Community: bloggers@brooklynmuseum

Brooklyn Museum has just joined some of the other non-profits hosting content in the Beyond Campus area of iTunes U (tip of the hat to Despi at IMA for initial info on this). For us, the idea seemed like a good one because it allows us to host long-format content in a setting where people want to find it. Many of the Universities using iTunes U are hosting lectures and we’ve got a ton of artist talks and panel discussions, so this seemed like the right location to do it. In addition, we’ve always wanted to find an easy way our visitors could download our audio tour content right to their iPods and the iTunes U setup accomplishes this. Finally, all of our content is all in one place. We’ll still be uploading to YouTube and blip.tv as appropriate, but iTunes U gives us the ability to host everything in one location without file size and length limits.

When working with the iTunes U template, we wanted to keep our categorization as simple as possible. Most of the traffic to our own website goes to three areas: Exhibitions, Collections, and Visit. In iTunes U, you’ll find our content divided into three categories to mirror this idea. The jury is still out on if this will work for us in this venue, but we are giving it a go and keeping it simple for now. On the right hand side, we are owning the “wisdom of the crowd” and showcasing top downloaded content which seems like an interesting way to get visitors deeper into the site.

If any colleagues are thinking about doing this, feel free to give us a ring if you need any information.

I’m happy to mention that Brooklyn-based artist Paul Notzold will be bringing TXTual Healing to our upcoming Target First Saturday on May 3rd. I’ve long been an admirer of this project and am thrilled to be able to see it live and in-person in our lobby.

TXTual Healing is an ongoing series of interactive performances that encourage the creation of dialog through text messaging from mobile phones. The project harnesses the SMS capabilities of the cell phone as a medium to interact with and explore our shared public and physical space, not as a means to escape it. TXTual Healing builds community through public story telling.

Using the speech bubble as a symbol for communication, participants send text messages to a provided phone number that automatically, anonymously, and in real time, displays these messages inside the bubbles projected onto the facade of a building. The result of projecting in shared public space give participants in the street a voice as loud as the corporate and government entities who financially predetermine the information in these spaces.

TXTual Healing encourages the public sharing of thoughts, experiences and ideas using networked mobile devices that typically support more private communications. Positioning the projections next to windows, or integrating the SMS interactivity with religious, political and socially charged graphics, invites people to share their own uncensored views of the information around them in the form of interactive theater.

For our installation, Paul has adapted the system to display images from our Utagawa exhibition  and worked with our Education and Curatorial staff to give txters questions to ponder. If you are coming this Saturday, be sure to bring your cell phone and if not we will be posting photos to Flickr and hopefully a really awesome video soon after the event.

Pics in this post are from the dry run last Tuesday.  While I was in Denver for AAM, Bob was having fun testing and sending me pics (see below - very funny Bob).

ArtShare, the Brooklyn Museum’s Facebook application just won a Silver award in the Online Presence category of the American Association of Museums MUSE awards. We are in great company with the Powerhouse taking Gold for its online Collection (a project we are great admirers of).

Judges said:
“ArtShare on Facebook is a simple web application with a great, innovative concept: provide a database-driven storehouse of images for users to populate their Facebook pages with and allow users to add their own artwork. In other words, this application creates a new virtual port of entry to museum content (albeit one limited to Facebook users), that taps into the universal desire to “share ownership” of great art. By tapping into mainstream social networking, this application engages new audiences and spurs communal discussion and conversation about artwork and other collections objects. Visually, the application succeeds in retaining the clean and appealing interface of the Facebook site itself, no mean feat in the often-cluttered social networking environment. The Brooklyn Museum’s foresight and generosity in opening this application up to use by its museum peers (ArtShare now includes content from eight different museums ranging from the Metropolitan Museum of Art to the Powerhouse) preserves the integrity and authority of art and institution alike makes this application an award-winning development. Three cheers for ArtShare’s art-sharing concept, execution, and cross-museum synergy.”

ArtShare now has 2239 users and 12 institutions using the application to share their collections (with more on the way in the coming months). We intend to make some technical changes/additions as soon as Facebook completes their expected profile overhauls.

Side note, if you are at AAM this week, I’m in a session about blogging with some really awesome folks, so come by and check it out.

Update! ArtShare also won in an additional category, the Jim Blackaby Ingenuity Award (Cindy, Seb - thanks for the headsup on this).

“The Jim Blackaby Ingenuity Award was introduced in New Orleans at the 2004 MUSE awards ceremony. Jim Blackaby, a board member of the Media and Technology Committee, passed away in the summer of 2003. Jim influenced many in the museum world with his innovative work in information services and Internet strategies. Conceived in his memory, this award recognizes a project that exemplifies the power of creative imagination in the use of media and technology a project that has a powerful effect on its audience, and one that stands above the others in inventiveness and quality. The winner is selected from submissions to the MUSE awards of all categories and does not necessarily have to be a winner within the category to which it was submitted.”

Has everyone seen the fantastic work the Indianapolis Museum of Art is doing on their YouTube channel? It’s hard to miss and we’ve been watching their videos for while now in complete amazement. They’ve got a little bit of everything on their channel including staff profiles, short videos and video series from recent exhibitions and installations. I was excited to meet the folks in charge of the channel recently, Daniel Incandela and Despi Mayes, when they were visiting NYC. One of the things I love about the IMA videos is they do everything with their own in-house staff - no outside producers. It’s clear to me that there’s a lot of commitment and quality here that’s rooted in the mission of the institution. YouTube is just one part of the awesome IMA web presence. While you are at it, check out their new blog, the dashboard and the latest web feature for Breaking the Mode.

So, why am I starting this post with the IMA? Well, we just produced a short video for our exhibition © MURAKAMI and while video is not something we tend to do a lot of at the Brooklyn Museum, we are very proud of this one. “Mr. Pointy Comes to Brooklyn” was inspired by the IMA’s “LOVE MOVE“. Shot in timelapse style, our new video documents the load in and assembly of Takashi Murakami’s sculpture, Mr. Pointy, which is now on display in the Rubin Pavilion throughout the run of the exhibition. One of the things we really liked about “LOVE MOVE” was the way the IMA combined different types of footage to produce a video that could really hold your attention. We worked with the same format, combining still shots taken from the ground with timelapse shots from the roof, then shifting to a true timelapse of the sculpture being assembled.

To get some of the footage, we set up shop on the roof of one of buildings across the street from the Museum. Bob (left) and Francesca (right) almost froze up there! This part of the load in lasted all day and they shot more than 2000 images to go into the final timelapse. Those of us on the ground kept joking that they looked like snipers on the roof. Many thanks to Victor, the superintendent of the building across the street. Not only did he arrange to get us access, he provided electricity so we could power our equipment all day.

Bob hard at work and cold!

After the first day, we all got to move inside to warmer surroundings. At the same time we were shooting, Ruby Washington, a photographer from the New York Times, was here capturing shots for a piece just published in our hometown paper. Check out her great flicks in Carol Vogel’s article. We’ve also got a series of shots of our own up on Flickr if you are into the close-ups.

The view down Washington Avenue was pretty cool…note the pigeons decided to oversee the shoot!

You may notice there’s no music in the video. We really wanted to use a track from mobygratis, but we were just shy of time needed to get the approval for the track and our request is still “pending”, so it’s a bit of a silent movie right now. Once the exhibition completes its run we will have to take the video off YouTube and the flicks off Flickr, but we are thrilled we can share them with you for this limited time. Thanks to The Nugget Factory for the inspiration! Daniel, now we need advice about how to make transitions that will look good when YouTube does its compression. It looks so much better when we host it.

We are very happy everyone is logging in to evaluate submissions for Click! A Crowd-Curated Exhibition, but our technical resources are a bit unmatched for this kind of traffic.  If you are trying to evaluate and finding that images slow to load, hang tight.  We are working on the problem and should have more news soon.  You can login at any time during the evaluation period to finish up, so you don’t have to evaluate everything in one sitting.

We are launching the evaluation interface for Click! today, so I wanted to take this opportunity to write about some of the choices behind the design. In The Wisdom of Crowds, James Surowiecki asserts that for a crowd to be wise, maintaining diversity and independence are two key factors. Both issues are talked about at length in chapters two and three of the book, but here is a small sampling to give you an idea:

“Diversity helps because it actually adds perspectives that would otherwise be absent and because it takes away, or at least weakens, some of the destructive characteristics of group decision making.”

“Independence is important to intelligent decision making for two reasons. First, it keeps the mistakes that people make from becoming correlated. […] Second, independent individuals are more likely to have new information rather than the same old data everyone is already familiar with. The smartest groups, then, are made up of people with diverse perspectives who are able to stay independent of each other. ” (more…)

One of the biggest challenges we face with an exhibition like Click! is getting the word out. Click! depends on two types of participation, initial submissions from the artist community and participation from the online community who will evaluate those submissions. Getting to word out to the artist community is critical and that means we’ve been doing a lot of leg work.

Physical card distribution is still a major method of communication throughout the Brooklyn communities. Many of the local mom-and-pop establishments like cafes and bookstores have a place for card drops and announcements. As you can see, we printed a lot of cards, so we’ve been working to get them into the neighborhoods. Happily and with the help of many staff who have taken a bunch to their local hangouts, we are now down to two small stacks!

Since this is a photography show, it seemed like a good idea put announcements in all the Brooklyn-based groups on Flickr. Instead of just posting, we wrote the administrators of each group to ask permission to do so. The admins were great about getting back to us and our postings are now in place. For those of you who have never seen the Brooklyn groups on Flickr, there’s a great online community there, so spend some time checking it out.

In addition to Flickr, there’s a strong blogging community in Brooklyn and we’ve been sending information their way. To get an idea of how large and active this community is, take a look at the blogroll at The Gowanus Lounge. Also of interest, the Brooklyn blogging community hosts a monthly blogade.

And that’s not all. There are many artist collectives in Brooklyn that we’ve been contacting and, in turn, they’ve been sending notification e-mails to their lists of artists. In addition, there are photo documentation projects for certain areas and we’ve been contacting the people running them. Take a look at What’s The Hook? and the Coney Island Documentation Project for great examples.

So, this post is a bit of thanks to all those who have helped us get the word out about our open call. If you’ve sent out e-mails, allowed us to post to your Flickr group, accepted cards, installed our widget, posted to your blog - thank you! We couldn’t do this without your help and we are happy to be neighbors!

Following up on this earlier post, our new video has just been published to our YouTube feed. Many thanks to everyone who contributed to this project!

For the past several months, we’ve been working with filmmaker Matt Wolf on an upcoming video project. The video is in the final stages of editing, but I wanted to take a moment to write about the process. When we first met with Matt, he had the idea to do a rapid-fire combine of visitor portraits and objects in the collection. Because his vision was so closely tied to our mission (which considers the visitor experience paramount), we thought it might be an interesting twist if the collection photography used in piece was actually taken by our visitors.

We had been running a Brooklyn Museum Flickr group and had always been thrilled by the diversity and the quality of the shots that had been submitted to the group over the years. For the video, we selected 10 photographers who had been part of our Flickr community to participate by photographing areas of the permanent collection. Similar to our earlier Visitor Video Competition, one of the most interesting elements became how each photographer captured objects in a distinctly different way. As shots started to come in for review, I kept finding myself really looking at objects again and noticing how different the photography differed from our own. Objects that I see every day, took on new life and we hope these different takes will help show off the museum in a new way in the final video. (more…)

Having launched in early November, we now have just over 1000 people using ArtShare on Facebook. I’m happy to say we’ve been joined by five other institutions (IMA, Met, Powerhouse, V&A, Walters) with a few more on the way soon. 174 artists are using ArtShare to share their own works. To date, institutions have uploaded 438 works from their collections and artists have uploaded 754.

Those are some of the straight stats, but it probably doesn’t tell the whole story. On Facebook, the highest traffic comes from browsing profiles, so exposure to the images may be significantly higher. For instance, if each ArtShare user has 20 friends, a lot more people could be seeing the images from ArtShare being shuffled on that profile. In a nut shell, 1000 people may have installed it, but a lot more may be seeing it and while this is not the kind of traffic we can measure, it is interesting to think about.

And on that note, one of the things I find most interesting are the works in ArtShare that are most interesting to our users. Here are the top 5 selected works. Keep in mind, these top 5 shift around a lot - this is the top 5 today, not the cumulative over time. Also note, 4 of the 6 institutions are new to ArtShare, so the Brooklyn Museum and V&A collections have received more exposure over time and that’s clearly being reflected here.

We’ve received a lot of great suggestions and have some thoughts of our own to make ArtShare even better. Over time, you should expect to see user interface changes and adjustments that will enable artists using the app to better share their own work. We’d also like to work in a general stats page within the application, so the basic numbers that we’ve reported here are always available to anyone using it. However, these changes must wait until after the Brooklyn Museum’s Spring exhibition cycle when we expect our workload to lighten just a bit. In the mean time, go check out the latest works that have been uploaded - there’s a lot to choose from now!