Tuesday, March 24, 2015

How Technology Is Changing the Museum Experience

Museums are recently beginning to explore digital and mobile technologies in order to enhance visitors experience. They have gone beyond an added exhibits and installations, but also include more pervasive uses of technology to create interactive experiences for visitors. In addition they have also created remote experiences for individuals who cannot manage to physically visit the museums.
The Smithsonian is the  leader in the space of digital and mobile technology. I has everything from “traditional” cellphone tours and mobile apps to crowd-sourcing in order to create interactive gaming and even augmented reality. The head of mobile strategy and initiatives at the Smithsonian, Nancy Proctor, has published many articles on the topic of mobile in museums. She has even been cited by other museums as a main source of learning and inspiration on the topic and the expansion of technology as a source of enhancing the museum experience.
The Smithsonian has an array of mobile apps:
Infinity of Nations: created for the National Museum of African Indians and provides English and Spanish mobile tours, and includes slideshows and video in versions for both children and adults. 
Yves Klein-With the Void, Full Powers: provides an overview and insights into select art pieces with hi-res images, video, audio and quotes directly from the artist.
Set in Style: an iPad application which showcases 65 of the 350 objects on view in an exhibition at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in New York, including jewels, timepieces, and fashion accessories by Van Cleef & Arpels. 
Artists in Dialogue 2: made for the National Museum of African Art, provides a mobile tour in English and Brazilian Portuguese, led by curator Karen Milbourne and the artists.

Source: http://mashable.com/2011/09/14/high-tech-museums/

Wednesday, March 18, 2015

Electric Sheep

Electric Sheep is a distributed computing project for animating and evolving fractal flames, which are in turn distributed to the networked computers, which display them as a screensaver.

The casual user can simply install the software as a screensaver. Alternatively, the user may become more involved with the project, manually creating a fractal flame file for upload to the server. It is than rendered into a video file of the animated fractal flame. As the screensaver entertains the user, their computer is also used for rendering commercial projects, sales of which keep the servers and developers running.
The Name "Electric Sheep" comes from the title of Philip K. Dick's novel Do Andriod's Dream of Electric Sheep? 
The idea is that the computers (androids) run screen savers when not in use rendering "dreams," the fractal movies (sheep).

The parameters that generate these movies (sheep) can be created in a few ways:
They can be created and submitted by members of the electric sheep mailing list, members of the mailing list can download the parameters and tweak them
Or sheep can be mated together automatically by the server or manually
Users may vote on sheep that they like or dislike, and this voting is used for the genetic algorithm which generates new sheep.
 Each movie is a fractal Flame with several of its parameters animated



Source: http://www.techasart.org/Artists.html

Wednesday, March 4, 2015

"Open Air" By: Rafael Lozano-Hemmer

Open Air was an interactive artwork which allowed participants' voices to transform the sky over Philadelphia by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer. It was commissioned by the Association for Public Art. 
Participants could use a website to record a voice message and listen and rate other entries. The highest rated messages were played-back over the Benjamin Franklin Parkway using 24 powerful robotic searchlights that reacted, both in brightness and position, to your voice’s frequency and volume.
The project made massive light formations every night from September 20 to October 14 that were visible up to 10 miles away. These lights were automatically controlled by your voice.  Over 63,000 people visited the website from over 92 different countries, leaving nearly 6000 messages in over 20 different languages. The website still allows you to listen to the thousand of messages recorded that were once used to make a brilliant light show to decorate the sky. This project is demonstrative of the beauty that modern technology can create on a large scale. 





Source :http://www.openairphilly.net/