iPod Touch for use in the Gallery
So, the idea was pretty simple: the curators of Burning Down the House: Building a Feminist Art Collection wanted our visitors to hear directly from the artists in the exhibition, so we set out to create a series of videos that would play on iPod Touches in the gallery. As most people reading this blog already know, we don’t have a lot of resources here (read: staff time) to produce video, so we needed a way to do this project without putting too much of a strain on the department. We purchased a bunch of Flip Video cameras and the curators set out to film short interviews with the artists—check these out. We were impressed with the quality of these cams, so if you are looking for a cheap and easy way shoot some video this may be a good answer for your needs—worked for us!
The iPod Touch part of the project turned out to be a bigger problem. Why iPods? Well, they are cheap and small. We are all conscious around here that too much technology can compete with the work on view and the Touches were a good fit. Small enough to be installed in a way that does not overpower the visitor experience, yet large enough screens to watch the movies and built-in touch screens to navigate a list of movie files.
iPod Touch installed in Burning Down the House seen here with Marriage Bed, 2001. Edwina Sandys (British, b. 1938). Mixed media. Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Henry Luce III and Leila Hadley Luce, 2004.29.
We were hoping to find a Museum Mode that would work for the Touch, but it doesn’t exist yet. I guess this makes sense, it took Apple a really long time to release Museum Mode the first time around and it looks like we may be waiting just as long for a version to run on this newer hardware. Best answer we could find was to use the API to create an app, but that doesn’t work either—the API won’t let you lock down the device in a kiosk-like way. No Museum Mode? No API? What’s a museum tech department to do? Our solution is not perfect, but it’s not difficult to accomplish and if you drop us a line we can point you to some existing documentation on the web that helped us.
Now that we’ve got them in the gallery, we will be watching usability closely. Apple is pretty good about providing easy-to-use interfaces, but it remains to be seen how it will translate in a situation like this one. We’ve got a fabulous team of security guards to help get feedback. I’ll be doing some of my own observation in the galleries and will report back with our findings.
Justin Heideman:
October 31st, 2008 at 4:16 pm
I wonder if there is some way that you could replace Springboard.app with your own app, thus solving the lockdown problem. This is often what people do on Macs, replace the finder with something else, and/or kill the finder in some way.
Of course, you’d need to jailbreak the iPod, which you can’t do quite yet on the 2nd gen touch.
John Wyver:
November 2nd, 2008 at 7:20 am
This is a really interesting post, and the videos are very good — they prompted me, as someone who runs a company making films about contemporary artists, to write a response thinking about our own practice on our blog at http://www.illuminationsmedia.co.uk/blog/index.cfm?start=1&news_id=123
An Xiao:
November 3rd, 2008 at 4:25 pm
This is such an awesome application for the iPod Touch. I’m thinking about the use of cell phones in exhibitions now, to let people hear about various pieces. I can imagine a similar thing for folks with iPods and other wifi-enabled devices to view the vids directly on their devices while walking around.
Cheneseau Thomas:
November 26th, 2008 at 1:07 pm
My new project :
http://www.citu.fr/wiki/index.php/Cartels_d%27identit%C3%A9s
Buzzeum | Le blog » Les utilisations alternatives de l’iPod:
January 6th, 2009 at 3:44 am
[...] il remplace bien le petit écran encastré dans le mur du musée ou la borne multimédia. Pour lire l’article de Shelley Bernstein c’est ici. Le commentaire du Walker Art Center sur cette utilisation [...]
Museums in 2034. Same as it ever was? | new curator:
January 7th, 2009 at 11:00 am
[...] Apparently, 2034 museums will act as a “respite/retreat” from technological future shock. (Someone better tell the Brooklyn Museum). [...]
Brooklyn Museum: Community: bloggers@brooklynmuseum » Does tech engage or distract?:
August 4th, 2009 at 12:08 pm
[...] here and I often find myself torn with the results. You may remember that last year, we produced a series of videos and put them on iPod Touches in the gallery. One idea behind this experiment, was to produce the videos as lo-fi as possible with the hope [...]
Breton:
October 5th, 2009 at 1:38 am
Hello, I work for an art museum in australia which is currently looking into using ipod touches. I am intrigued by this :”Our solution is not perfect, but it’s not difficult to accomplish and if you drop us a line we can point you to some existing documentation on the web that helped us.”
You wouldn’t mind doing a little bit of pointing, would you?
Shelley Bernstein:
October 13th, 2009 at 10:45 am
Breton, I just sent some stuff your way…
Camille:
November 19th, 2010 at 4:58 am
Hello,
I work for a Museum in Belgium, and I wanted to know a little bit more about all this stuff, because we are thinking to give iPods to our visitors during the visit. Some advice ?
Kain:
December 21st, 2011 at 10:43 pm
Hi Shelley, I would also appreciate some tips for a ipod touch “museum mode” tour of our gardens.
Shelley Bernstein:
January 4th, 2012 at 11:31 am
Hi Kain,
To my understanding, Apple still has not provided a museum mode for ipod touch devices or iphones. I believe most museums are utilizing cases that cover the home buttons as a solution.