Category: Art & Culture

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Art & Culture

More on Online Museums

Adobe Museum of Digital Media

Rhizome recently published a piece I wrote entitled “Moving the Museum Online“. The piece was a critique of the Adobe Museum of Digital Media, and also served as a platform to discuss the concept of online museums, and highlight a few examples that I thought were particularly noteworthy, including the Virtual Museums of Canada, the Museum of Online Museums, the MINI Museum, and Google’s recent Art Project.

In both the comments section on the piece and through Twitter comments and emails, people have kindly been pointing out other examples of online museums that are of interest. Here are three that stood out:

Guggenheim Virtual Museum (vintage: 2001): “The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum has commissioned the New York firm Asymptote Architects to design and implement a new Guggenheim Museum in cyberspace. This is the first phase of a three-year initiative to construct an entirely new museum facility. The structure will be an ongoing work in process, with new sections added as older sections are renovated. The project will consist of navigable three-dimensional spatial entities accessible on the Internet as well as real-time interactive components installed at the various Guggenheim locations.

As envisioned by Asymptote and the Guggenheim, the Guggenheim Virtual Museum will emerge from the fusion of information space, art, commerce, and architecture to become the first important virtual building of the 21st century.”

muSIEum (vintage: unknown, pre-2009): This online reconfiguration of four Viennese museums “…displaying gender, criticizing the conventional hegemonial ordering of things”, and “bringing out the different storylines that could (have) been told with the same objects from a standpoint counter-acting the cultural hegemony of the patriarchal view”. An intervention that is needed not just in Vienna, I’d wager. In German only.

MIX-m (vintage: 2001 – 2003): “MIX-m stands for MIXed-museum. It is a contemporary art museum that exists both in physical and digital spaces, in localized and networked environments. MIX-m plays with the dimensions of its architecture: a mix between a real museum space (here, the Bâtiment d’Art Contemporain in Geneva) (1:1), a digital space based on the dimensions of its host (1:x) and a model of this game-like environment (1:50). MIX-m has the ability to re-locate itself into this existing exhibition environment, transforming, mixing and extending it into new territories. It offers therefore a variable environment to create art installations. These works, commissioned by MIX-m, can now define and modulate their presence inside an extended space spectrum: physical-digital, real-simulated, localized-networked.”

Read Moving the Museum Online on Rhizome, and join the discussion there or send me a Tweet (@mkasprzak) with your own suggestions of other virtual museum projects that exemplify either the lack in current physical museums (as muSIEum does), an additionality (as with the Guggenheim), or a hybrid space (MIX-m).

…also this came in from @eefski on Twitter: Oneindig Noord-Holland.

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Art & Culture My Projects

*leaks


Visualisation of the word frequency in the Wikileaks cables by itmightbedave.

In the wake of Cablegate (the release of numerous US diplomatic cables by Wikileaks), it seems there is a mini-boom in groups following their example: Brusselsleaks and Openleaks spring to mind, and surely there are others I don’t know about.

In a lighthearted way, Club Karlsson (Center for Counter Culture), the club that I co-founded here in Amsterdam, is having a Christmas party entitled “Karlssonleaks”. Guests who bring a USB stick with their choice of interesting liberated or leaked data to hang on our Christmas tree will get into our party for free. Non-leakers have to pay an entrance fee of 10 Euro (and will be given a chance to fill up a USB stick on site). After an evening of drinks, snacks, music and projections, every visitor can take a random USB stick from the tree as a little Christmas present, and discover the digital treats within.

We’ve asked people to use common sense when filling up their USB keys for sharing: we have all read the Wikileaks cables, seen goatse a million times, and don’t want to be Rickrolled. I’ll report back and let everyone know how it goes — I’m certain there will be some interesting data exchanged.

If I don’t get to blogging again before the end of 2010 — happy holidays!

Categories
Art & Culture

Why Museumnacht Rocks

Tropenmuseum

Once a year, Amsterdam’s museums put on special programmes and are open very late in a celebration called Museumnacht. Variations on this simple concept take place in cities across the globe, making it a tried and true model to get people into museums.

I’m a newcomer to Amsterdam, but a hardened culture consumer. I’ve seen this concept done before and know its potential, though I haven’t always had the ideal experience. What makes Amsterdam’s Museumnacht stand out as exceptional are three key things: letting go of the velvet rope, taming the devil in the details, and keeping it local.

Portugese Synagoge

Letting go of the velvet rope:
Amsterdam’s museums are among the best in the world, housing priceless treasures in buildings that are often also of architectural significance. With this in mind, you might expect that there are a lot of measures in place to protect the buildings and artifacts, and the first line of defence is miles of velvet rope, or other obvious measures that set a certain tone. I have found that there are no obvious extraordinary measures in place to protect these buildings and artifacts from the hordes of drunk and merry people marauding through town. Perhaps treating people like responsible adults has had the desired impact, as I haven’t witnessed any events that might make a museum director wish she’d used a few extra miles of velvet rope, either. If extra health and safety measures are being implemented, they are nearly invisible, which has a significant positive impact on the tone of the whole event.

Taming the devil in the details:
The Museumnacht website is good, allowing me to browse other people’s agendas for the night, which gave me a quick head start when planning my night this year. But even if you don’t stumble upon this great feature, which requires a little scrolling to get to, they provide other paths to suggest single events or entire agendas for the evening. The event information is sliced and diced in as many ways as possible: time, location, categories, even a kind of overall mood or “buzz”. Several ready-made agendas corresponding to personality types (urban explorers, art lovers, socialites) also provide a general jumping off point.

In short, the organisers of Museumnacht clearly understood the problem of a great programme packed with details: faced with too much choice, it’s easy for potential visitors to get freaked out and decide to just skip it rather than do a lot of research. Making it easy to jump in to the programme with a particular angle is the only solution, and they’ve done a great job of this.

Keeping it local:
Most of the promotional material, including the programme guide, is in Dutch only. This is a strategic decision in a city where most people speak excellent English and lots of things, even government services, are provided in English as well as Dutch. The cultural riches here are very accessible for tourists year-round. Once a year there is an event really for locals, not tourists, and the language decision makes that clear.

The price tag is reasonable (the 17.50 EUR ticket gets you entrance to everything, plus free public transportation all night), and prices for food and drink at each venue are fair. Also if you hang on to your ticket, you can use it to get into any of the participating museums free on a later date. This nice added perk underscores the local emphasis, and is gentle encouragement to return and explore a venue further.

I went last year (when I happened to visit at the right time), and this year again as an Amsterdam resident. I will definitely be back again next year. That said, it’s important to balance my high praise by noting that of course it is not perfect: the more popular venues (Rijksmuseum, for example) can have enormous queues, sometimes the events are not quite as advertised (the edible insects for sale at De Hortus this year ran out very early, which was a disappointment), et cetera. But these are minor glitches in what is otherwise a well-oiled machine. Other cities would be wise to copy the ingredients for success that have been deployed so well here in Amsterdam.

Pianola Museum
Categories
Art & Culture

If IKEA ran our museums…

Photo by Michael Kuhn

In September I attended the 6th International Culturemondo roundtable. Culturemondo is an open network of international digital cultural specialists who work together to facilitate strategic and relevant knowledge exchange. The group has members from around the world, and attendees at the 6th International Roundtable here in Amsterdam came from the UK, Australia, Croatia, Taiwan, Belgium, the USA, and more.

The Roundtable focused on a main question: how can we ensure that culture and heritage policies are linked to digital policies and strategies? After a morning of discussion around case studies, we then broke into groups for a visioning session led by Lydia Howson, to spur new thinking on the organisations we work within.

Each group was asked to envision what it would be like if one of the following institutions ran cultural policymaking, or ran our cultural institutions: IKEA, National Geographic, and The Guardian newspaper. The exercise was a three step process.

Firstly, each group was asked to think about their analogous organisation (IKEA, National Geographic, or The Guardian) and their users; their business model; and their capabilities.

Next, the groups were asked to think about their own organisations (whether that be a gallery, museum, or agency) and their users, and compare them to the users, business model, and capabilities of their analogous organisation.

Lastly, groups were asked to imagine what would actually happen if each of these analogous organisations ran cultural policy or one of our particular organisations:

1. What would they start to do differently?
2. What would they keep?
3. What new services or products would they introduce as part of your offer?
4. How would they change your business model?

After intensive group activity around these questions, the findings were presented to everyone present. I was part of the group looking at IKEA, and what IKEA would do if it suddenly entered the museum business.

We thought that an IKEA-museum would do a lot of things differently. For example:

• Make the museum a hang out space
• Operate more efficiently
• Put good copywriters between artists and the audience
• Conduct mass audience research
• Take a long term approach to amortising marketing investments
• Nurture life-long customers

The exercise served to illustrate to all attendees the possibilities for innovating that lie in simply viewing things from a different perspective. What if IKEA ran your organisation?