Making Conversation with Museums

Jude, pictured above, my just turned 4 year old son would much rather watch a digger in action on one
Brooklyn’s ubiquitous building sites than be dragged along with me to another one of New York’s famous art museums. When I’ve managed to coax him through the door he’s usually lasted about 5 minutes max before the museum guards descend with their list of violations; don’t run; don’t climb; don’t shout; don’t lie on the floor; DON’T TOUCH! Not wanting Jude to have a completely negative experience of museums I’ve stopped taking him to see art and have spent most of the northern winter in the American Natural History Museum or the New York Transit Museum where everything is behind glass or allowed to be touched.

Last week things shifted a little in favour of art, I was looking at a timelapse video on YouTube of the installation of the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden at Moma. Attracted by the cranes hoisting sculptures off the back of flatbed trucks Jude climbed onto my lap to watch. Eventually he began to see beyond the cranes to ask what the sculptures were, he was particularly taken with the construction of Barnett Newman’s Broken Obelisk and after watching the short video about 13 more times he asked if I could take him to the sculpture garden, so I did on Saturday and was amazed and excited by his excitement. The MoMA sculpture garden is just beyond the entrance so all we had to do was run across the colourful floor (see picture above) installed as part of the current Color Chart:Reinventing Color, 1950 to Today show and out the glass doors. The guard told him not to run but he took no notice and soon discovered the Broken Obelisk - see picture below.

Because he’d seen the video on YouTube he could attach his passion for building sites to this sculpture, I think looking at art made a little more sense to him. He began to explore some of the other sculptures. In this good mood he even agreed to the Color Chart exhibition but again he lost interest fast once he was stopped from touching, back in the sculpture garden we stumbled across Color Lab, an interactive space for families created in conjunction with the Color Chart exhibition and in here Jude could not only touch the colourful objects but also had a view of his beloved Barnett Newman sculpture. At last a positive art museum experience for him.

When we got home we watched the YouTube video of the installation of the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden at Moma another 13 times.

So all of the sudden everyone is on Facebook - the numbers for users of my generation, the Xers, have gone crazy in recent months. I’ve begun to use it personally and professionally and am pretty much addicted now, and because I’m living in New York it’s been a great way to keep in touch with friends and family in Oz. That’s the genius of it I guess, every new FB member brings another bunch with them, it just grows and grows. I am not 100% enamored though, I have a growing list of personal positive and negatives which I want to share and keep track of myself. I’ll be adding to this list over the coming months, so if anyone reads this feel free to add some, here’s a couple to begin with:

Negatives:
-Friend spam

1. I don’t want to play zombies, vampires, pacman etc. etc. - it’s not that I don’t like you I’m just too old and don’t have enough time
2. I don’t want to send notification to all of my friends about every application
3. I don’t want to buy your artwork in an online auction
4. I don’t want to ’send this on to all your friends and see what happens’

-Advertising that you can’t remove on  the News Feed.

-I like that I can share what I’m reading and listening to with friends using apps like Music! and Visual Bookshelf but wish the marketing intend wasn’t so aggressive.

Positives:
-Cool apps like ‘ArtShare‘* that fill your profile page with stuff that might actually interest you and your friends

-Privacy - Unlike MySpace you get to choose who looks at your profile and sends you those zombie invites. I see that you can hide your profile information on MySpace these days.

-It’s fun to waste/kill/fill time interacting with friends by playing the odd ‘identify the famous actor as a child’ quiz.

-Great to play with your profile and change your picture and update your status to let people know where you’re at.

*I am currently working at the Brooklyn Museum with the team that developed this app so I’m totally biased but nevertheless it’s a personal fave.

Lauren, one of the curators for australianscreen online gave me the heads up about this article at artshub entitled ‘Facebook for museums’. It’s about MESN a new museum specific social networking site started by Kurt Stuchell. There seems to be a focus on ‘authenticity’ of material on the site and the provision of a ’safe’ learning experience for students.

 We needed a more defined and structured platform that would embody the educational objectives of our member museums and present a clear value proposition to art lovers, educational institutions, parents, students, and life-long learners. The purpose is explicit: this is an environment for learning about cultural treasures.

I will keep my eye on this, but my initial reaction is that it is not as immediately as fun as interacting with museums on flickr or facebook - I’ll be interested to see how they motivate the above-listed stakeholders to hang out with them.

If I’m honest my tagging habits could  best be described as haphazard, on Flickr I sometimes tag my pics if I have the time and the head space, but sometimes it doesn’t even occur to me to do so. Social bookmarking sites are brilliant but so far I haven’t really become usefully dedicated to any - more often than not I lazily use my browser to bookmark, not really in the community spirit of things but it’s force of habit I guess. I do however use social bookmarking sites for research purposes, taking advantage of the resources created by those who are putting in the time to build and maintain great lists. For this blog my original choice of wording for tags was more for personal organisation of information than anything else. Almost a year on things have evolved, more posts have been added and I’d like to search my content using wider criteria, also it’s clear that others are occassionally reading ‘making conversation’ and I feel obliged to provide a clearer map of what’s within the blog.

I see how incredibly useful tagging is, especially folksonomic tagging in revealing objects that may have previously been hidden to visitors by more formal curatorial language. However the more I learn about how we tag the more I realise how many objects are hidden all over again by what might be called poor tagging practice. Words being misspelt, strangly grouped, split by plural or singular usage, synonyms, the list goes on. The wonderful payoff of not controlling how objects are tagged by individuals is the serendipitous element of each search, you can land in places you never knew existed and be inspired to find out more about stuff you didn’t even know interested you. Also, if you find another who tags like you then chances are you’ve made a valuable connection to that may broaden your horizons even further.  As much as I would like folksonomies to be more reliable it’s obvious that if we try to control the way we tag then some of the magic may disappear and we’ll head right back into the more authoritarian classification methods that negate the creative opportunities free tagging has given us. 

battersea power station, originally uploaded by joelrawlings.

For the first time, Tate Britain is inviting members of the public to contribute to the content of an exhibition. How We Are: Photographing Britain takes a unique look at the journey of British photography, from the pioneers of the early medium to today’s photographers who use new technology to make and display their imagery.

For more info go to Tate online
http://www.tate.org.uk/britain/exhibitions/howweare/slideshow.shtm
or straight to the Flickr site
http://www.flickr.com/groups/howwearenow/

I recently became aware of a project to get Australia’s audio visual heritage online. australianscreen is slated for launch mid this year, the site’s holding page at http://australianscreen.com.au/holding/ announces

australianscreen is a web-based resource that will offer free access to a vast range of Australian moving image and audio material drawn from the Australian film, television and radio industries.

What an amazing resource this will be for film makers, viewers, archivists and learners in all guises.  In this ‘online’ conversational age there is an incredible potential for this project to raise the profile of Australian screen history and culture locally and internationally. Will users of the database be able to contribute tags to the audiovisual material they view/listen to to create a lively folksonomy? It will also be interesting to see if there is any online community building initiative built into the australianscreen vision.

This month I’ve been helping Sydney artist  AñA Wojak  set up a blog to document her photo-synthesis project. She is the first official Royal Sydney Botanical Gardens artist in residence and will work in the gardens from March 2007 until March 2008. Much of the work AñA create’s during this residency will be ephemera and will perish (or get nicked) quickly. Blogging is the perfect way to for us as viewers to follow the project and keep track of what’s on display within the gardens. Blogging also provides a cheap and easy way to keep a record of the 12 months for AñA’s own portfolio and the Botanical Gardens own archive.

I’m building a small business web site at the moment and the owners are shy about putting their picture on-line. My immediate reaction is how twentieth century to be so modest! How will they react to their children putting their lives online -  Here’s an interesting article about ‘Kids, the internet and End of Privacy: The Greatest generation gap since Rock and Roll’ from the New York Magazine site Say Anything

Kids today. They have no sense of shame. They have no sense of privacy. They are show-offs, fame whores, pornographic little loons who post their diaries, their phone numbers, their stupid poetry—for God’s sake, their dirty photos!—online. They have virtual friends instead of real ones. They talk in illiterate instant messages. They are interested only in attention—and yet they have zero attention span, flitting like hummingbirds from one virtual stage to another.

Ron Mueck’s Man in a Boat. Picture: Katarzyna Krzywania

I’ve often wondered why you can’t take photographs in some museums or in some exhibitions and not others. The  e-artcasting blog entry “When Cameras Inside Museums Are Forbidden: Web2.0 and Copyrights” shed some light on the mystery.  The answer is pretty obvious really it’s all about lender agreements and copyright.

Here’s a sneak peak at http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dzmfdbj_9gs8z98. The result is really quite moving - creating something alone to come together - or something like that.