London offerings

London is always offering up challenging new art installations, and though it may not be the centre of the universe for contemporary art aficionados, it manages to regularly juxtapose the old with the new in exciting ways.

I hot footed it to two such artworks this week, with mixed results.

In the fabulous plaster court at the V&A there is an installation entitled 'The Tower of Babel', in the form of a 6 metre cone of nearly three thousand ceramic houses with photographic images of street fronts on them. It sounded sort of interesting, but, well it sort of wasn't, failing for me to engage in anyway with the rather bemused statues around it. Perhaps I can cite the label to explain why I moved on rather smartly: "Barford playfully likens our efforts to find fulfilment through retail to the biblical Tower of Babel's attempt to reach heaven. His seemingly precarious Tower poses questions about our society and economy, celebrating London's retailers, yet exposing the divide between rich and poor." MONA has a word for such stuff.

'The Tower of Babel' at the V&A

Down the road however, the great Ai Weiwei has installed half a dozen massive trees in the forecourt of the Royal Academy, and the juxtaposition of that rich 18th century Palladian mansion and these stark bolted leaf-less limbs is breathtaking. They are part of a major retrospective exhibition, and alright perhaps I am a little biased, because I haven't washed my hands since I found the great man himself wandering around and shook his hand, but others seem to agree (see this article published in the Guardian).

Tree sculptures by Ai Weiwei 

installed in the courtyard of the Royal Academy of Arts, London

What is particularly interesting about the trees is that their inclusion in the exhibition only came about through crowdsourcing. Working with Kickstarter, the Royal Academy raised 123,500 pounds from 1,319 backers, all of whom are listed on two great banners as you go up the main stairs.

Inspirational on two fronts - the art itself, and the action by which it came to be in London.

Harnessing technology to add to the museum visitor experience

Despite being quiet on the issue for a few months, I remain fascinated by where technological developments will aid the museum visitor, as in my previous blogs (see links at end of blog).

I am in no doubt that we are drawing closer to each visitor's own smartphone being able to provide:

• location specific content at whatever level and in whatever language the visitor chooses.
• dynamic way-finding that guides the visitor wherever they want to go, suggesting objects of interest tailored to the visitor's viewing patterns along the route.
• rich data to the museum on visitor patterns, and dwell times.

At the moment despite a great deal of noise in this area over the last five years, visitors to museums are still relying on good old labels and storyboards, along with that stalwart supplier of extra information, the audio guide, albeit vastly advanced from the old cassette tape days.

We can visit MONA and see what the world looks like in a label-less museum, and we can test a great array of apps, and NFC technologies (RFIDs and QR codes being the dominant). And though I have yet to experience it, the Cleveland Museum of Art's Gallery One project does seem to be hitting the mark in providing a value-add to visitors  - check out the New York Times article 'Technology that serves to enhance not distract' for a good summary.

We can ruminate on how Google Glass is going to change our world. The latest edition of the UK Museum Association's on line journal looks at the potential for Google Glass to 'recognise' artworks and provide additional text on the wearer's screen along with audio feedback. To learn more on this, check out GuidiGo.com who have partnered with Google's 'Glass at Work' program to develop mobile guides  for museums. However Google Glass is currently far too expensive in terms of hardware and content development cost to be a serious tool in museum interpretation.

If you want to spend a day on line at a webinar, tune into the New Media Consortium's Virtual Symposium on the future of museums on 23rd July.  It will be looking at advances in both BYOD (bring your own device) and location based services.

My take on all this? The process is taking far longer than we all thought for these technologies to move into mainstream use, as they all currently have limitations. A fundamental reason is that the user cannot see much added value, so until the content gets substantially richer and the experience of viewing the artwork or object that much greater, visitors are going to quickly switch off.  And this richer content requires a heap more work from curators, at a time when curators remain a somewhat  threatened species within museums and certainly not well resourced to produce this extra overlay of information.

In the year when the number of active mobile phones is due to overtake the planet's population, we need to be ready to work out how the visitor experience can be maximised in an all pervasive mobile world.

Previous relevant blog posts:

• QR codes and visual recognition
• QR codes - the discussion continues
• Mobiles and museums - the next stage
• The real via the virtual - Google Art expands
• Mobile connectivity and museums
• New technologies in the museum sector
• Providing rich media content
• QR codes, RFIDs and Goggles
• Museums mobiles and apps

Labels or no labels

Should galleries allow the art to speak for itself or should they provide information and interpretation for visitors? asks an article in the December 2011 UK Museums Journal.  It’s a question that is as old as art itself, with two components.The first is how much interpretive material should be provided, the dilemma described by Nicholas Serota of the Tate as that of ‘experience or interpretation’ i.e. either helping visitors experience a sense of discovery in looking at artworks or leaving them to find themselves ’standing on the conveyor belt of history ‘ (great quote!). 

The second component is how that interpretation is physically imparted. The common label is under some threat at present, witness the label-less MONA (see blog) and experiments that National Gallery in London has been trialing (having no labels but a pocket size guide book for visitors), and the Getty in LA (exhibiting a room full of Rembrandts with no labels for 4 weeks before they put the labels up). Whilst the National Gallery speaks favourably of visitor reaction to their trial, the Royal Academy note that  visitors struggle without them. Kathleen Soriano of the RA noticed that ‘ the absence of labels can make audiences quite nervous. They tend to walk past more quickly’. 

And of course this is also where technology is making serious inroads in offering new ways of ‘seeing ‘ art.  Whilst the Getty substituted no other form of interpretive material for their label-less Rembrandts, MONA provides a highly sophisticated iPod touch info package. 

In between there are lots of new techniques that can be tried. I visited the National Gallery of Denmark over Christmas where in their splendid newly refurbished European galleries, they have included as well as labels;

a)         a large touch table in the first gallery where the highlights of each successive gallery are able to examined in  detail as a taste of what is to come

b)         each gallery has  a small ‘break out’ area, literally an open topped cubicle, where one painting only is hung with a seat to contemplate and earphones for audio information

c)         a series of desks with board games for kids down the middle of one of their major galleries, with the games answers derived from the surrounding paintings.

Museums and the Web last year concentrated on the critical role the mobile was beginning to play in museums .  Much of course has happened since, and it seems amazing that we were discussing then how some art museums still did not permit mobiles. Smartphone use has now passed 50% of all mobile use and web access via mobile overtaken desktop access.

So a number of papers at Museums and the Web 2012 last week looked at strategies to deal with this fast changing world.  Messages I picked up from them included:

• Know your audience and environment – mobile delivery of content via smartphones or multi media devices is not always applicable. Some visitors choose to come as a fun family outing, and accessing content whetrhe visual or audio through mobiles  can provide solitary experiences that do not enhance this.

• Awareness of apps that can be downloaded onto your own smartphone is still low (people imagine that the museum’s equipment has to be used as at MONA) or visitors can be wary of app use (they presume it will cost them as part of their plan or can expose them to viruses).

• Be aware that no one has quite sorted out the business model, i.e. whether apps or providing iPod touchs should be free

Check out particularly relevant papers at:

You've Gone Mobile, Now What?

and

What's On TAP ? Strategies for keeping pace with rapid changes in mobile technology

But returning to the label debate, we will never completely ditch them, but I continue to believe that hand held devices as the principal interpretive tool are going to be the way of the immediate future.

Julian Bickersteth
Managing Director
internationalconservationservices

Google matters

A quick note on the fast moving world of Google and particularly how it impacts on the museum world.

I blogged on Google Art in March and April - a new initiative that involves providing 'street views' of the contents of 17 of the great art galleries around the world, and high resolution images of selected artworks.

Google Goggles is a visual recognition app that has been around since 2009. It is like the music recognition app Shazam, except it does it visually rather than by audio. It has focused on two areas to date namely architecturally recognisable buildings and wine labels. The former I could understand, but why the latter had taken the fancy of the folks at Google was not entirely clear – apparently there are enough wine connoisseurs out there who want to photograph a wine label and find out whether the bottle is worth $10 or $100.

However, the application of using a visual search engine activated not by putting in key phrases but by taking a picture with your smartphone has been begging to be applied to artworks, and finally Google has announced they have teamed up with the Getty to "Goggles-enable" (don’t you love the phraseology!) their permanent collection. Read all about it in the LA Times.

How it works is that you take a picture of any of the Getty paintings during your visit and instantly access information about the painting. You can also hear commentary from artists, curators and conservators on the works of art themselves.

The Getty has been trialing ways in which they can provide more information to visitors than fits on a wall label for some years. They pioneered the so-called ‘Getty Guides’, a mp3 player format that provided an advance on the audio guide concept by including images, but it was not found to be taken up with much enthusiasm by visitors.

The bigger picture is whether we are moving to a label free world in museums, as MONA in Tasmania is pioneering (see my blog). My view is that we shall never dispense with the label but the opportunities that smartphones in particular are providing for seriously enriching access to information on what is being viewed are only going to multiply.

Julian Bickersteth
Managing Director
internationalconservationservices

Museums, Smartphones and mobile applications

Where are apps at? Well the first thing to be aware of is the speed with which take up of smartphones is occurring. New Nielsen figures show 24% of internet users (isn't that the entire planet now?) are considering buying a Smartphone over the next year. Last year a trifling 269.6 million smartphones were shipped worldwide, a substantial improvement over the 173.5 million number from 2009!

And we know that the museum sector is embracing this aspect fast, judging by the rollout of site specific apps for them.

Here are a few:

• MoMA’s app, so far downloaded over 400,000 times, offers a selection of audio tours with images and videos and access to one fifth of the museum's collection.
• The American Museum of Natural History’s app is neat with the app Explorer allowing you to share finds in the Museum with your own networks on Facebook and Twitter .
• The LA County Museum of Art has been an early player in the museum tours using apps.
• The Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam was one of the first in the world to offer an audio tour in the 1950s, and they also have been early pioneers of app use.
• In Madrid the Reina Sofia Museum is focusing purely on audio programing in an effort to keep visitors' eyes on the artworks, providing four audio podcasts that can be downloaded onto smartphones.
• The Nelson Atkins Museum of Art allows you to interact with over 200 works of art in the permanent collection. One of the problems of working out whether these apps are any good is finding out quite what their offering is. The Nelson Atkins allows you to preview.
• Check out also the Dallas Museum of Art.

Where does the audio tour now sit in all of this? Well one issue is that you normally have to pay for an audio tour either as a stand alone purchase or as part of a special exhibition ticket. App downloads to date cost nothing, although the Stedelijk is considering offering a premium edition for which there would be a charge. This is going to have to change.

And the next issue is that audio tour providers who have had control of this aspect of museum visits are going to need to work out how they embrace Smartphones. Judging by the websites of the two leading players internationally, Antenna Audio is not there yet but Acoustiguide is fast developing an offering for this space.

And finally the MONA experience about which I blogged last week is an interesting one. Although not strictly an app, it is relevant to this issue. MONA has purchased 1340 iPod touches, which are provided free to visitors. No exhibit has a label, with all content delivered via the iPod. Two separate Wi-fi systems are used, one for content delivery, and the other being a real time location system (RTLS). No guidance is given on the basis that visitors should be able to navigate according to their free will. It is an interesting (and I suspect immensely costly in terms of R&D) experiment that we shall all be watching closely. My first use of it, admittedly in the hurly-burly part of the opening, was positive, and certainly the data that MONA can gather on visitors, the path they take, what they like (and don’t) is going to substantially add to the value of these technologies for museum evaluation.

But on that matter await another blog!

Julian Bickersteth
Managing Director
internationalconservationservices

MONA and the Wow factor

We have been helping MONA, the Museum of Old and New Art in Hobart, with a whole range of conservation issues over the last eighteen months, so I was lucky enough to be asked to the opening on Friday 21st January.


And my goodness what an opening it was! The morning rain cleared, so the ferry ride from Constitution Dock up the Derwent showed off Hobart at its prettiest (takes c20 minutes and is the BEST way to approach the Museum), and we were then deposited at the pier from which a flight of steps takes one up onto the top of the Museum, rather like going up the side of a pyramid. A scene of great splendour met us assisted by a vast array of fine Tasmanian food, and wine and beer from the adjacent Morilla Winery, including the famous Moo Brew beer. Standing there in the evening light looking out over the enchanting vista of the Derwent River and the hills rising to Mt Wellington, helped no doubt with a glass or two of the Moo Brew, our senses were certainly heightened for all that MONA was going to reveal.

From there a large circular staircase, rather like, but on a smaller scale, than the Vatican Museums staircase carries visitors down to the lowest floor of the Museum to begin the tour. The staircase has been cut into the sandstone, and at its base one passes through a passage way of two spectacular rock faces with shades of entering Petra. And it was quite a spectacle that greeted us. Apart from tables literally laden with food of all descriptions, all beautifully arranged like Dutch still life paintings, the art is everywhere. There is no chronological or thematic sequence, and no labels, and one wanders through antiquities and contemporary art all interposed.

And does it work? – impossible to tell with such a crowd there, but my gut feel is that this is something pretty special that is going to have a major impact on the Australian museum sector. The controversial items, particularly those themed on sex and death, did not seem to me to be as shocking as I thought they might be, but what I did get a feel for was the wonderful use of space and vistas and voids that the architect and museum team have achieved. It is a truly awesome building which constantly appears to have been designed around the art (which I think is what has actually happened in a number of cases).

One particular feature is the lack of labels, with all content provided via iPhone. These are handed out at the entrance (and hopefully collected on the way out, though I did constantly hear the alarm at the exit going off during the evening – absent minded guests?), along with some minimal instruction on their use. Perhaps because of the party atmosphere, no one was particularly listening to the instructions, so I did hear people asking each other how it works and getting somewhat exasperated with their use. When you are in front of an artwork you push the update button and the iPhone works out where you are, and identifies the artworks in your vicinity. The information is a simple image and artist and artwork details, but there are further options to get more information on the artwork and artist, read a quirky view on it (these apparently change so your next visit may reveal something different), listen to some audio, and also vote on whether you like it or not. At some stage to keep the iPhone live, you have to type in your email address, a neat idea for keeping in contact with visitors, sold as MONA being able to keep you updated and also advise how long you spent in front of each artwork. I liked it, but suspect it is going to need quite a bit more refining and visitor instruction to fulfil its potential.

Above all it is a place with undoubted Wow factor. Ignore the costs (reputedly $70m for the building housing a $100m collection) and ignore the questions as to whether some of the offerings are actually art. MONA has moments of taking your breath away. It is a stunning new attraction on the museum scene and one that I would encourage you to visit as soon as you can. Check out a couple of reviews from The Punch and Taste Travel.

Julian Bickersteth
Managing Director
internationalconservationservices

Digitial delusion or a real new age for museums?

I have been challenged this week by a blog from Medical Museion at the University of Copenhagen entitled ‘The Digital Delusion’. Challenged, because I thought I would be blogging to disagree with the blog’s premise, namely that the future for museums does not lie in digitisation, but the more I think about it, the more I actually agree.


Let me explain my position. The concept of getting collection information online by the process of digitisation is one I believe must be supported at every level, so that information can be accessed, cross referenced and understood. I came across a beauty this week at Hortus Camdensis. This is an illustrated online catalogue of the 3300 plants grown by Sir William Macarthur at Camden Park, south of Sydney, between 1820-1860. Combined with garden records of the time, including Sir William’s diaries, essays on laying out an orchard in Colonial Australia, wine growing etc and notes on changes in nomenclature, it is a model of what collection digitisation can achieve in providing not only access to a hitherto hidden catalogue, but also a pile of useful related information.

Beyond this, using technology to provide access to digitised records in an easily accessible way is also something we must continue to explore and promote. There are few better exemplars than the Powerhouse in pioneering the use of on-line collection data. Look for instance at how they use Flickr to provide access to collection information. But also check out how the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) has launched an app to provide heaps more information on objects in the Museum through the use of iPhones, iPads and iPod Touches, either the visitors’ own, or provided on loan by the Museum. MONA, the new Museum of Old & New Art due to open in Hobart next January is planning to go a stage further, providing no labels to objects, with all information delivered via a mobile device. Exciting times, especially with iPad use. Its’ larger screen is going to offer all sorts of opportunities for delivery of video, as well as being a unit that a group or family can enjoy together rather than the individual experience of the iPhone or iPod.

So I fully agree with the sentiments of AMNH President, Ellen Futter, when launching their latest app that “the digital age is upon us, and we want to integrate education with technology”.

Why then the digital delusion? Museion’s point is that museums have got carried away with the concept of digitisation for its own sake without really unpacking why we must digitise. The process has been driven by ‘digital immigrants’, i.e. museum people who were not born into the digital world but have become fascinated by the technology – count me amongst them. The result is a mass of digital museum projects, some of which work (see above), but many of which don’t. How often have I seen unused computer monitors in museums provided to allow public access to the Collections – why? Partly because the digital natives, i.e. those born into a digital world, for whom they are largely provided, are not interested because they make such poor use of digital media. The overlap between the world of the digital immigrant and the digital native is only partly bridged.

As Museion points out the future is not digital, in that it is not about digitisation just for digitisation’s sake. It will and must remain real, that is grounded in real objects. Museums have a unique position to display that materiality, albeit using the undoubted power of digitisation and digital media to maximise how that materiality is accessed. We need to sell that unique ability which is only going to become more valuable as the digital world swirls around us.

Julian Bickersteth
Managing Director
internationalconservationservices