Retired fashion great Valentino has launched a new “virtual museum” of couture with “10,000 square meters” of fashion galleries that you can download (Mac/PC) for free. After a few days of seeing promising screen grabs everywhere, I dutifully downloaded. If you’re a fan, it seems encyclopedic enough, and there is a lot of content to get into here. As a digital visitor experience, the “Valentino Garavani Virtual Museum” has some room for improvement, particularly the execution of the first-person 3D navigation. That alone got me wondering about the whole idea of a “virtual” (i.e. faux-spatial) museum in digital form. More on that later.

Via Architizer, Hyperallergic, and others.

Click the link at the very top of this page, or here, and enjoy. More fancy features to come, this is just a start.

Many thanks to Jessica Griscti, bibliographer extraordinaire, for helping to make this happen.

Suggestions? Missing books? Useful? Not useful? Comments open below.

“Ceaseless World Expo!”

In case you missed it, Robin Pogrebin’s Brooklyn Museum article in the New York Times yesterday (“Brooklyn Museum’s Populism Hasn’t Lured Crowds”), has created quite a stir. The article itself is very much worth reading, if you are someone interested in successful visitor experiences of whatever kind. Just don’t expect pat answers, the jury is still out. Perhaps indefinitely.

One of the better responses I’ve seen thus far has been from the most mysterious, anonymous, hardworking museum twitterer around, @museumnerd, who posted this reply.

So what do you think?

Why do I like the “obscure Brooklyn depot” or “fascinating gallery of extraordinary objects and materials” called The Index Ltd so much? First, I can’t explain what it is very well, which usually portends great things. Second, the online version has a Swiss domain extension for reasons initially mysterious.

But don’t just take my word for it. From Cool Hunting:

Tucked away on an anonymous street in Brooklyn’s Bushwick neighborhood, the storefront and gallery The Index Ltd is almost as rare a find as the objects it harbors. The space—home to the work of Jonathan Roquemaure—represents the culmination of his healthy obsession with sourcing and documenting materials and objects that have singularly fascinating purposes, characters and origins.

Via this article in Cool Hunting and this post at the Significant Objects Project. (More on the latter in a future post, if you’re interested.)

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.

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)

The remarkable site Artbabble won “Best Overall” honors in the Best of the Web competition last week at the Museums and the Web conference in Denver. Originally launched in April of last year by the Indianapolis Museum of Art and six partners, the site is has become “one of the premier destinations for art video online”. It’s eminently worth seeing, not only for its implications about how the web changes what museums do, but also for the innovative video-navigation core features.

From the Best of the Web writeup:

Broadening the interactive experience even further, a section for comments allows visitors to share observations and suggest links of their own. Comments can also be embedded directly into the video timeline as well, letting users comment on elements at a particular point in time. Full text transcriptions of videos drive closed captioning features for video playback and because they are rendered to the video page, search engines can index the spoken text for video content. Users can easily skip deep into a long format video picking and choosing only the content that interests them.

1. Congo hopes a new museum can heal a nation’s scars.
2. McSweeney’s imagines museum work: “Natural Museum of History Interoffice Smackdown.”
3. Smart museum idea in here somewhere: brilliant IKEA subway display in Paris.
4. Mixed Reactions to News of Dale Chihuly Museum Planned for Base of Space Needle.
5. Swiss Museum of Transport: the “most fun, most whimsical, most hands-on and most clever” of them all.
6. A smart museum idea is in here somewhere: 3D Optical Illusion Pavement Art
7. Juncanoo claims to connect “museums with patrons through mobile interactive tours.”
8. Talented museum catalog and book designer Gina Rossi.
9. Charming video: Preparing the gowns for the First Ladies exhibit.
10. Virtual tour: Strong National Museum of Play
11. Ireland’s new National Leprechaun Museum. (See next item.)
12. “Too Many Museums?” (See previous item.)
13. Exploratorium gets $90M, their biggest gift in decades, to prep a new pier site.
14. Which is better investment for a nonprofit, an iPhone App or mobile website? (Answer: mobile web.)
15. “Renzo Piano, Favored Museum Designer, Wears Out His Welcome”
16. “We have TRIPLED our visitation since the movie opened!”
17. Harriet Tubman Collection Unveiled by Smithsonian Museum (NMAAHC).
18. Clever museum idea: Using Lights Display to Raise Awareness – and Money.
19. Exhibit of computer-aided design blurs art and architecture.
20. Obama appoints information design guru Edward Tufte to help explain $787B in recovery stimulus funds.
21. You Are Not a Curator.
22. Smart museum idea: National Trust’s “Tweet For Our Treasures” campaign.
23. A Tree Grows in the Guggenheim.
24. Foot in the Door 4 – Minneapolis Institute of Art’s crowdsourced art exhibit.
25. “Feed The Children” interactive exhibit.
26. Here’s one way to make use of old, outdated material. Colorado History Museum’s moving sale.
27. Florida Modern Day Slavery Museum tackles human trafficking.
28. Many Metropolitan Museum of Art Guards Are Aspiring Artists (and they started a magazine).
29. “Capture your own MetMoment and we’ll add it to our slide show.”
30. Rather incredible: Periodic Table of Visualization Methods.
31. The remarkable Julián Zugazagoitia leaves el Museo del Barrio to lead Nelson-Atkins Museum.
32. What museum visitors wanted in an iPhone app, circa July 2009.
33. The (online) Timeline of Art History from the Met
34. The interactive kinetic art of Bernie Zubrowski. (video)
35. US National Slavery Museum gives up. And that’s not all.
36. Handy video summary of augmented reality.
37. The People’s History Museum opens (Manchester, UK).
38. The natural history museum that time forgot.
39. And the hottest new museum funding idea from California is … Snoopy?
40. Fresh idea: “Tag Tours,” staff-picked alternative online tours of the collection.
41. Skinput – fascinating bio-acoustic sensing array turns your body into a touch-screen.
42. “Do Museums Still Need Objects?“
43. Google Labs introduces Gesture Search.
44. Interesting stats on museum attendance in SF & Chicago.
45. The Gender Museum.
46. Widow of notorious Israeli museum burglar attempts to sell looted artifacts back to the same museum.
47. Location-based game for iPhone maps Manhattan’s historical ecosystem onto modern streets.
48. The exceptional exhibit designers Opera Amsterdam.
49. “This Robert Storr piece on museum design comes to a sudden end just when it seems to be taking off.”
50. Design Museum (UK) releases all-star shortlist of 7 architects.
51. USATODAY: Museum attendance surged in 2009 as travelers stayed closer to home.
52. #Zooms, a new museum hashtag game (invented in the Netherlands).
53. The first iPhone museum app in Germany.
54. Museum of the American Gangster.
55. Link to great AAM report, Service Despite Stress (PDF document).
56. Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Library and Archives to open late 2010.
57. The #class project: a “series of public workshops in a classroom setting” about art during a recession.