Google Art Project

Posted on February 8, 2011 by Robin White

Last week Google announced Google Art Project, an extraordinary website where Google has adapted their Streetview technology for indoors and used it to map some of the galleries in 17 of the world’s major museums, among them:

The Museum of Modern Art, Tate Britain, Uffizi Gallery, Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Rijksmuseum.

Within their galleries, you can peruse the walls and zoom in to look quite closely at the paintings. In addition to paintings scanned at ordinary hi-res, Google provided gigapixel scans of one painting for each museum; these allow you to zoom in to see the painting surface at a scale that the artists themselves may not have had in real life.

Each painting becomes a universe you enter and experience on an ever more abstract, mind-bending level the closer in you go. You have to see it to understand the experience. It’s like the Hubble Telescope focused on paintings instead of the heavens!

Some people have criticized the project because the navigation isn’t perfect – you can often end up in the street outside a museum as you’re trying to get from one gallery to another. Other criticisms include the fact that only some artworks are available to view while others are blurred out, and only 17 museums have signed up for this Project so far. You the user are stuck with the choices Google and the museums have made for you.

These things are true but I think they miss the point. What we as viewers have been given is an opportunity to see these artworks in a way you’ve never seen before, and that will change your whole relationship with them.

You can get to know these artworks intimately, becoming aware of every brushstroke and bread crumb, every curl of spray from a wave, every strand of hair, tiny bud, spec of dung, wispy cloud, every starry halo. And gradually you absorb the relationship of each detail to those around it and begin to build an impression of the painting from the inside out until you own it.

You can take as much time as you like, any time and place you choose, as long as there’s wi-fi or 3G. Imagine how this can change your experience of a work of art when finally you see it in real life.

The painter Ed Ruscha once described to me how he had been fascinated by Jasper Johns’ work when he first saw it reproduced in Artforum Magazine. But when he finally saw it in real life it was like a bomb went off in his head.

Whether it’s a bomb that explodes, or just a sharp intake of breath as you see the real thing, your bond with the art, and probably the institution, will be strong and personal, before you walk in the door.

Oh, and you can make your own collection of works, and even collect your own views of each work to return to, like your favorite piece of music. You can share these galleries too if you want.

If there is one thing I’d like to see it’s a way to know when I’m looking at the life size artwork – at the size the artist was working on; and when I’m looking at the image in hi-res, how much more closely am I able to see than he/she was.

6 Cool Museum Apps for 2010 Gift Giving, for iPhone & a couple for Android too!

Posted on December 10, 2010 by Robin White

Why not give your friends a smart phone app this year? If they’re into art, paleontology or just appreciate inventive interface design, here are some of my favorites, based on the following criteria. A really good app has to:

Have great content, designed for the small screen experience
Provide an immersive experience
Be a self-contained experience – no need to be at the museum to enjoy
Present content designed to be consumed in short sections – so you can complete reading something, playing something, listening to something in a few minutes
Allow you to access at least some content without an internet connection
Do one thing really well

It should also:

Link to social media so you can share what you’re doing/seeing/loving
Link to additional content on the web so you can find out more if you’ve been inspired

Here’s my list, in alphabetical order:

1. Dinosaurs: iPhone, Free, from American Museum of Natural History.

Currently eight dinosaurs and their discoverers get the full treatment. Did you know Barnum Brown was a spy for the US government, as well as a prodigious fossil hunter, discoverer of three T-rex skeletons and an oil prospector? Neither did I till I had the app on my phone. I’ve read the label copy on the museum wall before but info didn’t stick until I was holding it in my hands.

You can navigate through the stories, or with the marvelous mosaic of dinosaur images and then share any picture you like via social media. Recently updated with new stories about Triceratops and Psittacosaurus, and with more updates planned, this app keeps on giving and giving.

2. Exquisite Clock , iPhone: Free, from Fabrica

Based on the concept of the “Exquisite Corpse” this app uses crowd-sourced pictures of numbers to tell the time in hours/minutes/seconds. The numbers are represented by objects, landscapes, vegetables and other things that people have photographed and uploaded to the Exquisite Clock website. The site then feeds the app. Exquisite Clock is also available as a screensaver and an art installation. I came across it first at the Victoria & Albert Museum last year where it was part of their exhibition Decode: Digital Design. I’ve had the pleasure of seeing my photo on the clock more than once.

3. How It Is, iPhone: Free, from The Tate Modern

In the museum version of the exhibition How It Is by polish artist Miroslaw Balka people could walk up a ramp to enter inside a “giant gray structure” and walk through its vast black interior, or they could walk beneath the structure and listen to “the echoing sound of footsteps on steel.” The app is a small screen version that manages to be immersive, creepy, and unlike any other app. It’s a compelling art experience in itself, rather than a tour. Use the onscreen joystick to zoom around the black environment and explore whatever you bump into. Have a good set of noise cancelling ear buds handy to hear the eerie 3D sound track, and it will help to be in a low light space as well.

4. Meanderthal: iPhone, Android, Free, from The National Museum of Natural History

Ever wanted to see what you might have looked like if you’d been alive 700,000 years ago? Now there’s an app for that! Meanderthal has a one-two punch that stimulates your curiosity about paleo-anthropology while bringing you literally face to face with our ancestors. Upload your photo and watch yourself morph into a male or female version your favorite early human. Then share your new self-portrait with the world on Facebook and follow the links from the app to the website, What Does it Mean to Be Human, and feed your growing curiosity about how we became the humans we are today. Fun!

5. Smarthistory Travel: Rome, A First Look iPhone, Free

Smart History Travel is a project of Smart History, a multi-media web book about art and art history. The app is bursting with the trademark videos Smart History is well known for – videos capturing short, informal and very enlightening conversations between two engaging art historians who talk about some of Rome’s most famous buildings and artworks: the Pantheon, Column of Trajan, the Sistine Chapel, Raphael’s School of Athens and many more from Ancient, Rennaissance and Baroque periods in Rome. Drs. Beth Harris and Steven Zucker will give you a refreshing view of these cultural icons. Of course there are useful tips about doing a few other things in Rome too, like eating, shopping and getting around.

6. Yours,Vincent: iPhone. $3.99

This is the story of Van Gogh’s life and his art, evocatively told through his letters to his brother Theo. It’s an immersive, intimate, narrative experience with very well produced short audio and video clips. You can pinch and zoom the letters themselves to look closely at Vincent’s handwriting, his words, and his sketches. Most of the chronological sections conclude with a gallery of paintings, sketches or watercolors. You can’t enlarge them to look at details, but there’s a surprising amount you can appreciate, even at this screen size. Visual storytelling at its best, but no social media or web links.

I’ll recommend a few others in an update next week. If you have other favorites I’d love to hear about them!

Treat Yourself to the NMAI Infinity of Nations iPhone App

Posted on November 5, 2010 by Robin White

If you want to make the most of your visit to Infinity of Nations, the new exhibit at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian in the Old Customs House at the tip of Manhattan, then download the iPhone app before you enter!

The app, with its illuminating audio clips and visual navigation complements the in-gallery experience of this knock out show, and serves as a rich souvenir of your visit. Together they will give you a fresh perspective on the worldview and culture of Native Americans.

To start with, the app content is awe inspiring – a collection of 60 stunning objects from the NMAI collection, representing Native North, Central and South America. Small but essential maps are provided.

Clear, even delightful, navigation also helps! Primary navigation is by region, mirroring the presentation of the story in the exhibition. In addition to the ten regions, there are two sections that offer a cross-region perspective where examples from many tribes provide a comparative view of Native cultures. One is devoted to Contemporary Native Art, and the other to Headdresses. Here you get to see how one type of object operates as a symbol with so many different meanings.

Once you’ve selected a section/region, such as Mesoamerica, you can use the List or the Case view to explore in detail. In either view you also have a choice to see a small image of the object and read a description, or see a larger image and listen to a narrator tell you about the object.

Choose the audio version!

Not only is the image larger, it’s also so really interesting to hear an expert speak the native names and words. The narration is often accompanied by music or sound effects and the total mix creates a multi-sensory environment that you happily enter for a brief time.

Navigating through the objects by Case diagram is helpful when you’re in the exhibition, and also gives you a feeling for the gallery installation when you’re offsite, even if you’ve never been there.

To set the stage and frame your experience of the content in the app there’s also an Introduction that explains that native historians and community knowledge keepers collaborated with NMAI to interpret the objects. It concludes by reminding us that there continue to be diverse, self-governing native peoples and this exhibition pays tribute to their culture, past and present.

As good as it is, the Infinity of Nations app also left me feeling frustrated, longing for more connection.

Why couldn’t there be larger images to zoom in so we could admire the intense details of these art works? Even in the gallery we can never get close enough to the objects so providing higher resolution images on the app would be a great service.

Why couldn’t there be a search option so we could find a specific object, or see all the garments, weapons or chairs if we wanted to.

Why couldn’t I access links to more information about these evocative objects? Surely NMAI’s site must offer up a wealth of material to feed my curiosity at the very moment when I’m hungry for it.

And finally, why couldn’t I share my enthusiasm about what I’m looking at with other people, on the spot! I would be a walking ambassador for the exhibition and the app if I could send pix via Twitter, Facebook or email.

Also, on the day I attended, the Museum hadn’t put up any signs promoting the app so no one else was using it. Hopefully they’ll take care of that right away.

No matter what, Infinity of Nations is a fine example of how a native app can offer audiences in the galleries or offsite a totally engaging experience. It was produced by Tristan Interactive. The audio content was produced by Earprint Productions.

What Does it Take to Get a Conversation Going?

Posted on October 7, 2010 by Robin White

Shelly Bernstein at the Brooklyn Museum, wrote a blog post on Oct 4th, in response to Ed Rothstein’s fairly disparaging article “From Picassos to Sarcophagi, Guided by Phone Apps”,in The New York Times, three days earlier, about museum smart phone apps. She defended her museum’s efforts to date, and the efforts of all museums, to bring their content into this all important environment, the mobile landscape. I completely support the arguments she made.

Toward the end of the piece Rothstein dismissed the BklynMuse app’s capacity to allow visitors to leave comments about artworks for other visitors to find, saying “The various votes for “likes” in the museum are equally unilluminating. The result is a kind of scarcely literate cybergraffiti that does nothing to help reach a deeper understanding of the works or reveal their artistic traditions or cultural significance.”

It’s true that Likes and one word tags are not all that illuminating. I’m reminded of Malcolm Gladwell’s New Yorker article, Small Change about social media and revolutions. Pressing the Like button next to an object is easy. It takes a higher level of commitment and interest to write a quick comment about an object, and an even higher level to write a thoughtful comment.

I left a low level comment about a little Figure from the Nicobar Islands via BklnMuse when they launched the mobile web version back in March. I wrote about my experience in this blog post, expressing excitement about the possibility of being able enter into a dialogue with other visitors and even the curator, about works of art that I love for one reason or another.

But, six months later I see that I’m the only person who left a comment, even though the little figure has been Favorited by four other people. Why did they Favorite him? Do they see what I see? What else do they see? Why has no one else chimed in? Did they not really care enough to comment?

Rothstein’s article got me thinking. How do you prime the pump to get that conversation started? How do you get people to say something that inspires a response? And how do you keep them coming back?

Could one of the curatorial staff have responded? Obviously curators can’t be responding to every comment. But – what about docents or volunteers? Could this be part of their job description?

I know I’d be more likely to leave comments if I thought that someone would read them and respond. No one wants to be lonely.

When SFMOMA created a blog for their Olafur Eliasson show visitors to the show left lots of advice for others about how and what to see. Part of the allure was the time sensitive nature of the exhibition – it was temporary and therefore it was an event.

Perhaps featuring certain objects for a specific period of time – turning them into an event based experience – would generate some action, and interaction.

What are other successful examples?

Mobile Meet Up @ Newseum Report

Posted on August 6, 2010 by Robin White

I wanted to give a quick report on the Mobile Fair and Meetup held on August 4^th at the Newseum. I’m sure others who were there will have more to add! This was the first opportunity for an SI wide conversation about mobile apps and how they can serve the many SI museums. It was organized by Paul Sparrow at the Newseum and Nancy Proctor, Director of Mobile at SI.

There was lots of buzz about Explorer, the new GPS enabled app from AMNH, done by Accenture, one of the vendors at the Fair, and Spotlight Mobile. Everyone wanted to know how well that works but not even us New Yorkers had had the chance to try it out yet.

AUGMENTED REALITY was a high priority issue. Many people pointed out the wonderful way it brings historical archives and research of all kinds out of the dark and musty file cabinets and into the daylight of everyday lives. When you can point your phone at an empty field in Gettysburg and bring up images of Civil War soldiers on that very field after a battle, and hear a soldier’s letter being read, you’re blending past and present for an enhanced experience.

USER GENERATED CONTENT was another topic that generated lots of discussion, dispite the fact that most apps (that I’m aware of) don’t encourage users to contribute “useful” content, though many allow links to Twitter, Facebook or Flickr to share, or “like” something.

Nancy Proctor, Director of Mobile, SI raised the data asset management issues involved with handling the two types of UGC:

1) comments, favorites, likes > user reviews

2) users contributing specific factual info about names, dates, places, makers etc.

One thing’s for certain, museums have to be clear about what they want from UGC. If you want your app users to provide information about collection items, rather than just favoriting something, you need to design the app for that purpose. I don’t think anyone’s done that yet, have they?

AUDIENCE RESEARCH is critical and there aren’t many stats out there about who uses their phones in museums, and whether that’s even an indicator of whether they’ll use their phones to interact with exhibits through apps. Results from a recent study done for one museum indicate that there are no clear use patterns based on gender, age or prior visits. How do you figure out what to do? Today I noticed on Twitter that a white paper has been published that sheds some light on mobile measurement, but I haven’t read it yet so can’t say if it’s relevant.

Obviously it’s very important to know which audiences are using their phones in museums so you can know what content phone users are interested in. App development must start with audience research, so a lot more needs to be done in this area, at individual museums and collectively.

This topic again brought up the issue of providing social media features on apps. These links are already used to provide ways to share content with others and promote the app itself. What hasn’t happened yet but would really add a new dimension to museum apps is providing features that allow small groups of people to interact with the content together in the museum. Then the app becomes a way to enhance the social experience of attending an exhibition.

TO CHARGE OR NOT TO CHARGE is almost as big an issue as whether to develop a MOBILE WEBSITE OR A MOBILE APP.

Paul Sparrow, from the Newseum, proposed one argument for charging: apps are a great way to provide niche content for niche audiences, and museums that specialize should be thinking of developing apps to promote to people interested in that special content, who will pay for the information, especially if it’s from a trusted source like a museum.

Free apps are way more popular than paid ones, but if you’re not developing for a mass audience that may not be an issue. However the evidence from the National Gallery of Art indicates that if you start with a free app and then begin to charge for it, download numbers drop precipitously.

The debate about MOBILE APPS VS MOBILE WEB makes people passionate! Cost, ease of use, audience reach are all big issues. I recently read a very thorough analysis from Mobileactive. Org that came down soundly on the side of the mobile web. You can read it here. And yet both the Powerhouse Museum and the Brooklyn Museum have recently produced iPhone and Android apps because their visitors greatly preferred to use an app than to navigate the mobile web on their phones, even inside the museum. There are very valid arguments for going either way.

There were 12 vendors at the Mobile Fair, each offering a different solution, with closed, customized platforms, for a wide range of costs, either one time or monthly. It can cost anywhere from $10,000 to $60,000 depending on what you want an app to provide. While people in the audience were shaking their heads at that top number, others pointed out that museums think nothing of dropping six figures on interactives within exhibitions, so it shouldn’t be out of the question to pay real money for an interactive experience people can take with them, no matter where they are.

One other thing that museums are concerned about is the lack of standards. Once you sign up with one company you’re locked into their system which doesn’t interface with anything else out there.

At the beginning of the meet up people were asked how many of their museums had apps. Almost none; how many were in process – almost none; how many of them were thinking about it – more hands, but this group is clearly not at the forefront of what’s going on. Probably because they are gov’t institutions. Many don’t even have wi-fi enabled buildings.

One objective of the meeting was to consider whether it makes sense to build some kind of collaborative app for all SI content that could then have other, tourist info wrapped around it. Alternatively it would certainly be easier to develop a standard for all the SI museums so their information can then be picked up in each other’s apps and DC tourist apps etc.

Yellowstone Videos

Posted on July 19, 2010 by Robin White

We produced these three short videos for National Geographic Television’s Explorer TV series with host Boyd Matson.

Intro to Yellowstone National Park

19th Century Photography Celebrates Yellowstone

Timelapse Video of Old Faithful Geyser

Meanderthal: The App That Takes You To Your Roots

Posted on June 7, 2010 by Robin White

Finally, there’s an app that let’s you see what you might have looked like if you’d been alive 700,000 years ago. Meanderthal is the Smithsonian Institution’s first official app for iPhone and Android and was released in May.

This is a well-designed app with a one-two punch that invites users to have fun, while it stimulates your curiosity about paleoanthropology, and then makes it easy to find out more – as much as you want – about it.

Here’s how: the app lets you upload a photo of your face and then blends it to one of the faces of three different human ancestors: homo floresiensis, who lived between 95,000 and 17,000 years ago; homo neanderthalensis who lived between 200,000 and 28,000 years ago; and homo heidelbergensis who lived between 700,000 and 200,000 years ago.

As soon as you’ve watched yourself morph from homo sapiens into one of our ancestors you can replay the morph, or choose to learn something about your new / old self.

The Share option lets you show off your new self-portrait on Facebook or email it to someone. The More option lets you choose a new species, start over or go to the exhibition website What Does It Mean To Be Human. You arrive at a vivid display of headshots of many of our human ancestors and can continue to explore from there.

One of the things that makes Meanderthal so good is that users get to see themselves in faces created by one of the world’s great paleo-artists, John Gurche. The faces come from the early human models he created for the Hall of Human Origins at the National Museum of Natural History.

According to Briana Pobiner, a paleoanthropologist at the Smithsonian Human Origins Program who spoke to Live Science, the app provides an opportunity “for people to make emotional connections to our ancestors….It’s an important way to break down that barrier between things we think are so different or so ‘other.’”

It’s Gurche’s skill as an artist that helps us make this personal connection; the faces looking out at us are compelling, even at the size of a smart phone screen.

The app provides an engaging experience because it’s fun, focused and simple. It takes advantage of pop culture notions about Neanderthals to attract people, then provokes their curiosity and generously feeds it with information. Bravo!

By the way, the app’s release just happened to coincide with the announcement of a recent study showing that non-African modern humans carry between 1 percent and 4 percent of Neanderthal genes, and suggests early humans mated with Neanderthals.

A Fun Game, But a Missed Opportunity

Posted on May 13, 2010 by Robin White

In the iPhone app game Dali’s Soft Watches, players get the chance to explore several of Dali’s surreal landscape paintings. The paintings are intriguing and the game provides an engrossing experience even if you’re not a big Salvador Dali fan.

Players must search for the famous melting clocks that go missing from their painting, The Persistence of Memory, and turn up in other landscapes. To find them you must examine every inch of the paintings. So you play the game, becoming curiouser and curiouser as you spend time pouring over Dali’s trippy environments. The images are big and scale up very well to the iPad, so you can really see the details. Each painting has it’s own evocative musical score as well. There doesn’t appear to be a time limit for finding the clocks, so you can take your time and really look around.

Surprisingly when you click the Info button all that appears is the title (in English, French, Spanish and Dutch), the date and size of the painting, and which museum owns it. Nothing more – there’s no information about the artist, no back story about the individual paintings. This seems like such a missed opportunity to take advantage of players’ interest and provide more context! Dali was a flamboyant character. Even a casual player would get a kick out of knowing more about him and his work after being so immersed in it.

Interestingly the comments in the app store page didn’t mention this oversight, even though people loved the chance to really look at Dali’s paintings.

An original and compelling game about art is a way for you, the museum, to attract new audiences to your content. Once someone has downloaded the app to their phone and enjoyed it, they’re half way to your front door. I wonder why the makers of this app didn’t go out to meet these players and invite them inside virtually by offering them more information about Dali, or other surrealists. Or if they had provided a Comment or Share Information link people could have provided their location and the producers could have recommended the closest museum with Dali paintings. A lot more could have been done.

If you’re thinking about a game, bear this in mind.

Meanderthal is a very different museum game experience that offers fun, and information at different levels and ways to share what you’ve created. It was just released by the Smithsonian this week (May 10, 2010). Haven’t you always wanted to see what you’d look like as a Neanderthal? You can download the iPhone app here. It’s also available for Android. I’m going to write about this and one or two other museum game apps soon, so please check back or subscribe.

Thank You Instapaper, and Miles Davis!

Posted on April 15, 2010 by Robin White

Do you have a problem keeping up with all the links from Twitter posts? I do. But at last, I’ve found a way to read them all – when it’s convenient, with or without an internet connection. Thank you Instapaper!

A friend recommended signing up for this service. Brilliant! I must have 50 tabs open between my Safari and Firefox browsers and they stare back at me, almost reproachfully, every time I use a browser, reminding me that I still haven’t clicked on a link I opened days ago.

Now I can finally settle in and read them. Tonight, before I left the studio, I signed up for Instapaper on my laptop and downloaded one app that works on both my iPhone and iPad. I added the little ‘Read Later’ button to my Bookmarks Bar and added 30 articles to Instapaper. It automatically synched to my phone.

So I got on the subway, shuffled my playlist to Miles Davis and started reading the first one in the list. It happened to be about TAP, the new open source mobile tour platform developed by the wizards at the Indianapolis Museum of Art. I was having such a good time I rode right past my stop – really. All I needed was an armchair and a glass of wine.

So, thank you Instapaper. You’ve given me the gift of time, to go along with the gift of knowledge I get from all my Tweeps. Thank you all too!

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