Read all about it

Seb Chan over at the Powerhouse Museum has been blogging up a storm as a bunch of new sites and apps roll off the production line ...

First up, there's the Sydney Design 2011 site, mobile site and app (built by Mob Labs, based on an idea by Toko, and produced by the Powerhouse), which Seb describes as the most decentralised web presence for the event yet; partners use an instance of the Powerhouse's helpdesk tool to submit events for editorial review. At the end of the post Seb observes

Mob Labs did a great job on the mobile site which has some nifty swipe interface action and geo-location in mobile browsers – give it a go on an iPhone, Android or Blackberry and see. And once the native App goes live we’ll be able to see how many iOS users choose the App over the Mobile Web version of the site.

Maybe this year will be the last time we feel we need both a mobile website and an App.

Next, there's Go Play, a site and mobile app that pulls together kids holiday events across multiple agencies. Here the Powerhouse seems to be working as a R&D lab for the NSW government, selected to solve a problem on the basis of their well demonstrated digital acuity. Seb's post outlines the need and audience for the site, as well as the development process.

Then there's the online exhibition catalogue and app for 'Love Lace', a new Powerhouse exhibition. I found Seb's post about this piece of work particularly interesting, as they've found ways to solve previous issues they had with QR codes:

To solve one of the big problems with QR codes – that people just can’t be bothered downloading a QR code reading application (or firing it up if they do have one), our internal developer Carlos Arroyo has built the exhibition iPhone and Android App with the QR code scanner built in! This means anyone who downloads the exhibition App – itself a full catalogue of the exhibition designed for in-gallery supplementary browsing now also has their QR scanner at their finger tips.

If you're not subscribed to Fresh + Newer, you really should be. Seb never posts filler or fluff; it's always useful, usable information, which often makes you think not just 'why didn't I think of that?' but 'what if we couyld do things like that?'.

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).

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.

Disjunct

Last week I was at a cultural sector web conference which left me thinking further about the relationship between galleries online (virtual - yuck, hate that word) and offline (physical) presences.

I'd started thinking about this about a week ago, when I visited the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney for the first time. I'm an avid follower of the Powerhouse online - their website, online collection, dhub, work on Flickr, and Seb Chan's Fresh + Newer blog. The Powerhouse is an incredibly sophisticated user of and contributor to the web, very user-focused, very much about tapping into and assisting communities, and always very close to the 'bleeding-edge' of developments.

So it was quite weird when I visited the Museum offline to not have this experience replicated physically. To begin with, I was quite taken aback that there's an entrance fee - not because this fact is at all hidden on their site, but because their online work is so open and generous that charged entry seemed disjunctive.

Secondly, the entry lines are a bit of a mess - and god, didn't the poor kid administering them know it, telling us that he'd lost count of the number of times he'd told Visitor Services that visitors got confused and pissy.

But over all, the physical experience didn't mirror my online experience. It wasn't as elegant, the design wasn't as good, I never saw a floor person (the web services are very "friendly"), the shop was jumbly and unfocused and didn't appeal to my niche interests (which is what the web is all about).

These criticisms could be applied to almost any institution. The thing was, my expectations of my 'visitor experience' were sky-high, because I thought it would match my online experience. In general, it's the other way around (a so-so online experience is exceeded by the real visit - the AGNSW on- and off-line experiences being on about a par). So, if you run a gallery or museum website, here's some questions to ask yourself:

-- Is your online branding and design work as good as your exhibition and print design?

-- Do people answer questions submitted online as quickly as they'd answer them in real/physical life?

-- Do online visitors have access to the same kind of information physical visitors have (esp. wall panels, essays, curatorial insights....)

-- Is it as easy to find out what exhibitions and events are happening online as it is in your foyer?

-- Can you make bookings and buy things online simply and without having to hand over any more info than you would offline?

-- Is a visit to your website the same kind of experience as a visit to your real space?

Here's a quick test. Ask someone (who doesn't work with you) to sit down and explore your site for a minute or two. Then ask them: if this site was a car, what kind of car would it be? And if they call you a people-mover when you think you're really a Ferrari, you have some work to do.*

*PS please do not ever use this focus-group question too seriously. Really, what's the likelihood that anyone will ever identify you as the beautifully restored classic finned 50s Cadillac you think you are? Sometimes it's just good to motivate yourself with a little self-flagellation.

Smells like modernism

It was lovely to be greeted at the entrance to the Powerhouse Museum's Modern Times exhibition by non-other than that international artist we love to clasp to our parochial bosoms, Len Lye.*



Looking at the show from a New Zealand perspective, it was interesting to note the similarities and differences.

The wave of European refugees in the late 1930s and early 1940s had a similar effect in Australia to that in New Zealand - particularly in terms of architecture, and I'd like to see a Antipodean modernist architecture show. One of the differences that quickly became apparent was that while NZ was still firmly fixated on Britain, and London was the place to go for aspiring artists right into the 1960s, Australian artists turned their eyes towards America much earlier.




One favourite part of the show was seeing Margaret Preston's Implement blue displayed with swatches of paint samples and colour wheels - according to the exhibition info, the work was named after a paint colour, although that's not what the AGNSW says.**




Another was seeing the maquette for and correspondence over Alexander Calder's Crossed Blades (1967) commissioned to sit outside Harry Seidler's Australia Square building. The correspondence had been arranged into a collage by Penelope Seidler, and while that's probably not a conservator's dream, it suited the very personable tone of the letters, and in particular Sandy's wee sketch of the sculpture with jokey two human faces on the uprights.

Now, some gripes. For a design exhibition in a design museum, the lighting was often crappy (a dark-toned Grace Cossington-Smith practically disappeared behind its glass barrier) and the signage crooked or confusingly placed. Several interactives were inactive (including the colour-theory spinning tops, which I really wanted to try).

And a suggestion. This review of Sanchez and Turin's afore-mentioned book Perfume: The Guide ponders how a perfume like Guerlain's Après l’Ondée could be fitted into "an exhibition of Edwardian art and design where it so obviously belongs, the olfactory equivalent of what Yeats called “the faint mixed tints of Conder”, alongside many other nearly contemporaneous manifestations of the beautiful pre-war cult of paleness?".

Likewise for Modern Times. The exhibition had interior design, art, architecture, advertising, ceramics, film, textiles - you name it. How about a few bottles of Chanel No. 5, Je Reviens, Joy, or Shalimar?


*The fit between the curve of the jaw and the deco-y plinth is hilarious, but also rather beautiful.

**Hmmm. "Implement blue' represents the extremity of Margaret Preston's pictorial pursuit during the late 1920s, and has rightly become regarded as one of the iconic images of early modernist Australian painting. But its very simplicity of design, which Preston could not sustain for more than a couple of years, belies a problem resolved through brief resistance to her natural predilection. For in spite of the domesticity of its motif, Implement blue signified a conquest over the real potency of her female sensibility." Barry Pearce, 2005.

Images

Rayner Hoff, Decorative portrait (Len Lye), 1925. Marble, 30.5 x 22.5 x 16.5cm. Purchased 1938. Art Gallery of New South Wales. Image from the AGNSW website

Margaret Preston, Implement blue,1927. Oil on canvas on hardboard. Gift of the artist 1960. Art Gallery of New South Wales. Image from the AGNSW website.

Alexander Calder, Crossed Blades, 1967. Steel. Australia Square, Sydney. Image from the Art Business website.

Blogging for fun and profit

The Powerhouse Museum, Sydney, has just launched a new blog, Photo of the Day. As the title indicates, the blog features a new photo each day.


The interesting thing is that the photos aren't drawn from the Powerhouse's collection. Instead, they're photos from the Powerhouse's Image Library, taken by their Image Services staff for exhibition, publicity or research purposes. The blog is tightly linked in the site architecture to information about the Photo Library - where people can place orders for images. Very savvy.




Two other interesting aspects of the blog; all the images on it are hosted on Flickr - automatically cretaing a second audience opportunity for little effort (although placing them at Flickr's mercy: images at the tail end of the blog are missing right now, and showing a Flickr apology note).

And a nice navigational device: instead of listing post titles or categories, visitors can browse the blog using the calendar function.

Images from the Photo of the Day blog

Back next Tuesday

Best-of-3 is taking a short break - posting resumes on 14 August. In the meantime, treat yourself to some back issues:

Where are the art gallery blogs?

Irresistable: Florentijn Hofman's riff on giant inflatable art

Sharing the love: how much should the dealer's cut be?

Advice for collectors ... what's the deal with art advisors?

A better breed of art fair ? ... Gallery Weekend Berlin

Free tools for free lancers

Opening up access to collections: the Powerhouse story

Opening up access to collections

People often gripe that at any time, a museum or gallery will only have 5-10% of its collection out on display.

The Powerhouse Museum in Sydney has made a move to improve this statistic, opening its Castle Hill storage and preservation centre up to the public, not just for a special event, but on a permanent basis. They've set up a new website to profile the venture:

Powerhouse Discovery Centre website

The Castle Hill centre houses 40% of the Powerhouse's collections (by volume), or about 50,000 objects. Sadly, you can't just roll up and visit - access is somewhat mediated via:

• monthly public open days
• quarterly community field days
• themed supervised tours into stores on site
• educational programs and workshops, tours for school groups and special-interest groups school holiday programs
• community engagement programs
• regional partnership events
• specialist/industry and professional development programs.

As well as looking at the objects when you visit, you can get more information about the collection through the Powerhouse's online database, available on OPACs in internet-connected kiosks throughout the space.

Image from the Powerhouse Discovery Centre website

Museum blog survey

Ideum are currently running a survey to collect info about museum-related blogs, for presentation at the Museums and Web Conference in San Francisco in April 2007. The session that Jim Spadaccini (Ideum) and Sebastian Chan (Powerhouse Museum, Sydney) are presenting their findings in is called 'Radical Trust: the state of the museum blogosphere'.

Ideum's museum blog survey

More about Jim and Seb's conference session

FYI: "radical trust" here is defined as 'taking the big step to trust (radically) the community online'. what I'd like to see is "radical trust" being defined as 'taking the big step to trust (radically) the community to look at art works in museums and galleries without the need for big ugly barriers'. Maybe I should survey people on that.

Bear with me

I know social tagging is hardly a revelation, but over the past year I've heard a lot about it in various presentations and conversations with colleagues. I'm particularly interested in the way that arts institutions are looking to tagging as a way to enhance the search functionality of their online collections. Examples of New Zealand institutions who have put their collections (or slices of them) up online include:

Auckland Art Gallery
Te Papa
Christchurch Art Gallery
Alexander Turnbull Library
Matapihi (a site that gives users access to the online collections of about 12 partner institutions).

Tagging (for people who aren't far behind me) allows users to contribute keywords to internet resources (like web pages, videos, images and blog posts) that are not controlled by a central vocabulary. Sites like Flickr, del.icio.us and YouTube are exponents of social tagging. The benefits of tagging include enhanced personal organisation of digital resources, spam detection, social networking and improved search functionality.

It's these last two aspects that arts institutions have jumped on. On the one hand, they're all excited about the sexy Web 2.o idea of users actively engaging with an contributing to their collections and sites. On the other hand, there's the way that tagging might / will be able to make online collections easier and more rewarding to search.

The 'problem' (not everyone's convinced that this is a problem) that tagging could fix is that the language used by curators, registrars and collection managers when cataloguing items is not necessarily the language used by the public.

For example - and not to pick on Te Papa, although god only knows why they're using rough images, not clearcut ones, on their site - when you search on the Te Papa Collections Online database using 'otago landscape' as your simple search keyword, you get this: Haru Sameshima's St Bathans, and Colin McCahon's Otago landscape no 2.

Among the artworks you don't get: Rita Angus's Central Otago and McCahon's Otago Peninsula.

The idea is that social tagging could help users to find items using keywords that aren't being used to describe the objects by the institutions. There are debates, of course, about the usefulness of user-contributed tags. People start throwing around terms like 'faceted tags'. The US Steve Museum project has just received funding to research questions like this.

Steve Museum

Sydney's Powerhouse Museum has produced a 2.0 version of their online catalogue that includes not just tagging, but Google-type features such as the 'people who searched for A also looked at X, Y and Z', all aimed to encourage 'serendipitous discovery'.

Powerhouse online collection database

Image: from del.icio.us