Museums

Here are some posts about museums. Enjoy!

Witness Voices

Blanton Museum of Art, 2015

Real-time cross-platform aggregation of visitor responses to an exhibition.
Graffiti on a building wall depicting an older woman spraying a younger man in the face with red spray paint. The man is holding a selfie stick with a phone attached.

The Great Museum Selfie-Stick Ban of 2015

March 16, 2015

This post is search engine optimized.
The site of the Calvary, a shrine built in 1628 at the top of a cliff overlooking the medieval town of Honfleur, was popular in the nineteenth century among tourists, pilgrims, and people offering prayers for men at sea. Corot painted this work during a trip to Normandy, probably in 1830.

More on relevance

March 2, 2015

Some further thoughts on ‘relevance’ and why chasing it is trouble for museums.

Net Neutrality and the museum community

July 15, 2014

Copy of the text I sent to the FCC about the dangers posed by the proposed 2014 net neutrality regulations to the museum community.
Instructional illustration of the lifecycle of moths.

The museum as skeuomorph

July 1, 2014

Examining the idea of skeuomorphism and how it (unfortunately) applies to a lot of museum thinking.
Watercolor drawing of purple grapes on a vine.

The irrelevance of relevance

May 18, 2014

Does it make sense for museums to strive for relevance as an end goal?
Image of two people in front of a large screen with hundreds of images of works of art. Both are touching the screen and immediately between the two figures a larger artwork image is visible and the words 'decorative arts' are immediately underneath it.

Gallery One and visible technology

May 1, 2014

Thinking about the very visible technology of Cleveland Museum of Art’s Gallery One in an era where most musetech is about making the tech invisible.
A picture showing the Brooklyn Museum in March 2018, when the David Bowie Is exhibition was showing there.

The technology skeptic

April 5, 2014

Thinking about what it means to transition from being a full-time cheerleader to a skeptical veteran.

…aand here’s a blueprint of the floorplan.

April 5, 2014

A short post on other ways of accessing museum mobile content other than maps.
Brown grasslands receding into the horizon, with a single tree in the center of the frame.

Why are we so tired?

October 30, 2013

A few words of concern on the exhaustion of the musetech sector.
Ink-and-pen drawing of leafy green plants.

How can museums make memorable apps?

July 18, 2013
Painting of male and female cafe-goers dressed in late 1800s attire.

The majesty and wonder of Drinking About Museums

July 5, 2013
Color image of a woman with short black hair and large round black glasses seated at a table with many colorful bolts of fabric in her hands, to either side of her, and behind her.

On “curation”

April 25, 2013

Tracking the moment when a word no longer means what you think it means.
Waves of shaded color, interrupted at regular intervals by hard edges

Leave tech in the conversation

April 19, 2012
Glass storage cases full of decorative arts on the left and right side of a narrow walkway, with green and red movable staircases.

Online collections, hey! Online collections, what?

April 16, 2012
Image shows a single empty gallery with dramatically sloping walls. Streams of individual digital characters are projected onto the walls and ceilings

Blink! Light, Sound, and the Moving Image

Denver Art Museum, 2011

A large-scale installation of Time-Based Media artworks.
Waves of shaded color, interrupted at regular intervals by hard edges

What’s the point of a museum website?

April 18, 2011
Waves of shaded color, interrupted at regular intervals by hard edges

Building a museum from scratch

December 1, 2010
Waves of shaded color, interrupted at regular intervals by hard edges

“A great place to plan your visit!”

July 22, 2010
A farm windmill is silhouetted against an orange-red sunset.

Serendipitous and disposable

July 1, 2010

Exploring how we might experience museum content outside of museums.