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.
A lovely video from the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum (post from Director Bill Moggridge’s “Bill’s Blog” here) showing the way they got a (teensy) Tata Nano off New York City streets and onto a display platform inside the museum. Despite snow.
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)
I promise you my best 140 characters on accessibility, architecture, education, exhibit design, graphic design, installation art, interaction design, museums, online exhibits, philanthropy, technology, video, and wayfinding. www.twitter.com/jonathanalger
… 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.
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.
A great little video of the Dieter Rams exhibit at the Design Museum in London, narrated by museum director Deyan Sudjic. Just lovely. (To me, design exhibits and exhibit design are sort of the same thing, somehow.)
At a museum design conference once, I was asked by a participant at my table, “what percentage of technology should an exhibit have?” With great confidence, I promptly replied: “thirty-seven!” As the surprised participant whipped out his notebook to record this holy statistic, I laughed and said “I’m kidding, there is no pat answer.”
Secretly, I wish there were. My job would be much easier. It would easier still if someone could help us all simply be more comfortable with the stuff: even “technology people” have limits beyond which they get nervous, even for all their bravado. (It’s always a particularly human moment when that happens.)
Somehow, this TEDxAmsterdam video made me feel better about it all, even optimistic. Why? I’m still trying to figure that out. Perhaps you can tell me.
Anyway, enjoy: Kevin Kelly on technology, via TED.com.
Thanks to a kind twinvitation* from Nancy Proctor, the Head of New Media at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, I have just done a review of the provocative new iPhone app “How It Is” from Tate Modern. The full review is available at the Museum Mobile Wiki site.
The app is a companion piece for Polish artist Miroslav Balka’s current installation of the same name, on view in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall, and it is part of what I argue is a more or less continuous suite of experiences that includes the artwork itself, an “exploration” web site, and the app. So long as you follow the advice I stumbled on, and make sure to experience the app in a dark room with headphones on, you may agree with my conclusions: that this is a great, perhaps even revolutionary, new museum mobile project.
I have to smile every time I watch this utterly charming compilation video from Swiss installation artist Zimoun. From Zimoun’s Vimeo channel:
Zimoun focusses on creating installations and sound sculptures, usually in connection with mechanical features, movement and physically generated sounds. His creations are graceful, mechanically harmonized works of poetic playfulness – simple yet complex, the result of repetitions with slight irregularities caused by routine and coincidence.
I also want to make a t-shirt out of this motto:
«I am intrigued in simple and elegant systems to generate and study complex behaviours in sound and motion.» Zimoun
UPDATE 23 Feb 2010: If you are interested in more conceptual audio installation projects, here is a DVD you can order with a wide sampling of related work. From the delightfully audio-minimalist 12k.
Explorations of new developments in exhibit design, museum planning and interactive space by Jonathan Alger, co-founder of the design firm C&G Partners.
