Memory and memorials

Yesterday on the radio I talked about how Christchurch's galleries and museums have come through the Canterbury earthquake. Although it's a terrific shame about the damage to the Logie collection at the University of Canterbury, I was greatly relieved to hear how safely the buildings and collections of the Canterbury Museum and Christchurch Art Gallery came through the initial quake and the aftershocks: both have now reopened. It's a true testament to the foresight and skills of their staff.

As I noted in my piece, the Gallery in particular did a fantastic job of keeping its friends and fans up to date via its blog and twitter, and giving us peeks into the surreal sights of a gallery being used as a civil defence headquarters.




As I also noted on the radio, I really hope to see a community archive built around the photos, tweets, blog posts, news items and everything else that's been produced and sent out of Christchurch since last Saturday. There are all sorts of logistics around this, and Twitter is one of the most complicated, both in terms of copyright and the ephemeral nature of a tweet (they start disappearing off the web after about 20 days). While Twitter is lodging their archives with the Library of Congress, that's not going to help us much over here.










It's old school, but I've always dealt with this in the past by taking screenshots. A more sophisticated push to deal with all this stuff might involve using something like the kete software, and combing Flickr and blogs and asking photographers and writers for their permissions to upload copies of their content (a great opportunity to do some Creative Commons promotion and education at the same time). And I really hope that the National Library, which has the mandate to make copies of New Zealand digital content, has been out there collecting madly since last Saturday.

This morning I saw that The Press and stuff.co.nz are 'crowdsourcing' people's earthquake memories. This is a great initiative, but inevitably it comes with the 'all your copyrights are belong to us" terms and conditions:

You grant us a non-exclusive, royalty-free, perpetual, worldwide licence to republish any material you submit to us, without limitation, in any format.

We retain the right and discretion to terminate your access to the comments areas if we believe you are abusing the services in any way, or have breached these terms and conditions.

You consent to our collecting and storing your email and IP address for security purposes.

Sigh. There's got to be a better way.

Mid-week pretty

Actually, pretty AND smart



Slippy map generated from geo-tagged photos on Flickr, by Aaron Straup Cope

Web muster

1.

Recently, Over the Net drew attention to Victor Berezovsky's new mural on the front of Freyberg Pool, and the expert committee that approved the work. This week, Ed Winkleman posted on debates around whether the public is the best judge of public art, drawing on Jonathan Jones' post about taking part in two debates on public art.

From Jones' post:

It's as if we have, as a nation, turned into the board of some big company commissioning a portrait of the managing director. Or, rather, a bronze statue of John Betjeman, or maybe a gigantic homage to a sprinter like Manchester's B of the Bang (bang and it's gone). Most of the public art we're putting up is worthless.

The best interventions in public space by artists are often confrontational and controversial, from Richard Serra's Tilted Arc to Rachel Whiteread's House. All good art is private before it is public. The secret to finding great art for public spaces – and, for that matter, great art to change attitudes to disfigurement – is to find talented artists who happen to be interested in working in that arena. Then let them indulge themselves.

2.

Frankie Roberto has 3 ideas for how archives can get in on this social media stuff: open nominations for acquisitions, crowd-sourcing transcription, and child labour.

3.

More awesome from the Brooklyn Museum: they've launched a complementary game to their original collection tagging game, Tag - You're It!

Freeze Tag! encourages people to review tags that have been submitted by the public, but which have had their accuracy or relevance challenged. I've played quite a lot over the last four or five days, and it's both addictive and rewarding.


4.

A really interesting article by Robin Cembalest in ArtNews about how museum and gallery directors are reviewing their physical spaces, exhibition displays, interpretation and more, in light of both the recession and the in-reach that the social web has encouraged over the last few years via Mia Ridge)


5.

The Library of Congress releases one of Dorothea Lange's most famous images under the 'No known copyright restrictions' licence on The Commons on Flickr

6.

The Obama family is shaking up the White House decor, selecting works by Robert Rauschenberg, Ed Ruscha, Jasper Johns and Josef Alpers for display.

Image
Dorothea Lange, Destitute pea pickers in California, 1936. Library of Congress on Flickr

Two bits of awesome

Bit One

The Indianapolis Museum of Art (IMA) has thrown open the doors to ArtBabble, a delectable site that hosts art-related video from a range of organisations, including the IMA, MoMA, LACMA and SFMOMA.

Not only is the content awesome, the design is really very lovely (although I have some minor quibbles about the navigation). Read more about the project on the IMA blog, or in this NYT article.

Bit Two

The Powerhouse Museum mark 1 year on The Commons on Flickr today, and to celebrate they've released a gorgeous little print-on-demand book that presents a selection of the photos they posted to Flickr along with the commentary left by Flickr members.

This book is a lovely example of the increasing blurring of online and offline behaviour and existence: physical objects were digitised to allow virtual viewing; real people left information & responses to them online; and now these digital objects and online commentary are repackaged as a physical item (that - bless - saves cost & waste by only being physically created when someone ponys up for it).

Shine a light on me

It has been a mind-bending 10 days here at Best of 3 headquarters, what with the full immersion experience of Kiwi Foo Camp and the glories of Webstock.

Someone who blew me away at both events was Fiona Romeo, Head of Digital Media at the National Maritime Museum and Royal Observatory. The NMM is currently running what I think is one of the most exciting initiatives in the cultural/science/web matrix.

What is it? It's a photo comp. Yup, a photo comp. What's innovative about that, I hear you ask?

First off, the comp (Astronomy Photographer of the Year, 2009 edition) itself is being run using a group on the photo-sharing site Flickr.

This in itself is not super-innovative. The photos entered into the group on Flickr get displayed on the NMM website, and the ones selected by the competition judges will be displayed in a physical exhibition at the NMM.

In addition to this, the NMM plans to use the images collected in the group to build a "giant, zoomable photo-collage of the Universe". To do this, they're getting people who enter photos into the group to add astro-tags; information that helps identify where and when the photo was taken, and exactly what part of the sky is depicted.

But here's where things get very special and very interesting. The NMM is working with a group called Astrometry to add even more celestial metadata to these images. The Astrometry robot 'crawls' over every photo entered into the group, looking for patterns of star placement - 'skymarks' - that it recognises, based on a huge index of coordinates that knows. When it identifies a match between the stars in the photo and a skymark in its index, it adds all the relevant info to the image on Flickr. With each photo it crawls, the bot gets a little bit wiser and more experienced, improving its accuracy along the way and finding the gaps in its current knowledge (the index).

The thing I admire about the project is that everyone gets something out of it.

The NMM achieves its mission: "illustrate for everyone the importance of ... the stars and their relationship with people" and key objectives (I love this one) "maximizing access and inspiration for all users".

Keen astro-photographers can share their work and talk to others about it. The exhibition is not a one-off (it will be held yearly) so the community doesn't die once the institution no longer needs it to provide content. Plus, they're making an important contribution to scientific research.

And Astrometry gets a smarter bot and a positive public profile.

The topic and the language (skymarks, astro-tagging; did you know that space has its own north? It's called celestial north) are kind of magical to me. Fiona Romeo's enthusiasm was infectious. And the photos are extraordinary ....



Image: Our Milky Way Galaxy, by Sir Merv, on Flickr.

Hero image

Last week I pointed to an interview with one of my personal web heroes, Shelley Bernstein from the Brooklyn Museum.



This week's recommended media is this webcast of a presentation by Flickr and The Commons on Flickr founder George Oates. Fast-forward through the first 6 minutes or so of Smithsonian guy, and see how George has inspired the keepers of public heritage collections all around the world to set their photographs free.

Image: Paris Exposition: Salle des Fetes, Paris, France, 1900, from the Brooklyn Museum, via The Commons on Flickr

Nay, I say.

Hi there. I'm Best of 3. You might know me for my relentless support of such web phenomena as Flickr and Twitter.

Well, today I'm here to tell you that all the glistens on the web is not gold. There's a lot of hoo-ha on the wires this morning about the partnership between Google Earth and the Prado, which has resulted in 14,000 megapixel digital images of 14 of the Prado's key works being made available for intensely close-up viewing through Google Earth (which you need to download to access, so here's the link to do that).

The resolution of the images is beyond amazing; the white flecks of paint in the eyes of the Infanta in Las Meninas are easily visible, the flicks of apricot paint on the side of her cheek are centimetres long on my screen. But. It's only 14 works from the collection. There's no plan to digitise more at this level, or to work with other museums. I'm not even sure that the images are available on the Prado's own website (it's refusing to load this morning).

While I'm not as hung up as Jonathan Jones on the lack of the silvery light when you see the works in person, I'm going to favour standard digitisation and and easier method of access over extraneously high-quality, extremely limited digitisation every time.

However - the video recording how the images were made and stitched together is amazing. Enjoy (and I recommend on mute).

Tearing down the barricades

I would love, love, love to see some New Zealand museums or galleries take part in the Wikipedia Loves Art project that's just kicking off on Flickr.

The point of the project is to gather photos to illustrate Wikipedia articles. A list of desired images will be posted at the end of Jan, and then individuals or small groups can go forth and compete to collect the most shots. From the guidelines that have just been posted on Flickr:

Qualification Notes:

1) Shots submitted must be licensed with the correct creative commons license required by Wikipedia. That's got to be either "Attribution Creative Commons" or "Attribution-ShareAlike Creative Commons". There is no resolution requirement.

2) You can only shoot works of art in the public domain, so as a general rule, only works of art created prior to 1923 will be able to qualify. This will differ from country to country, so check with the Wikimedians for general help with this.

3) Images can only be taken at participating institutions (following their guidelines posted below) and must uploaded during February 2009.

4) In the caption, your images must include the object's full identification and credit line from the object's label; your team's name; and the category this image defines so that we can assign points. Each institution may ask you to tackle getting this information in different ways, so best to see the each venue's guidelines posted below for more information.

5) Images must be your own work, submitted by you.

This could be a great opportunity to engage with the Flickr community in your area - the Wellington group in particular is very strong. You'll also be in very good institutional company: Shelley Bernstein from Brooklyn Museum put out the call this morning, and LACMA, the IMA, the V&A and the Met are all on board.

Sometimes it can just be simple

The Powerhouse Museum web team are heroes of mine. Here's something super simple and effective that they've just done:



That little vid is made using some pretty standard software and a scan of a collection item. As Seb Chan said in his blog post about this:

These little 90 second videos are a very simple but effective way of ‘digital storytelling’ - something museums should be quite good at, being as they are, repositories of stories. The technology at work here is nothing more than a very high resolution original scan and a copy of the consumer-grade iMovie - something which, for us, is important to emphasise.

Good ideas trump expensive technology every time.

So so so so busy

Okay, readers. I do my best, but November is a busy month in Best of 3's real life. So posting this month is going to rely on me pointing you to things that I wish I had time to read more closely, mixed with some random observations.

On that note - if your institution is still struggling with the why-tos and where-fore-art-thou's of getting involved with Flickr, check out this great discussion on the Ideum blog, with their thoughts on understanding the platform, making time estimates, working with the community & planning for problems.

You might like to follow that up by revisiting Nina Simone's thoughts on how much time Web 2 takes.

Nina also has a valuable guide to developing social media guidelines within your organisation. What I like about it is that it focuses on providing guidance and resources, rather than telling managers to freak out in case their staff are doing a Virgin Atlantic.

Peel

Following the 'deinstallation' of a Sol LeWitt at SFMOMA, the Modern Art Museum of Fort worth shows how you take down a Kara Walker.

Dear Govett-Brewster Art Gallery; will you PLEASE set up a Flickr account & post pictures of the removal of Snow Ball Blind Time?

Model artist

Brush? Check.

Palette? Check.

Beret? Check.

Pipe? Check.

Lack of figurative elements? Check.

Hard-to-pronounce surname? Check.

All images from the Smithsonian's photostream on Flickr Commons


New York City W.P.A.; O.P. 65-1-97-2063; W.P.1 Date: 1/13/42; Photographer: Fredmacher; Negative No.: 6736-3; Location: 1947 Bdway; John Xceron on Mural Abstraction to be placed at Rikers Institute Chapel.

New York City W.P.A.; O.P. 65-1-97-2063; W.P.1 Date:1/13/42; Photographer: Fredmacher; Negative No.: 6736-2; Location: 1947 Bdway; John Xceron on Mural Abstraction to be placed at Rikers Institute Chapel.


New York City W.P.A.; O.P. 65-1-97-2063; W.P.1 Date: 1/13/42; Photographer: Fredmacher; Negative No.: 6736-4; Location: 1947 Bdway; John Xceron on Mural Abstraction to be placed at Rikers Institute Chapel.

UPDATE It occurs to me I was remiss in not giving any info about Jean Xceron (pronounced ksair-OHN). Born in Greece in 1890, he trained at the Corcoran Art School and worked for many years at the Guggenheim Museum. More info in this 1984 NYT review (thank you for the archives, NYT!)

better, better, better, better

For those of you still puzzling over my repeated statement that using a feedreader will make your life better (or at least more interesting) - check out this Common Craft video.



And also on the theme of better, a Flickr set from the IMA, showing the conservation of a Eliel Saarinen sideboard.

Last one, I promise

Okay - the final installment in my current obsession with the Flickr API - Tag Galaxy.

Is it the most efficient way of searching for images? Hell no. Is it intuitive, beautiful and surprising? Yes. Give it a try.

So beautiful it must be true

About a month ago I wrote about Multicolor search lab, a tool that let's you search Flickr images by selecting a colour palette.



Today I stumbled over another oldie-but-goodie, based on the Flickr API. retriever gives you a simple little tool to draw colour sketches, which are then matched to images in Flickr. Your drawings automatically generate urls: this was my attempt to get buildings at night time.

Again, imagine - just imagine - if you applied this search tool to your online collection. Is it for the hard core researcher? No. Is it an engrossing search experience? Yes.

Oh, go on

One of the things that interests me professionally is serendipity. How can you introduce play into search? How can you help people wade through the depths of your online collection is a way that's so elegant, so lightweight and so satisfying that they're unaware of effort, and only aware of the joy?

I played a while ago with Colr.org, which lets you build colour palettes out of selected images - the principle is, I think, that a colour image that's easy on the eye can be developed into an appealing colour palette.


This morning though I found Multicolr search lab and it's a whole new ballgame. Using Flickr's API, the tool lets you search nearly 3 million images by colour.





Now imagine that this was laid over an online collection; selecting shades of ochre, black and white would bring up McCahon, while jade and purple would give you Reuben Paterson. I could play with this thing for hours.

Images from top

Screenshot of a search on Multicolr

Colin McCahon, A grain of wheat, 1970. Acrylic on canvas. Collection of the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa. Purchased 1978. New Zealand Lottery Grants Board. From the Colin McCahon website.

Reuben Paterson, Anticipating, 2007. Foil on canvas. From the Gow Langsford website.

Three views

I love exhibition installation time. I think it's the intimacy with the work; art feels different in a packing case or leant against a wall to when it's fully installed.

That's why I'm really glad to see galleries writing about and posting pictures of exhibition installations, and sharing this feeling around. Three things that popped up in my feedreader today:


Kara Walker at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth

A post about temporary walls and crate details (no, really, you do want to read this) and a link to more construction pics on Flickr


Click! at Brooklyn Museum

The photos in this exhibition were contributed in response to an open call and judged by the community. The exhibition designer has decided to print the photos in the show at sizes that reflect their popularity with the community, an interesting physical reponse to the tag cloud aesthetic. More about the exhibition here.



The opening of the Public Gallery, West Bromwich, England

The Public Gallery is "part town planning, part regeneration, part visitor attraction, part contemporary art gallery and part media collection". A "notoriously cantankerous and rigorous" gallery designer invents a "tree structure" to cope with the architect's "interior landscape".

Go there, do that

If your institution's web presence currently consists of a website and an e-newsletter and you're wondering how to step outside the boundaries of your URL, look no further - do I have the conference for you.

The Transforming Cultural and Scientific Communication conference is being held in Melbourne, 5-6 March 2009. The conference is chaired by Angelina Russo, who works closely with Seb Chan (who's a bit of a rockstar, really, from where I sit).

You can see what the 2008 conference covered on the Social Media and Cultural Communication blog. The themes for the 2009 conference are:

Digital Change Promotion organisational change and new business models
Branding the Cultural Experience interactive strategies for brand building
Implementing a Networked Communication Strategy increasing participation through social networks
Social Media and Public Programming communicating discipline knowledge online.

If you want to get a feeling for the kind of things that are likely to be discussed at the conference, I'd take a look at the following:

> Shelly Bernstein (Brooklyn Museum) on the Museum's Web 2 activities

> Seb Chan on using social media, social media & web strategy, and resourcing for social media

> Seb and Angeline's slides from their Museums & the Web 2008 social media workshop (PDF)

And if you're not sure what I mean by 'web presence' as opposed to 'website', here's a couple of examples.

MASS MOCA, like a number of other American institutions, has a Flickr pool.

Kaliman Gallery in Sydney has just announced their Facebook presence. (BTW, Julian Dashper's show at Kaliman finishes this week).

Holding hands with Olafur

More Olafur Eliasson visitor engagement, as the SFMOMA show 'Take your time' tours to MoMA and PS1.

I recently wrote about the SFMOMA experience of trying to get visitors to the show to share and discuss their experiences. At MoMA/PS1, visitors are being invited to apply for a "special cell-phone camera" to hang around their necks. As they walk around the show the cameras take pictures at random intervals, "documenting the visitors' journeys through the exhibition in a candid and experiential way".

Some of the photos are then being incorporated to "appear in the background" of the online exhibition (which is nice, but BEFORE YOU CLICK know that it's a slow loader). I wasn't sure initially what 'in the background' meant, but I think now that it means 'underneath this long piece of expository text'. After a bit of back-and-forward buttoning, I got this page, which shows just the visitor images. (It's not listed in the nav, as far as I can see).

The online exhibition is very beautiful, btw, and has a nifty little feature where when you hover over images it displays the title and the site where the work is on show - subtle, but useful for a multi-site exhibition.

At first, I wasn't sure about this hang around your neck, random timing thing. Why not let visitors decide what to photograph and how? And then I thought, if the whole Eliasson thing is about experiencing the work, having a visitor thinking about documenting the work instead of just being in it constitutes failure (or at least, the failure of the museum to fulfil the artist's intentions).

So I came around, and although I reckon some visitors must be subverting the instructions and pointing the cameras at things they hope to photograph, I like the idea that I'm seeing fragments of people's visits in quite an unmediated way (except - god, it's always except, isn't it? that they're being selected by someone inside the museum. Maybe they could put the whole unfiltered set up on Flickr).

Image
Olafur Eliasson, 1 m3 light, 1999, photograph by Matthew Septimus. From www.ifweranit.com

The 2007 "Besties"

It's the time of the year when people start publishing their Top 10s and Best Ofs, and so Best of 3 is inaugurating the Besties.

First of: Best Online Presence

I've been incredibly impressed by the Brooklyn Museum this year. They're blogging, flickring, youtubing, myspacing, and more.

For those of you still focused on physical people through the door, it's time to think about promoting the value of the engaged virtual visitor at management level. I might visit a big exhibition at a local gallery three times, and not write about it or talk to other people about it (flatteringly).

Meanwhile, I subscribe to the BM's blog feed, I check out their Flickr page regularly, I follow their other endeavours, I write about them here, and I promote them to other people who are thinking about these kind of things. I'm more of an evangelist for these guys than I am for my local institutions - and I've never been to Brooklyn. So - what value the online visitor?