Flickr Galleries

Caz & I set up a Flickr account for the Arts Centre's Collections some time ago with a view to eventually being part of The Commons.

I was suprised to find that other flickr users have uploaded some great photos from inside Hamer Hall and tagged them as Performing Arts Collection.

Check out our so far very "modest" efforts at a Flickr Stream here. Flickr provides an interesting Curatorial outlet for us - Sets or Galleries can be created with up to 18 images. It could be a set of quirky or unusual images you stumble across during research; a selection a favourites; or musings and selections featuring the colour yellow - whatever you like!

The focus is on interesting photography, and we are not short of resources in this regard. So lets delve into the collection and create some small galleries without the usual constraints of the physical gallery environment.

I'm hopeful that we'll be able to get some conversations started in the comments about unidentified photographs from our collections, and potentially crowd-source some info about them. Got an interesting image you need help identifying? Lets put it on our flickr stream and see what people think!

Who Shot Rock 'n' Roll Pt 2

You may remember I recently sent through a post about Brooklyn Museum's new photographic exhibition, 'Who Shot Rock 'n' Roll'. This is a follow up post showing how they cleverly intergrated new media into their public programs. Although the exhibition is about rock 'n' roll, the focus of the show is photography so they sent out a call for people to come along and take their own rock shots at a live gig set up by the Museum. Punters were then encouraged to upload their images to the Museum's Flickr stream and legendary rock photographer Bob Gruen viewed the work and commented on his favourites both on Flickr and on the Museum's blog.

This sort of program may well be quite manageable for us as it had a very definate start and end date lasting just four weeks. The set up was not that different from our AC/DC Back in Black Friday gig. Next time we could advertise the 'call to arms' on the flyer, we already have a Flickr account (although we haven't actually started using it) and we know lots of great photographers who might have been interested in being involved. Maybe we could try something for 'Women in Rock' - what do you think?

Caz

Exhibition inspiration

How would you feel about letting someone else do some of the curating? Here are a couple of different approaches to curating exhibitions that you might not have considered.

The first is Powerhouse's The Odditoreum which began life as an idea for a small school holiday program but resulted in a popular exhibition, book and limited edition print. The project had many constraints including a budget of only $7000 (excluding staff time) and was conceived as a 'low-tech' way of engaging visitors with the permanent collection.

The show was 'curated' by children's book author Shaun Tan. Tan chose 10 objects from a long list he was sent by the Public Programs Producer who had compiled and refined the list in consultation with curators, registrars and conservators. He then wrote fictitious labels of approx. 100 words for each object. Visitors were also invited to write their own labels. The 'real' label information was also included by only at the end of the exhibition.

The show was a hit and is a good reminder that you don't always have to spend a million bucks to pull off a good idea. It is also a good 'real-life' example of a the type of engagement people are also seeking online.

The other idea comes from the Brooklyn Museum and is called Click!: A Crowd Curated Exhibition. This exhibition was inspired by the notion of 'the wisdom of crowds' as espoused by business and financial columnist James Surowieki. Rather than try and explain it just click on the link for a short, sharp explanation.

Does anyone else know of any interesting exhibition concepts? Why not let us all know about them by leaving a comment below!

Caz

Four well dressed men holding beer bottles

Here is a great example of how Web 2.0 applications, in this case Flickr, encourage public interaction with public collections. Do you know about Flickr Commons? The Commons was set up as 'your opportunity to contribute to describing the world's public photo collections'. Participating organisations include various international institutions such as Library of Congress and New York Public Library but also Powerhouse, State Library of NSW, State Library of Qld and the Australian War Memorial. Institutions upload collections with no known copyright restrictions and visitors help describe images either by commenting or 'tagging' (more about tagging and folksonomies in another post).

The Powerhouse photostream is as usual very well set up. This interesting photo is from the Phillips Glass Negative Collection. Check out the comment stream below the photo. It starts and ends with the usual boring 'great photo' type comments but in the middle is this amazing exchange between two people who go on a web quest to try and work out if the unidentified men are actually painters of the Heidelberg School! Even if the result is inconclusive the way in which they go off to other sites and come back to report their findings shows how even an unidentified image can fire the imagination.

There are already a number of performing arts-related images on the site including several from the State Library of NSW. Imagine what we could do with our photographic collection?

Caz