guideddetours

[guideddetours]

Some edu-tainment in a beloved art museum. I am interested to see how this plays out in the long run.

[guideddetours]

Give your ears a listen to these magical sounds. The possible applications of this sound technology are pretty exciting🎈📌

[guideddetours]

Audio tour meets 21st century. This looks amazing.

“The tours themselves, says Keir Winesmith, head of SFMOMA’s digital platforms, can range from “philosophical and emotional” to “hilarious and strange.” If you prefer the latter, select the “This Is Not an Artwork” tour. Actors Martin Starr and Kumail Nanjiani of HBO’s Silicon Valleydebate whether Marcel Duchamp’s urinal, a Dada classic, is a stunning masterpiece or merely junk.”

[guideddetours]

Here in Montreal: Soon-to-Be Biggest Art Education Complex in a North American Museum

The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts has announced plans to build a massive education complex in the next year! And it is partnering up with Concordia University to bring the Montreal community some exciting programming.

Researchers in Concordia’s Art History and Art Education departments are collaborating with the Museum on 8 new programs through the MMFA’s new Atelier for Education and Art Therapy. A couple highlights from that list include a new graduate certificate program in Art Museum Education and Meditation (!!!), as well as an art hive IN the museum, free for anyone wishing to go & create to their heart’s content. (More details on all 8 programs here)

Overall, they’re calling this the biggest ever education and art therapy complex in a North American museum. Having researched past museums’ efforts to develop community-based, grassroots programming in their outreach strategies, I gotta say, this is a big deal for the MMFA. 

Unlike many one-off, off-site community projects that rarely go anywhere, the variety of programs as well as the permanent space - literally a whole new 40,000 sq ft floor in the building dedicated to art education - demonstrates a sincere effort on the MMFA’s part to break down barriers and connect creatively with the Montreal community.

“This is an example of a cultural institution becoming more interested in a broader interpretation of art education,” said Rebecca Duclos, dean of Concordia’s faculty of fine arts. “It’s incredibly bold of a museum to say we recognize we have space and collections, but we need help in delivering programs.”

READ: Montreal Gazette Article

[guideddetours]

(via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A4FTBXaAJSY)

“Museum doctor” Ngaire Blankenberg (Lord Cultural Resources) presenting at TEDxHamburg on the power that museums have to heal and strengthen their communities through ‘soft power’. 

[guideddetours]

Nina Simon's The Participatory Museum turns 5 this week! And still this book remains 100% relevant. It continues to fuel my thinking about museums and has played a big part in my interest in digital & web-based audience engagement. 

Read Nina's thoughts on The Participatory Museum, 5 years later...

[guideddetours]

"Ideas for Museums: a Biography of Museum Computing: Seb Chan" Seb Chan is the Director of Digital & Emerging Media at the Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in New York. He talks about his experiences in IT at the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney, museum IT blogging, moving to the US and building a computer system for the Cooper-Hewitt.

[guideddetours]

"The idea is that a museum’s most valuable function is to provide data (a collection, content, information) to its users (participants, visitors) upon which these users can build meanings and, increasingly, new objects. In some ways, this theory isn’t all that distinct from how museum education has been thinking about the museum experience since at least the mid-twentieth century. (...)

What’s exciting today, however, is that ideas are no longer being implemented solely through educational programming as one possible layer of the museum experience. Instead, in a few rare but awesome cases, the museum-as-resource impulse is embedded into the digital infrastructure of the museum."

Museum Making's Desi Gonzalez discusses how and why the Cooper Hewitt API and the American Museum of Natural History's Hackathon event are such innovative, exciting developments. In both cases, especially the Cooper Hewitt, data & digital engagement is at the centre of the museum experience.

[guideddetours]

The Museum of Stolen Art features pieces reported as missing in the FBI and interpol art crime databases. The museum is a virtual reality experience, a space where one can get a glance at the hidden and the invisible. This is an exploration of VR technologies both for different purposes such as education and advocacy.

More here: http://mosa.ziv.bz/

The Museum of Stolen Art

[guideddetours]

Between BNLMTL2014 and then this weekend’s MUSEOMIX at the MMFA (!!!), Montreal is a damn exciting place to be right now.

In its 4th year, this collaborative event, described as a “living-lab”, brings together professionals from all different backgrounds to remix museums around the world and experiment with digital technologies.

For those who can’t participate in Museomix this year (such as my sad little self), the MMFA will be holding an open house on Nov 9th for the public to come play with all the new prototypes!

Details about the event here: http://bit.ly/1tdC33c More on Museomix's history: http://bit.ly/1ux0b7U

See you on Sunday!

[guideddetours]

Hey obnoxious visitors, this is you.

[guideddetours]

########MURAL Festival#########

Yesterday was Day 1 of MURAL Festival, kicking off a 4-day festival that has turned MTL's St Laurent Blvd into a car-free, open-air party to celebrate public art on a huge scale. 

And I mean, huge scale. Right now there are 20 local & international artists transforming The Main with gorgeous, gigantic works of art. 

 OTHER (Toronto, ON)

The murals will stay for a year, and then I'm guessing those walls will be refreshed with new works for MURAL '14. 

For obvious reasons, namely the fact that artists are working in real time in busy public spaces, this type of event is fun for everyone. It's awesome how people have been using social media to share events and the progress of murals during the festival. You don't really have to be in Montreal. Check out #Muralfestival on Instagram and you'll find 100s of photos documenting artists' process and various stages of mural production. 

The weather is beautiful, everyone is out celebrating art, chatting with artists, supporting businesses on St Laurent...It may or may not be the paint fumes, but I don't see why it can't be like this all the time..?

More muralgrammin' after the jump..

ESCIF (Valencia, Spain)

PHLEGM (Sheffield, UK)

And a couple before-and-after progress shots:

ROA (Gand, Belgium) <3

OMEN (Montreal, QC)

[guideddetours]

Talk about 'guided detours'! I LOVE this project -- part of the Artists Experiment initiative at MoMA, where education staff collaborate with artists to create innovative and participatory projects..

My friend just showed me MoMA's Artists Experiment (thx Fiona!) after our especially inspiring chat about the educational turn in curatorial practice. I haven't really thought about relational aesthetics or the collapsing/merging/evolving definitions of Educator vs. Curator, etc. since my MA in 2010, and man,.. it's all comin' back, s'all comin' back to me nowww...

More on that topic later.

As part of Kenneth Goldsmith’s Uncontested Spaces series, of our Artists Experiment initiative, he invited poets Kim Rosenfield, also a psychologist, and Robert Fitterman, to take over the fourth floor volunteer Information Desk. Or rather, Misinformation Desk! Equipped with therapeutic techniques and google, Rosenfield and Fitterman answered visitors’ logistical questions with probing, psychological responses and whatever else google searches came up with. Some visitors quickly caught onto the guerrilla-style information being distributed, while others were completely perplexed by the space the poets made for interpretation and creativity in the realm of seemingly straightforward, objective questions.

When one couple asked where the Ellsworth Kelly installation was, Rosenfield responded, “That’s such an interesting question. Do you remember your first experience with art? How old were you?”

The visitors looked back with simultaneous confusion, frustration and delight!

[guideddetours]

Fantastic video on the various issues/strategies for documenting and preserving installation art.

Here it is! The video from the project “Installation Art, who cares?”. A project started several years ago in the Netherlands, but with international collaborators, addressing the issues of installation art. Very interesting video for anyone working with these kinds of issues. 

[guideddetours]

On Museum Websites; e.g. Rijksstudio

For the last several months I've been updating the Collections section of the National Gallery of Canada website. It has been a great learning experience to work in the, dare I say, murky, undefined, yet ever-evolving process of a collection's digitization and distribution. 

The 'virtual museum' concept is not new. From the NGC's perspective, its national collection should be widely available to the Canadian public and not only visitors paying admission at the physical building in Ottawa. Therefore it's a sensible strategy that the Gallery maintain a strong online presence. Same goes for other cultural institutions with their own range of reasons.

Look at ARTINFO's article listing the top 10 museum websites. It suggests that museum web facelifts are what museum architecture was 10 years ago, in terms of its 'hey we're 21st century' branding power. That's a big deal.

So with regards to museums' digital collections and engaging users online, I couldn't think of a better example than the Rijksmuseum's [relatively] new website and Rijksstudio. What a beaut!

Launched in October 2012, Rijksstudio offers stunning, hi-res images of 125,000 artworks in the collection. The website itself has the cleanest design and user-friendly navigation that I've ever seen on a museum site. 

Peter Gorgels, the Internet Manager at the Rijksmuseum, outlines the strategy behind the museum's new site, as well as Rijksstudio, here.

More cool details:

The website is based on app design and iPad user experience: the goal was to streamline and simplify navigation and maintain that tactile intimacy that you get with tablet devices.

Not only open concept but open design: the most innovative aspect of Rijksstudio is that users can not only download and share, but manipulate (crop, enlarge, warp) images. Watch this video to see examples (Dutch but you get the idea). 

The website is fully responsive to all devices.

Rijksmuseum took their major 10-yr renovation (which has severely limited access to the collection) as an opportunity to improve their corporate website. This makes sense to pool your creative energy into your online presence.

This paper offers fantastic insight for any museum professional working with digital collections and online audience engagement.

Gorgels describes how most museums present their online collections:  a boring database of thumbnail img's representing a mere fraction of the entire collection. Cringe. I sadly agree for most cases.  

If a major goal of new museum practice is to increase access and break down barriers, why not strive to make the online experience as inspiring and visually rich as a physical visit?