This American Life

If you've never heard of the Chicago Public Radion This American Life programme, treat yourself at your computer today (yeah, I know you're reading this at work).



TAL are hour-long, thematic broadcasts, where a range of takes on a topic are presented. I've just done an hour of content loading while listening to How to talk to kids, which included 10-year-olds on what adults do wrong when trying to talk to them; two 20-year-old stand up comedians who fail miserably to impress at school camp; and a group of teens who edit a magazine about sex on the birds and the bees talk.

Try the TAL favourites page, or the full archive. You can also subscribe via iTunes.

The Great Tate Mod Blog

Tate Modern have launched a blog inviting the public to submit images & ideas to help them "create a photographic 'Mood Board' of the kind of interior spaces, ambience and designs that people would like to find" in the Herzog and de Meuron-designed planned extension.




Currently the blog features "posts" by Jacques Herzog, Nicholas Serota and Culture Secretary James Purnell. It'll be interesting to see what the take-up is like: the "best photos and ideas" will be displayed at the Tate next year.

A more low-tech way of approaching this would be just to put comment boards up in the gallery, and allow visitors to scribble ideas, tack up images, or draw. An interesting idea Auckland Art Gallery and City Gallery Wellington could look into for their redevelopments, as a way of engaging their audiences.

Image from the Guardian website

The GLAMS sector

Returning to the NDF conference ....

One of the most interesting moments of the conference was when a session chair asked for a show of hands, to see what kind of instition people who were attending the conference worked at. The results looked something like this:



That blue sliver is 'galleries' - and it's probably over represented. About 3 people out of 300 raised their hands when 'galleries' was called out by the chair.

Three things worry me about this. First, the NDF conference (not so much this year, but definitely last year) is a great place to learn about what cultural orgainisations are doing online to increase and serve their audiences. Last year's presentations by Seb Chan from the Powerhouse Museum and a nice fellow from the V&A were total eye-openers.

Second, NDF is currently the most obvious manifestation of what's being called in political dialogue "the GLAMs sector": galleries, libraries, archives and museums. I'm not sure that art galleries are aware that they're meant to be part of this group - or that they're being represented on a national level by this body.

And third - this reinforces my feeling that compared to some of our other cultural instititions, galleries are really not that interested in working collaboratively, sharing information and ideas, or even just hanging out together.

Lighter reading

Hummm. Today's post (below) might be kinda heavy going. For more relaxed reading, try Jerry Saltz on the New Museum, or Charles Isherwood on Donor Graffiti.

Co ..... operation

Last week I was at the National Digital Forum conference (more about which tomorrow) and the presentation that really interested me was by Paul Rowe from Vernon Systems, the company that provides cataloguing software to many of New Zealand's larger arts and collecting institutions.

Vernon Systems have been selected by National Services Te Paerangi to redevelop the (admittedly, currently horrendous) NZ Museums website. Currently a very basic directory, the site is going to be redeveloped into a web presence for members institutions' events, exhibitions and collection information.

The thing that really got me excited about this is that Vernon are producing a web-based version of their cataloguing system. Currently, smaller institutions without access to IT support can't afford the staff or techcosts of getting their collection information into a database that can be made publicly accessible.

The web application that Vernon is building - eHive - will allow organisations to catalogue online - the same that email services like Hotmail and Gmail allow you to email online. Organisations can sign up, then start creating records and loading up images (I think the figure of $250 a year for 5GB of files was given).

eHive will have a public and a private side. On the public side, web visitors will be able to browse the collection - like on the Auckland Art Gallery site. On the private side, organisations will be able to load up information like insurance values and condition reports.

Putting eHive behind the NZMuseums site means that people will be able to search across multiple collections at the same time (see for comparison Matapihi or CollectionsAustralia). If the big organisations that are using Vernon currently choose to import their data into eHive, it could potentially turn into an incredibly useful resource.

I think the success of the eHive system and the NZMuseums site will come down to training and standards. It's one thing to provide the technology - it's another to ensure that the Kauri Museum or Southland Art Gallery are making good digital images of their collection items, and cataloguing them in a useful (publicly and internally) way. I think the site will also need some kind of editorial control - as I understood it, there'll be the functionality to feature certain c0llections adn items on the homepage, form themed groupings, stuff like that.

I'm assuming that National Services has some sort of arrangement with Vernon whereby if the business ceases to be interested in providing the service (and hosting the files), it can all be brought in-house. But it was just really exciting to see an initative that's both about opening up access to collections for the public, and about collaborating to obtain essential services that small institutions can't otherwise access.

Back soon

Best of 3 is away for a few days - back posting next Tuesday.

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

Follow my mental leaps

Over the net have dissected today the over-done ( under-done?) lighting of the Bill Hammond survey show Jingle Jangle Morning at City Gallery Wellington. As they point out, the lowered ambient light and strong spot lighting in one of the galleries has created some problems: glare which makes the works harder to see, dimness which prompts visitors to step over the lines to see details and read wall texts, and an unfortunate side effect of turning some of the works into lightboxes.

So far, the lack of lighting does not appear to have caused injury - for example, people walking into walls. You may scoff, but take the example of the Tate's current installation by Doris Salcedo, Shibboleth, a crack running the length of the Turbine Hall which has, in the first 4 weeks of showing, resulted in 15 reported accidents.

Dennis Ahern, the Tate’s head of safety and security, said: “With Shibboleth this hazard differs from equitable ones in that physical protection measures which would normally be applied to a gap of this nature are not deemed appropriate due to its artistic nature.” By which I think he means: "apparently it's art, so we can't board it up like we normally would".

In other art-related danger news: you would need a very large piece of board indeed to cover up Urs Fischer's latest work in New York, (as reviewed by Jerry Saltz). A sign at the door says: THE INSTALLATION IS PHYSICALLY DANGEROUS AND INHERENTLY INVOLVES THE RISK OF SERIOUS INJURY OR DEATH.

Memories ....

Is anyone else in Wellington having brand flashbacks?


Everytime I see the logo for the 2008 New Zealand International Arts Festival, I'm taken back to the cricket clubs of my childhood, and men with moustaches drinking crate bottles of DB Draught.


Thanks to a visual mondegreen, for me it's now indelibly the DB New Zealand International Arts Festival.

breaking news

UPDATE Russell brown's latest comment on the thread:

Which brings me to: My Hobbyhorse: I would dearly love to see a modest contestable fund to which individuals could apply to have a work digitised by the archive that holds it.

Archives and libraries spend forever debating what to digitise. No one seems to grasp the fact that not every decision has to be top-down, and that part of what is digitised (and, ideally, made freely available thereafter) should be things that members of the public have a use for.

Artbash Aficionados and Hamish Keith have climbed on to the Hard News wagon: Russell Brown's discussion of the NZETC's recently released 19th century 'Maoriland' novels having turned into a whinge about, among other fine details, how much it costs to obtain images of collection items from the Hocken ....

Hard News: Maoriland Calling

hell yeah

For me, science is like art. I don't know much about it, but I know what I like - and that includes reading stuff by people who do (and who make it accessible). Every year I buy this series and this series, and I currently have a big old intellectual crush on this guy.

Bogus science gets me hot under the collar. For this reason, I'm really looking forward to reading Ben Goldacre's review of homeopathy research today.

Side column: Even noticed how science has the best words? Quantam theory. Half-life. Heavy water. 'Noggin' and 'sonic hedgehog' are both morphogens (morphogens!) critical to the proper development of the human embryo. I could go on ...

Design Review - now online

Maybe I'm a paper-sniffing library geek, but I was thrilled to find out that the NZETC has digitised all 29 issues of the 1940s-50s journal, the New Zealand Design Review.



It's transcribed, text-searchable, and has scans of each page, including the ads, some of which are to die for. Your modernist soul will delight in:

E Mervyn Taylor on letterhead design

Two houses by Ernst Plischke

Would a flat suit you?

A house in Stokes Valley - Bill Toomath