Thinking about that page led me to think more broadly about IMA’s main website.  Inside the museum, the IMA site is a major topic of conversation amongst the web team.  We’re in the planning stages for a web redesign of imamuseum.org.  This will include a better calendar system, better integration of digital content, a new collection page and lots more bells and whistles I can’t mention right now.  This process has really made me consider one word and one section: Interact.

IMA's Interact Section

What is Interact?  It’s togetherness, it’s action, it’s a mutual or reciprocal action, it’s technology.  Is it?

For the past 18 months, we have placed much of our new media content in a section called Interact.  You can access it directly from the home page and find yourself immediately faced with options like ArtBabble, Facebook, Tagging, iTunes U, Blog and Dashboard.  It’s one stop shopping for those of you interested in technology at the IMA.  But I’m not convinced that Interact is the correct word for this section, or even the right approach to offering this content. Here’s a quick scan of approaches other museums have applied:

Similar to IMA but putting the active in interactive, MoMA’s new site features Multimedia (check it out below.) The cool Walker Art Center has it’s own channel.  And the ever impressive Mattress Factory Art, playfully offers Friendship Version 2.0.

MoMA Multimedia

Front and center. Brooklyn Museum is simply, brooklynmuseum.org (you have at least 10 links on the home page devoted to technology and new/social media projects) and community-based interaction is weaved throughout the site (are you really surprised?):

Brooklyn Museum

Layered within the site, The Tate Modern, has its Tate Player, TateShots and The Great Tate Mod Blog (below).  The Getty Museum has a video gallery, is getting Twitter right and does lots of other tech related projects. There’s no specific section like MoMA and others, is not fully integrated like Brooklyn, but offers superb content.

The Great Tate Mod Blog

Interact: So what to call it and where to place it?  It’s a challenge we face in the coming months to bring you a new site that is interactive, engaging, educational and focused on art.  We can create a dedicated section for technology.  We  can integrate it in all areas of the new site.  Or we can place it in various sections of the site based on a navigation structure.

We’ll be looking at lots of sites online – like the one’s mentioned above, but I would LOVE to hear your input.  What approach do you think is best? What would you do?

#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?

June at SFMoMA – I’m headed to San Francisco next week, and SFMoMA is on the top of my list for places to visit. There’s just something about that museum that makes me feel super hip when I’m in its presence. I’m fired up because I just discovered that I’m going to be there during the opening week of Frida Kahlo. I’m thinking about buying a membership to the museum just so I can hang out on Thursday night at the member reception. If that party is anything like what I’ve imagined, the cocktail hour is going to look like an opening of a Marc Jacobs store.

July at the MCA Chicago –I have to say, I am enamored by the MCA Chicago’s marketing team. Particularly the person that writes the eNewsletters. Even if you don’t live anywhere near Chicago you should sign up for their eNews. It is the perfect mix of wit and info. This July, I’m looking forward to a couple of things at the MCA. First, Jeff Koons opened last week and I can’t wait to see it. I’m also really looking forward to attending a First Friday event. Every month, the MCA brings in a DJ, features the work of local artists, and apparently has figured out a lighting system to make everyone at the party looking stunningly beautiful. Check out the pictures!

August at The Walker - My pulse raced when I read a headline from the Walker Art Center’s May enewsletter, “Walker on the Green: Artist-Designed Mini Golf.” Finally, my dream has come true! Before I was a museum professional, I was a golf professional. For a full summer after graduate school, I taught golf lessons at a country club. Other than meeting Leroy Neiman at a tournament, I have never found a way to incorporate my love for golf and my love for art. THANK YOU Walker Art Center for doing it for me! Thank you for making golf cool!

Folks at the Walker – I’m coming up this summer to play a round, and as a gesture of my appreciation, I’m offering free putting lessons to the entire staff!

]]> http://www.imamuseum.org/blog/2008/06/05/trying-to-stay-cool/feed/ 2 http://www.imamuseum.org/blog/2008/05/27/wrapping-up-a-long-weekend/ http://www.imamuseum.org/blog/2008/05/27/wrapping-up-a-long-weekend/#comments Tue, 27 May 2008 12:54:46 +0000 Despi http://www.imamuseum.org/blog/?p=431 I took a peek at our Google Analytics numbers and it appears that many IMA Blog readers used the holiday weekend to spend time doing things other than read our blog. That’s okay, I suppose, but you will have some catching up to do this week, so I will keep this one short and sweet. (I am also still out of the office, theoretically doing things other than work. Check out this photo of me writing this blog. Don’t I look happy working from home?)

There are all sorts of things going on in the world o’ new media these days. I thought I would tell you about a few of them. Tomorrow, I will spend the day with a few other IMA staffers, likely holed up in the IMA Cafe taking advantage of the free wi-fi in there to drink coffee and upload the majority of the content to our newly developed website for To Live Forever: Egyptian Treasures from the Brooklyn Museum. If you look at it now, you will only find a taste of the design, but by this time next week, it will rock your world.

I received an e-mail from Shelley Bernstein giving a shout out to a project the Walker Art Center has going on right now called, My Yard Our Message. This project is a really cool and interesting one, inviting any artist to submit designs to this non-partisan competition and the winning submissions (selected by on-line viewers) will be made available for order as political yard signs. Want to submit? Get to it. You have until June 30th. Want to vote? Mark your calendars, voting begins July 1st.

Other IMA Nugget Factory news? Daniel and I need to get to work on our ISEA presentation for the upcoming conference. I think we have both forgotten this part after completing and submitting the paper a few weeks(or maybe months) back. The editing nuggets have really put together an amazing exhibition trailer for To Live Forever that you will get to see when the site launches. We are all very proud of this entire project and are so glad to have had such tremendous support from the Brooklyn Museum as we are creating it. I am sure you will hear more about that collaboration.

Well, that is all the news that is fit to print today. It has been a relatively slow weekend, but is shaping up to be a fast and furious week. So don’t forget to check back in!

I must admit that I was a very reluctant convert to this world. I am a member of the usual 20-something demographic, but just felt my life was “too busy” for a virtual version. But alas, I have discovered that I really like Facebook, and I have created my own Flickr account, too, though it is admittedly a bit neglected. It has gone so far that I have become a total Facebook snob, refusing to admit there is any usefulness left for MySpace. Honestly, who doesn’t agree that MySpace is over? Now we need to be concerned about what the next big thing will be. (If you happen to know, give me a hint in your comment.)

Museums as a whole are struggling to keep up, usually moving just one sad step behind trends. There are a few exceptions. Among the best are the Brooklyn Museum (that’s in New York) and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. Both have managed to maintain online activities that support real communities mostly due to brilliant content and savvy audience development. We ogle their sites and the amazing dialogue their work creates and daydream about creating the same in our community.

This admiration and envy is definitely the reason why IMA has given so much time and attention to the revision of our blog, creating an IMA Facebook page and integrating social networking into upcoming IMA exhibition websites. (Breaking the Mode will be the first, launching in February 2008.) You will see us making genuine efforts to use these tools in ways that are fun and relevant, and we hope you will join us as we do it. In the meantime, I hope you will visit IMA’s Facebook page and if you think it is lame (or awesome) say so, then visit mine, which naturally, ROCKS!