Grandeur Reduced to A 20 Inch Monitor

Another story from the “Could This Be The Wave of The Future?” file, (and the “Don’t Dismiss It Until You Ponder It” subfolder), NPR had a story yesterday about museum collections going online. The story starts out talking about how many smaller museums with interesting collections have had to either scaleback activities or close their bricks and mortar presences due to lack of funding. Now the only way to view the collections of some of these museums are online.

There is, in fact, a website called MoOM–the Museum of Online Museums which lists all these collections. They range from noted museums like the Smithsonian, MoMA and The Art Institute of Chicago to more obscure and interesting sites like The Gallery of International Cigarette Pack Graphics and The Grocery List Collection which boasts the largest collection of found grocery lists.

Now if you are asking how some of these sites qualify as museums and if images existing only as 1s and 0s in the ether of the internet can be considered a collection, you aren’t alone. (After all, everyone could boast they had the Mona Lisa in their museum with a little work.) The NPR story tackles the debate about what constitutes a museum and what it means to curate a collection.

The guys who run MoOM absolutely believe that seeing art in a physical museum is often a necessity and can be a transforming experience. But they also believe there are a lot of interesting collections of material out there that people should see, but that they wouldn’t necessarily ever want to drive to. They also point out that one would never have the time to visit all the bricks and mortar museums out there either so having the art online provides welcome and needed access.

But does a cool webpage of scanned skatepark passes deserve the appellation “museum”? NPR quotes Wilson O’Donnell, director of the museology program at the University of Washington in Seattle as saying no. His analogy that an online museum is no more a museum than Wikipedia a valid source of information is a little out of touch (Peer review of articles by the journal Nature found it as accurate as Brittanica.), and his reasoning quoted by NPR isn’t completely compelling.

My blog and others have countless examples of how being well trained doesn’t necessarily ensure the production of a quality product. I think the same could reasonably be said of a curator at a prestigious bricks and mortar institution. The inclusion in the story of a professor of Native American Indian studies saying that mainstream museums haven’t done a good job representing Native American cultural groups futher clouds the concept of who is qualified to assemble a collection. (Additionally, the professor is quoted as saying most tribal groups resist the term museum in favor of cultural center because it connotes something that is old and dull.)

If you really start trying to identify the elements that separate a museum from a really neat collection, I suspect you will eventually get frustrated and be reduced to paraphrasing Justice Potter Stewart’s “I know it when I see it.” It is no easier to do than making a similar list comparing a bench and a coffee table. Is the collection of magazine covers featuring the US Flag from one month 1942 more valid than the site featuring steel and coal magazine ads from all of 1966 simply because the former is on the Smithsonian site?

This story encapulates the whole dilemmia of technology and art. In some ways, technology throws open the doors to opportunity enabling possibilities and a reach previously unattainable. Concurrently, technology threatens to dilute or isolate us from the potency and relevance of works.

But damned if you can definitively say where the line between the two is.

Search For Sitar Video, Book the Sengalese Singer

I noticed something very interesting yesterday. As I was looking around for some final acts to round out next season, I happened upon an agents website and clicked on the link for video.

I was taken to the Google Video site. The agent had been clever on two counts. First, he doesn’t have to pay to maintain or store the video on a server. Second, now whenever someone looks up a topic related to one of the groups he represents (World music, for example) the video of his client will show up and perhaps garner some additional business for him.

I suspect we will begin to see more of this sort of attempt to position performances as video services like Google and YouTube.com become more prevalent and easy to use..and as it gets easier to make videos.

Ball Thrown Round The World

I don’t know if anyone caught this Guardian article on Artsjournal.com in the last day or so. The story covers, Play on Earth, an effort by performance groups on three continents to create and interactively perform with one another with the help of technology. I had previously mentioned a related effort by MIT in an entry a couple years ago.

The Guardian article presents what may be a preview of the format the performing arts may take in the future. It seems quite ripe with possibility. It could be exciting to see how directors might exploit the real time chronological differences in clever ways.

The danger element inherent to having separate directors and casts who have never met each other might provide a draw to audiences as an alternative to the well-edited movie or television show. We often talk about one of the appeals of live performance being that anything can happen and this certainly reintroduces that concept. The irony is, it is the instability of network connection that contributes to this sense that catastrophe may be imminent. As technology improves, performances may have to up the ante in other areas to maintain the ambiance.

A Door Closes, A Window Opens

Last week Wes Platt, owner of the online text based multi-user game Otherspace announced that in 2008 on the 10th anniversary of his game, he was shutting it down.

So what does Otherspace have to do with non-profit arts organizations you ask. Well, quite a bit if you take a look.

For one, Otherspace is definitely non-profit. It is completely free to play and runs on donations and merchandise sales (tshirts, hats, mugs and some other things I will soon mention). My first thought was that his move provides a good example for arts organizations for looking at a project that is doing well and deciding to phase them out and replace with something else that advances the organizational mission. It is no easy thing for any organization, online or not, to develop a new project while maintaining the current ones. (Platt also has two other games with different themes he runs.) It is even tougher to decide to do in an uncertain financial climate.

I also thought it was pretty gutsy to do it on an anniversary when he could get some additional mileage out of it. On the other hand, he can get some mileage out of the anniversary connected shutdown by simultaneously introducing the new project he has promised as he and the game’s following toast out the old.

The other thing of note about Otherspace is that it is a roleplaying game with well-designed large story arcs to involve the players. The first six years had 17 story arcs according to the website. Wes Platt has actually published a novel based on the world concept with another book on the way.

What he has also done though is taken the roleplaying logs provided by some key players and edited them into books as well. The sale of these books on Amazon.com also helps to support the game and keep them free. In essence, the actions and choices of the players placed in certain scenarios help to create works of fiction. Their incentive for playing in a compelling manner is that the sale of their recreational activities continues to make their enjoyment possible.

Obviously, it is just a new twist on an ensemble developing a performance piece. It would be interesting to see if expanding this idea of technology assisted could be turned into the next big thing.

The last thing that seemed valuable for arts organizations to note is that the game has a Wiki associated with it. Since the theme of the game is that of a space opera with strange alien races and terminology, there is a need to identify these elements to newcomers. The specific wiki for the game offers descriptions of the worlds, races, organizations, technology, culture as well as How To information for new players.

I would think the term alien terminology by itself would be enough to explain the value of a wiki to an arts organization. The benefit of a wiki over a list of glossary terms on your website is that a wiki is dynamic. As a professional in an arts field, you can’t always anticipate everything your audience thinks it is important to know.

With a wiki, you get a little help from existing members of your audience because they have a pretty clear idea of what they didn’t know at first that they found helpful to learn. Because anyone can contribute to a wiki, anyone can update entries on playwrights, composers, actors, tips on getting good tickets, protocol on behavior and dress in different scenarios whenever they realize they have something to contribute.

Of course, this strength is also a weakness since people can vandalize your wiki with ads for viagra, obscenities and bad reviews. In this regard, a wiki takes more effort than a static page on your website. Even if people are making well-written, objective neutral (the basic standard for wiki entries)contributions, someone always has to be monitoring the updates to ensure they meet standards.

The good news with wikis is that the someone doing the monitoring doesn’t have to be a staff person. In fact, it is a mark of a wiki’s success if it isn’t a staff person doing all the work. Wikis allow for the quick reversion to previous information by contributors. It is a testament to how invested your audience is in the success of your organization when supporters remove offensive material on your behalf before you know it is there.

And since wiki contributors tend to skew younger than the average performing arts event demographic, you know you are moving in a good direction when you have a number of people enthusiastically running defense and contributing on your wiki.