Okay, there are brilliant audience-participation exhibit ideas – and then there are REALLY brilliant audience-participation exhibit ideas.
The sculpture is artist Hans Hemmert’s “German Panther”, 2007.
Nearly as remarkable as the Shanghai 2010 World Expo: the Shanghai 2010 World Expo “Online Expo”. Nearly as remarkable as that (and entertainingly bizarre): the Shanghai 2010 World Expo “Online Expo” Official Preview Video:
“Ceaseless World Expo!”
If you can’t make it to Shanghai for Expo 2010, these three videos by the (accurately named) Shanghai Expo Timelapse Machine give a sense of the different kinds of pavilions on display. Germany: a deep, varied exhibition with a variety of completely different interactive zones in the interior:
Denmark, completely the opposite, with a beautifully designed building and little else to “do” (not that anything more is needed):
And finally, the hauntingly beautiful, award-winning UK pavilion, the “Seed Cathedral”:
I will be jurying EXHIBITOR Magazine’s Expo 2010 Awards along with a group of excellent exhibit design folks. For the next few posts, I’ll try to put out a few links of what I’ve been reading on the Expo this summer so far.
It’s never easy to use the floor to communicate information in an exhibit, no matter what kind of glass floor, LED grid or temporary decals you try. First of all, things wear out when people step on them all day. But more importantly, if the exhibit is popular, the visitors themselves block the view.
This memorable floor tile installation, from the newly-opened Schindler’s Factory in Krakow, Poland (a branch of the Historical Museum there) works for several reasons:
Frighteningly elegant. Read more in the New York Times. See a short video tour of the museum shortly before opening here.
Goooal! Three of the winning entries just announced in this year’s IDEA design awards were exhibit design projects. The judges might have had a case of World Cup fever: one of the projects hails from Brazil, the Museu do Futebol (The Soccer Museum); credited to designers Jair de Souza of Jair de Souza Design; Daniela Thomas and Felipe Tassara; and Mauro Munhoz and Leonel Kaz:
And there are two more.
I do think about other things besides the Cooper-Hewitt. I just don’t blog about them, apparently. The Cooper-Hewitt’s recently-opened Triennial exhibit, “Why Design Now?” has me, well, thinking. My favorite project thus far, for a dozen reasons: the “Posterwall for the 21st Century” installation at the Graphic Design Museum in the Netherlands.
Created by design group Lust, the wall falls towards the end of the exhibit “100 Years of Dutch Graphic Design”. It is a large-scale, digital media display of overlapping minimal posters. But none of these posters were designed by a human. They are designed automatically, one every five minutes, by software drawing on “various internet sources”.
You’ll find footage of it starting at the 3:30 mark of the video above (but watch the whole video while you’re at it, you’ll be glad you did). See the online version of the wall here, and see more images from the exhibit at the Graphic Design Museum here.
Via Cooper-Hewitt.
Designing exhibits, I’ve always been inspired as much by installation art as any other discipline. Perhaps more. For example, this remarkable image, from a piece by Argentine-German artist Tomás Saraceno, has been haunting me lately:
In the spring Bonniers Konsthall presents a solo exhibition by the artist and architect Tomás Saraceno … In collaboration with spider researchers and astrophysicists, Tomás Saraceno has spent several years developing the 400 cubic metre installation that is exhibited at Bonniers Konsthall. … The gigantic spider’s web, especially made for the main gallery of Bonniers Konsthall, consists of elastic black rope which will span floor to ceiling.
Must-see: an enlightening and (very) information-packed discussion of social media and web strategy. By Sebastian Chan – charismatic director of apparently everything technological at the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney, Australia – speaking at the Smithsonian (archived at the Smithsonian 2.0 video collection)
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King Tut, or at least the exhibition of the same name, has come to Times Square. A recent review in the New York Times by Edward Rothstein explains that the show is raising money for Egyptian museums, and that doing so apparently means a more commercial focus than ever.
The New York show is hosted by “Discovery Times Square Exposition,” which is related to the Discovery Channel. (Discovery TSX, by the way, is promoted as “New York City’s first large-scale exhibition center.” No offense to Discovery – I am a fan of the TV programming – but I wonder what the large museums of the city, not to mention the Javits Center, must think of that particular claim.) The Metropolitan Museum, host of “Tut I”, the earlier show of years past that helped define the idea of a blockbuster exhibit, declined to host this time around.
The ticket price? $28. That’s a lot, even for a child king. An excerpt from the Times review after the break:
“Chorus”, a kinetic installation with sound by United Visual Artists:
… an array of motor-assisted pendulums weaves through space emitting light and sound. The rhythm of the work evolves through chaos and returns to unison, producing a hypnotic and seductive performance that heightens the viewer’s awareness of the space and their relationship with it.
See a slideshow here.
Narrative Space, a conference hosted by the School of Museum Studies at the University of Leicester in the UK, starts today, despite the volcanic ash cloud. It is an “international conference exploring the interpretive potential of museum architecture and design.” (Sounds great, sad I can’t go!)
Full program (big PDF) here.
Sometimes in the early stages of a design project, an unfortunate physical similarity goes unnoticed until someone coins an unforgettable phase that captures it. I’ve seen perfectly lovely design concepts rejected because of this peculiar phenomenon.
Fortunately in this case, the citizens of Metz, France, seem to like the fact that their new museum, the Pompidou-Metz by architect Shigeru Ban, looks to their mayor like a “smurf house” (one supposes he would have actually said it in French: “chez les Schtroumpfs”).
Via the New York Times.
The blinking, wiggling and beeping Kinetica Art Fair 2010. Video via ArtLyst, original tip from @artnetdotcom.
My Shelfari bookshelf: the latest on exhibit design, museum planning, and interactive space.
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