the conference reception – about the Viewing Project .  A three year grant funded initiative, the Viewing Project is designed to experiment with ways of engaging visitors with works from the IMA’s permanent collection.  In addition, this project seeks to measure and evaluate this visitor engagement in ways that can lead to concrete answers about these issues.  Rather than guessing haphazardly about what kinds of exhibits might make a difference, we’re attempting to really study our particular circumstance and unique audience here in Indianapolis.

The Viewing Project in-gallery interface

I would have loved to point Nina towards some of our New Media team (most of whom are named Daniel) who could share about some pretty innovative ways we are engaging audiences in ways that allow them to self select their participation.

One of the Dans could have shared about project we did in association with an Egyptian Art exhibit which made use of Flickr both in the galleries and on the streets of Indy.  The project, called “Your Afterlife”, asked scads of people from around the museum and city about what they would take with them into the happily-ever-after which resulted in some really funny, interesting, and touching results.

What would you take with you into the Afterlife?

Or Dan might have shared some of the work we did creating visualizations from CAT scan data of one of the mummies in the show. Visitors could take a peak under the wraps both in the galleries near the display or online at home.

Meet Demetrious the Mummy

Yet another Dan might have talk to Nina about “Project IMA” a project we hosted featuring 16 local designers, which engaged the designers and the community in fashion designs presented in conjunction with an exhibition called “Breaking The Mode”.  The project culminated in a runway show inside the museum and some awesome video which is still really popular on ArtBabble.

Our last Dan may have taken Nina over to the Davis LAB where for over three years now we’ve been experimenting with bringing our online-efforts into the galleries for guests to experience and engage with.  Sponsored by several donors who really care about how technology can be used to enhance the museum experience, the Davis LAB has hosted a wide array of experiences.  In 2006, I built a multi-user physical interface for visitors to explore the IMA’s collection using camera tracking and advanced computer graphics algorithms.  This experience ran in the space for over two years and we tracked hundreds of thousands of users using  the interface to explore art from our collection.

ETX - Multi-User Collection Browsing with Physical User Interface

The LAB has also hosted virtual reality displays, a variety of interactive kiosks, a recreation of ancient Rome which allowed users to navigate through a unique system of interlinked panoramas in addition to many other efforts.  All of these experiences are always available to visitors in the museum and online and are designed to leverage their experiences here at the IMA.

Explore Virtual Rome through Linked Panoramas

Now the Davis LAB plays host to ArtBabble and encourages connections with the IMA’s blogs and online communities.  We find that users engage with the content in new and different ways in the galleries and that we receive a large number of comments from physical visitors from within the space.  Mind you, we are encouraging this online/onsite engagement while preserving – for the moment – an open, clean interpretive experience in many of the galleries.

Visitor Experiences in the Davis LAB

I do think that mobile content deployments offer some intriguing options for user experiences in our galleries.  These platforms can preserve an aesthetic which supports personal connection, while offering unobtrusive ways for visitors to explore deeper connections to works of art on their own devices and at their own pace.  As such, we’ve started work on a new software system for mobile tours which can connect to our back-end content management practices and drive experiences on multiple content platforms including kiosks, phones, and web-browsers.

The project is called TAP and you can expect to see it “in the wild” sometime this fall in connection with our Sacred Spain exhibition.  Beyond serving just ourselves in this endeavor, we’ve been working with a collaboration of like-minded folks on some possible meta-data standards for mobile tours and platform architectures that can work for lots of different museums.  An early version of this spec (TourML – pronounced turmoil) can be seen in action in the Dallas Museum of Art’s new mobile tour.  You can read more about our progress on the Museum Mobile Wiki,  follow the effort on twitter (#mtogo) or watch this space for more info.

Innovation

It’s worth taking a bit of time to talk about how innovation happens within museums.  This is a question I get asked a lot these days and, as such, I’ve thought a good bit about it.  I think it’s fair to say that we all seek after innovation in what we do.  At times it seems to be ephemeral… a gossamer to be grasped at.  Other times, you find yourself standing right in the middle of it without knowing how you arrived.  I can honestly say that during the last three years, the IMA has truly been the most innovative organization I’ve ever been a part of.  (This includes several major research universities, and the supercomputing center that invented the first web browser.)  If there’s one thing I’ve learned about innovation, it’s that it never occurs in a vacuum.  Certainly Max Anderson’s strong leadership and risk-tolerant style play a significant role here, and I’d like to think that our web team has had some pretty interesting ideas over the years.  The truth, however, is that the innovation others have identified in the IMA’s technology and online efforts is only a leading indicator of true institutional innovation and change happening just under the surface.

Those of you working in larger organizations know how difficult it is to push forward initiatives without comprehensive and wide ranging support from your colleagues.  Likewise, almost everything you see online has its roots in the support, efforts and beliefs of dozens of professionals from every department around the IMA.  Who is it, do you think, that populates the Dashboard with statistics?  Who’s responsible for the underpinnings of deaccessioning on the web?  Who is it that co-creates, consults, connects and supports the videos on ArtBabble?  Many of these folks have worked in art museums for decades and have devoted significant portions of their careers to advancing the arts in a non-profit setting.  To have their support and collaboration has truly been one of the great honors of coming to the IMA.

It should not be surprising, therefore, that the first-fruits of innovation can most easily be seen online.  Bricks, mortar and people’s opinions take significantly longer to change than our websites do.  We plan our exhibitions years into the future. Planning for a building expansion can approach the decade mark. Even our educational programs are planned at least a year out.

There are very few efforts in museums which move at the pace and timescale of the internet and social media. But like the buds on a tree, the innovation you see online is propped up by an ecosystem of support throughout the IMA which allows it to succeed at all.  I wish each of you could take the time to understand the institutional change we have been experiencing here at the IMA.  As it stands however, the most evident and easily accessible proof of this transformation is visible online.  Over the coming years, I’m extremely confident that this change will pay ongoing dividends for our visitors.

In Conclusion

Finally, I don’t mean to be overly harsh with Nina.  She is a brilliant professional who brings a lot of value to our profession in her writing and contributions to the field.  I do take exception, in this case, to a poorly informed series of articles.

Nina says on her blog that, “I believe that every museum can grow its audience as long as it is willing to grow with that audience by taking risks, trying new things, and communicating openly.”  In my opinion, I think that the IMA has been an example of these very things over the past few years and has contributed significantly to the community of museums.  I’m not asking for any special treatment or exemption from criticism.  On the contrary, what I’d like most is the chance for a little conversation on the topic.  So… if something we’re doing strikes you wrong or seems out of place…  all you’ve got to do is ask a few questions.  You can find me most easily here on the blog, or on twitter (@rjstein)

Thanks,

Rob

In the recent days, I have watched and listened as social media innovates political process in Iran. Twitter has been a powerful forum for a newsfeed out of the country, allowing people to photograph, video and blog about events in real time, even as more traditional journalists are being asked to leave.

Listening to a segment about it on the radio, I couldn’t help but think about the massive change to how news is found and the way crowdsourcing of information has so drastically changed the source of the news we get, and for museums, how closely this is tied to the changing face of visitor interactions through the web. Nina Simon, in this article at Museum2.0, writes,

For people who are deeply immersed in social media, social networks are already a much heavier influence on personal choices–where to visit, what concert to attend–than traditional advertising. Which means that your organization’s website–a brochure out in the wilderness of the Web–is only going to remain relevant and useful as a marketing piece if it is being referenced in the social context of your users’ lives.

Different people and institutions have found vastly different approaches to garnering information from their audiences.

Some museums have decided to use crowdsourcing, which can be appealing to visitors, in a way that is helpful to what the museum wants to accomplish. The Brooklyn Museum’s Shelley Bernstein wrote about a new project called Freeze Tag! where Brooklyn decided to utilize their loyal taggers to help control errant or incorrect information. Putting control back in the hands of the visitor can be risky, but, like Wikipedia, ultimately a project where passionate people and the wisdom of crowds wins out in the end. Brooklyn is a leader in integrating the visitor into the museums practice in innovative ways. With or without social media, how can other museums use this model to further their own goals?

Certainly, insta-media has increased the demand for transparency. Last week, Tyler Green and Christopher Knight tweeted and blogged about the dubious ethics in a private sale of works of art at the Orange County Museum of Art. These exchanges led to a heated discussion of the readers of the respected entries, including people representing both sides of the argument, and lots of scrutiny at the museum. Did the museum miss a chance to lead these discussions in the first place?

The problems start when the institution places itself on these social media sites, but don’t seem ready to hear what their devoted fan have to say. Douglas McLennan, of  Diacritical says,

…traditional PR notices are not only ineffective in this new era of many-to-many communication, but can make things worse. And what might have been a real opportunity to meaningfully engage this community has been lost.

Can a museum be listening all the time? In the world of public relations and standards, the casual conversation style of the Facebook world must seem completely alien.

The voice of the audience has never been as available to museums as it is now. Museums small and large have been all over Facebook and Twitter, my social media outlets of choice, trying to add fans and establish a voice that is cohesive with the museum’s image. Let’s imagine there is a museum out there doing it all perfectly. They generate lots of discussion and suggestions from their core audience of loyal visitors and donors…. What now? This next step is crucial and the point of getting involved in social media in the first place, and it is up to each museum.  How and when is that museum going to listen?

It’s my hope that we will continue to see the flowering of visitors being welcomed into the museum conversation, worldwide, with social media just being an example of ways to welcome them into the rest of the practices in the institution. If we want the community to value our institutions, we can strengthen the relationship by showing how much we value them.

It had always been our goal to create a website that we could share. One that would bring Art content from different places and perspectives together, easily accessed and found. We’ve been lucky enough to work with the New York Public Library, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and Art21, with the promise of more content contributors & videos and a continued strive to improve the user experience by adding a slew of features over time.

The team that worked on ArtBabble spans many departments and areas of expertise, and external collaborators & partners. It’d be hard for me to articulate all aspects of this project. On ArtBabble, we pay a lot of attention to quotes and interaction. So I thought it’d be fitting to ask the crack team of art techies who have been working on this website what babbles they’d like to share. I’m not of fan of comment begging, but please leave your interesting tidbits here. Please, feel free to ask questions… we’ll answer them here as well.

Photo by gullevek via Flickr

Coincidentally, I also recently came across the USA National Phenology Network. Phenology (not to be confused with phrenology), is the study of phenophases (recurring plant and animal life cycle events). Whereas Weathernews was running the “My Sakura” project to collect data from citizen scientists, the NPN collects data from the public on a variety of species through the “My NPN” project. They do have a preferred set of “calibration species”, but their database includes dozens of species that can be tracked using the system. Because phenophases are sensitive to changes in climate, recording and studying phenological observations can reveal the ways in which our ecosystems change in response to global warming.

In addition to creating a massive dataset, this project is great for another reason. Maybe it’s just the scientist in me, but I get excited about going out and making the observations. I have two of the calibration species in my yard, and I’m starting to think of them as amazing organic instruments. In addition to the foliage and blossoms, there is a beauty to the unfolding growth process that I’m appreciating more by learning about the phenophases and making observations over the long term.

The convergence of nature, technology, and research in these projects is really quite remarkable. I hope that we see many similar efforts in the future.

As of this month, at the ripe old age of five, it’s ancient in Web 2.0 terms. But for being a senior citizen of the web, Facebook sure has managed to stay fresh and relevant. What started as a social experiment in Mark Zuckerberg’s Harvard dorm room has grown to capture over 150 million users.

icanhascheezburger.com

Here are some ways Facebook has managed to grow and adapt so far…

-  its supernatural ability to help you reconnect with old high school buddies, network  professionally (ahem), plan killer bashes, and showcase your wit via status message

- the ever-growing collection of third-party Facebook applications, integration with Twitter, built-in Instant Messaging, blog importation capability, and more

These all allow users to express themselves in a rather addictive way.

Here at the IMA, we utilize Social Networking to reach a more diverse and (presumably) younger audience.  And, like any institution, we are always looking for ways to stay fresh and relevant.

However, TIME ’s tech writer, Lev Grossman makes a humorous argument as to why Facebook is for ‘Old Fogies.’  After all, Facebook’s fastest-growing demographic are those 30+. Could this be the kiss-of-death?

Illustration by John Cuneo for TIME

Others are predicting Facebook’s demise. Blogger Devin Johnston argues that unless Facebook changes drastically, it will fizzle out in just three years.

Sites like Facebook are doomed unless they radically alter their business and development models to reflect the needs, interests, and capabilities of internet users. There is room for Facebook to move away from providing service and toward assembling the services of others in a single location. Frankly, I think that this is the only way that Facebook will survive the coming revolution in social computing.

That’s a lot to ask of a five year old.

Do YOU think Facebook’s days are numbered? Will it continue to adapt, or be wiped out by something better-faster-stronger?

"Portrait of James Whitcomb Riley" by John Singer Sargent

Within the first week of my internship, I made two exciting discoveries here at the IMA. One was The Prado in Google Earth and the other, which I found upstairs in the American Galleries was the John Singer Sargent painting, Portrait of James Whitcomb Riley.

For those who aren’t already familiar, The Prado Museum and Google Earth have teamed up to create an interactive site for the museum, which can be accessed on the internet through Google Earth. The application creates a 3D view of the museum and incredibly detailed imagery of 14 masterpieces found in the museum, including works by Velasquez, Rubens, and Rembrandt, and Goya. According to the Associated Press article, the project involved 8,200 photographs of the works and an assumedly hefty bill (footed by Google).

The end product allows a viewer to zoom in on an image made up of 14 billion pixels. According to Google, that’s 1,400 times more detailed than the image a 10 megapixel camera could take – it’s quite remarkable. I watched the trailer for the project and was amazed. As one observer noted, you can actually see what appears to be a blemish painted on the rump of a women in the Rubens’ painting, The Three Graces. From what I can remember of Rubens in my art history classes, such an addition would be typical of his humor. I downloaded Google Earth at home in hopes of exploring the paintings beyond what the trailer shows, but unfortunately, my computer couldn’t handle the navigation very well, and I was left slightly frustrated. Hopefully your computer is faster.

So, how does this relate to discovery number 2? – Portrait of James Whitcomb Riley

I have recently read several posts, both on the IMA Blog and on other blogs, that discuss the use of technology in museums. The Prado in Google Earth raises the question: Can digital imagery ever replace the real deal? Would it matter if every museum offered all of their works in a manner similar to the 14 offered by Google Earth from The Prado? Would patrons stop entering the galleries and opt for the computer based imagery?

John Singer Sargent leads me to my answer.
Can technology replace the real deal? No.
Why? Brushstrokes.

I was a painting major in my undergraduate studies at DePauw University, and John Singer Sargent is my favorite painter. I studied his technique, I wrote papers on him, and I tried painting like him. My infatuation with this artist is founded upon his brushstrokes.

My painting professor adamantly told me that a painter should always paint from life, as Sargent most always did. He would say, “Painting from a picture will flatten your image and your painting will not have the same effect as it would if you were to paint from life.” For me, Google Earth has the same effect on a painting. I want to see the brushstrokes in person, in 3D space – not on a computer screen. (Google calls it 3D, but it’s not the same…)

My point here is that no matter how cool The Prado in Google Earth is, no matter how close the computers can zoom in on the brushstrokes, (at this point you might have to check it out to really know what I mean), I am always going to want to see the real thing. Yes, Google offers me the chance to zoom in on brushstrokes in a way that my own eyes would not allow me to do but that, for me, will never replace the intimacy of viewing the actual canvass on which the paint was applied. As Prado Director Miguel Zagaza says, “What we don’t see is the soul. The soul will always only be seen by contemplating the original.”

"Lady Agnew of Lochnaw" by John Singer Sargent

This is why I will one day travel to the National Galleries of Scotland, where my favorite Sargent painting, Lady Agnew of Lochnaw, hangs.

Phil’s Pharmacy prescribes the following links to combat Monday online anemia.

Workstations of Popular Websites – Sometimes it’s fun to see where an artist creates their art. Similarly, sometimes it’s fun to see the spaces where web-content creators create their web content.

Aptera 2e Electric Car – Pixar fans ghost-ride the whip. Can anyone else see see Wall-e and Eva getting out of this ride? Three wheels? Less friction I guess and therefore more efficient. Now, if only Google would partner with a California based company on hoverboards.

Kern – If you’ve got an iPhone and love typography, check out this cool game. “The iPhone’s first design-nerd game.” – Boing Boing Offworld.

Wordle.net – Word clouds are floating in from everywhere and with this fun site you can form your own. Here’s one I made. Enjoy!

European Design Facebook Contest – The week three winner has been selected. Up is the new picture.