Masterpieces in 7 billion pixels... Google Art Project

Google's latest venture Art Project took their Street View mapping technology through 17 of the world's greatest museums and galleries. Participating collections include The Tate, The Palace of Versailles, MoMA, the Hermitage and the Uffizi Galllery among a very distinguished list of others.

Each institution selected a masterpiece for digital capture at ultra-high resolution, up to 7 billion pixels in some instances. The beauty of this site is you can linger on the extrordinary detail and explore the paintings in ways that you cannot when in the gallery (and without enduring the crowds and queues!)

These 2 short clips are a worthwhile introduction before you explore the Art Project site in all its mind boggling glory.

Making Museums More Mobile

At what stage of an exhibition's development do you start to think about including digital content? Is it primarily a way to add movement & sound to a static collection of objects, or do you consider it integral to the design, presentation or functionality of an exhibition?

Digital elements such as downloadable content, interviews, social networking or games, can replace other traditional aspects of an exhibition to create a dramatically different look and feel.

With so many people carrying smart phones these days, mobile device tours are a new take on the traditional audio guided tour. I've often spoken about the suitablility of the Public Art Collection for this type of tour, well now there's an accessible mechanism to help us build one! The My Tours site lets you easily build your own mobile application for the public to download onto an iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch. Whilst this doesn't cater for all visitors, a few iPod Touches could be made available for use within the exhibition space, with other visitors using their own device to navigate through an exhibition, or around our venues.

Caz has shown us some examples of Brooklyn Museums iPhone apps. The American Museum of Natural History have also developed one. Another site of interest discussed at a recent Culture Victoria forum on the topic of mobile tours includes this beautiful interactive soundscape developed for a sculpture park.

How social are you?

You may have noticed that we now have a sign in the 'Rock Chicks' exhibition to let people know they can leave a comment on the Arts Centre's Facebook page. While we are not exactly being deluged with comments I think it's a good first step to improving our social networking presence. All we have to do now is start engaging!

Social networking in a museum context has come a long way since 2008 when many of the bigger institutions in Australia starting developing their social media policies and in April next year we'll have a chance to hear from some of the pioneers of  'the first wave' at the Transformations in Cultural Communications Conference. The focus of the conference is on developing and supporting culturally diverse audiences and will feature speakers from the Smithsonian, Powerhouse, RMIT, MOV, ACMI and Australian Museum.

If you feel like you've missed the first wave entirely don't worry it's not that hard to catch up. A few people have asked me to re-post the details of the Licence 2 Test Drive site I mentioned way back in January. You may recall that it's an easy self-guided, six lesson course that will have you up to speed in no time. If you'd like any help getting started or you think it might be fun to do a few lessons as a group just let me know and I'll see what I can organise.

Friday links

It's been a while between drinks but here are a couple of interesting projects and sites I've come across lately...



Have you heard about this exhibition? We're quite excited about it in Collections. It's called 'Move: Choreographing You - Art and Dance' and it's on at the Hayward Gallery in London. Using interactive sculptures and installations this show explores the intersection of dance and art over the past 50 years by encouraging people to actually dance there way through the exhibition.You can check out more about the show at this great microsite.

Caboodle is a fun kids/museums/digital project.You can read more about it here and here but basically it's a great way of getting kids invloved with collections by visiting museums, talking to curators, taking photos and uploading them to the Caboodle site. They can also become part of an online club and it is used both by schools and individuals. Kids don't have to interact with collections they can also draw, build, find something they want to photograph and upload.

The site where I found out about Caboodle is also worth a look. It's called Culture24 and it's run by a not-for-profit group working across the areas of arts, heritage, education and tourism in the UK. If you haven't come across it before it's definately worth exploring and being inspired.

Floorplanner - free exhibition layout tool.

Exhibition designer Nina Simon of Museum 2.0 has hit upon a great easy, free online tool for producing 3D exhibition layouts. It's called Floorplanner and you can read a post about it here. It looks like a great tool for mocking up exhibitions/events/displays that don't necessarily have their own design budget but that need that little bit of extra visualisation. 

Did you know that the 1st of September (Wednesday just gone) was 'International Ask A Curator Day'? It's not quite clear who made it so but 17 Australian museums and galleries seem to have jumped on board joining 100s of other organisations from 22 different countries to answer any questions the general public wanted to throw their way.

The aim of the project was for the public to have access to curators via Twitter for the day. Some organisations like Powerhouse decided to use Facebook instead as it let them answer questions more fully and is already their most active social networking platform. (This interesting post from the fresh + newer team gives you more insight into their involvement and how it fits in with their overall social media strategy). It's a bit early to tell yet how successful it was but if it becomes an annual event perhaps we could jump on board next year?

How to Make History Interesting...

It's not always easy to think of ways to make history engaging for kids...