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Nancy Proctor at the Tate Conference

I owe a lot to Nancy Proctor, the Head of New Media Initiatives at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. She can safely be labeled a guru of mobile museum tours because her knowledge of the subject matter is extensive. She has also been a great advocate for the work that I have been doing at the San Jose Museum of Art by inviting me to speak at conferences like the Tate Handheld Conference in September 2008.

Recently, I was honored to be involved with two side projects of Nancy’s.

Learning Times Handheld Conference

On June 3rd, 2009 I was part of an online conference through Learning Times (sponsored by the American Association of Museums) and organized by Nancy. The conference was focused on handheld tours and built on the collective knowledge of the previous Tate conference. For my part I was involved again with the getting it done section. My presentation titled, “The Little Engine That Could: Mobile Tours on a Shoestring Budget” was paired with that of Silvia Fillipini Fantoni from the British Museum which provided a good contrast of what goes into developing a large mobile tour versus a smaller scale one.

The outstanding list of presenters that day also included – Nancy Proctor herself, Koven Smith from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Titus Bicknell from Experius/Gateway Auto Museum and Bruce Wyman from the Denver Museum of Art. Nancy and Koven’s part talked about the future of mobile and Titus and Bruce spoke about the rapid development of a mobile tour.

Here are the slides from my presentation:

This was my first online experience and I have to admit I had some concerns going in, but overall I thought that it was very effective. The one bit of strangeness that was prevalent, and expressed by Bruce during his presentation, was that you are speaking into the phone with no gauge on how people are reacting on the other end. A large part of speaking at a conference is gauging the expression on peoples faces as you are talking and making adjustments as necessary to make it more entertaining or more informational. There is obviously no way to do this via an online conference.

My part of the conference is available in it’s entirety and you are more than welcome to listen to all the other sections of too.

Museum Mobile

The other side project that I was a part of is on her wiki called Museum Mobile where she features regular podcasts around the subject of mobile tours. She had asked me at the 2009 Museums and the Web conference if I would like to be interviewed and I was quick to say yes.

For the interview, which also took place in June, she paired me for a discussion with Ted Forbes from the Dallas Museum of Art who has recently been developing a tour for his museum. In the podcast Nancy asks us a variety of questions about the development of our tours, web app vs. SDK, implementation in the galleries and a host of other juicy tidbits. The conversation was over an hour long and very enjoyable.

You can listen to it on Museum Mobile – Chris & Ted’s Excellent iPod Tours or listen to it here.

iPod Touch Tour Home Screen

It’s been a while since I posted about the iPod Touch/iPhone prototype tour that I was working on at the San Jose Museum of Art. The last time was in October of 2007. A lot has happened since then including the actual launch of the tour itself. We launched it in May of 2008 in conjunction with a tour we created for Robots: Evolution of a Cultural Icon. For the launch of the tour there were some preparations and changes.

One of the main focuses was to upgrade the wifi in the museum. We were operating with 2 networks. One was used by patrons of the cafe (which was pretty unreliable) and the other was used for exhibitions. For the upgrade we combined the two into one network and added two more access points using HP enterprise grade wireless routers.

The new set-up reaches most parts of the museum. There are a few spotty areas that we will need to focus on should we expand the use of handhelds into galleries other than our two main ones. Another issues that we’ve encountered is the lag time that occurs when you move from the gallery downstairs to the gallery upstairs. This causes a switch from one access point to another. The units pick up the new access point fine, but the lag time occurs when it switches to a different channel. It can take up to a minute for this to happen which you can image could frustrate a visitor. My request to Apple about how the iPod Touch handles channels was unfortunately not answered. Thankfully we have not had a lot of exhibitions where visitors move between access points.

Update: iPod Touch/iPhone Museum Tour from Chris Alexander on Vimeo.

When users select the Robots exhibition from the Exhibitions screen they are presented with a list of artists.

One of the major changes that was made was to the user interface. Basically the tour is a web application similar to what you might see if you navigate to Facebook or Twitter on the iPhone. To construct it I spent a lot of time on the iphonewebdev Google Group reading threads about how to create web apps. One thing that I discovered was a javascript framework that a lot of people were using. The framework called iUI (iPhone User Interface) was developed by Joe Hewitt a developer for Facebook who was working on the iPhone version of the site. The framework mimics the page slide from side to side that the iPhone is so famous for. It also adds AJAX to the mix which helps to speed up the tour by loading only what is requested by the user and nothing extraneous. I downloaded the framework and tweaked the CSS file to make the screens that you currently see above in the video.

The artist page for this particular exhibition included a Curator's Video Label and an Artist's Video Label.

One other feature that I added was a feedback page.  It has not been very popular usage-wise.  There have only been about 30-40 forms collected and a lot of them are duplicate submissions.  The feature was added more as an experiment than anything else to see if it would be used and to learn from it.  I created the survey using a form creation website called Wufoo.  You can sign up on their website for a variety of different plans ranging from free to $199.99 dollars a month.  The service is great!  You sign-up, create a form and then you are given a snippet of code to embed the form on your site.  You can also adjust the appearance of the form through customized CSS.  While the form works effectively on the iPods, there are some issues with customizing the CSS for it.  There was another iPhone optimized solution that I came a month or two ago which I forgot to bookmark and I have been feverishly trying to find it again.  If I do find it I will post it here.

There are many other updates that I have been trying to experiment with. I will try and share my findings once I have implemented or tested.  I hope to make a post soon about WiFi delivery via web browser vs. locally stored data.

Camille Rose Garcia, "Antarctic Suburban Outpost " 2006

Challenge: The Camille Rose Garcia: Live from Tragic Kingdom Video Series project had multiple challenges. The first and foremost, being that it was our first venture into video and we only had a budget of $250. Additionally, the videos created were supposed to both provide a tour and act as a promotional material for the exhibition. We felt at the museum that this series would be the perfect match for the YouTube/iPod demographic. By utilizing these platforms we would be able to spread the word on the exhibition with no budget whatsoever. Videos would be posted to our YouTube Channel, be available for download via RSS, and offered to visitors on iPods in the gallery. To make the videos “sing” we wanted to add cutting edge music to the videos while avoiding any copyright issues.

Action: A budget of $250 is not much, but it was enough for two airline tickets to Los Angeles where Camille’s studio was and a rental car for the day. My colleague Lucy Larson and I made the trip in one day leaving at 6:00 in the morning and arriving back in San Jose at 10:00 at night. We were armed with our camcorder, digital camera for still shots, and audio recording equipment. We shot video with Camille in her studio for about 4 to 5 hours. Most of this was in a sit down interview style format, but we also wandered around the studio filming her talking about her process and technique.

Once the video was shot it was brought back and edited in iMovie on my iBook laptop. Images of artwork were inserted into video of the interview to help support the ideas and discussion. During the editing process we scoured the web in search of indie music labels that made their music available free of copyright. We were able to find a lot of music that complimented the artwork and the artist while also appealing to our target demographic. At the end of each video we credited the band and music label and also offered a link to the website. The completed movies were then uploaded to YouTube, uploaded to our web server for the RSS feed and loaded onto iPods in the gallery.

Camille Rose Garcia on Boing Boing

Since we were new to the YouTube community we wanted to build subscribers. To accomplish this we initially offered 10 videos with the promise for more to come. By subscribing to the channel on YouTube or to the RSS feed our viewers were apprised of any additional videos when posted.

Results: The Camille Rose Garcia video project was a success. To date we have had 45,955 views across 15 videos with the most views (12,675) on the promo video. The return on investment for that many views is staggering. Our salaries aside, the cost for each view was .005¢. The videos were embedded on blogs and websites such as Boing Boing, Drawn, and Last Gasp Comics. Looking at our subscriber profiles we were able to accertain that our target demographic had been hit.

Chester Arnold, Tailings, 1996. Oil on linen, 60 x 72 inches. Collection of the San Jose Museum of Art.

Challenge: In 2005 the Executive Director at the San Jose Museum of Art, Daniel Keegan, tasked the Museum Experience and Education Department to create an iPod tour for the museum. The museum up until that point had no experience in the area and the department was at a loss as to how to create one. It was decided that the exhibition to focus on would be the politically charged exhibition Visual Politics: the Art of Engagement. Additionally, the museum had committed to be the trial museum for a new company called Guide by Cell, which offers audio tours via visitor cell phones.

Action: At the time Dan Keegan put forward the challenge to the Museum Experience and Education Department I was currently employed as the Assistant Registrar. I had been reading a lot about podcasting and about a mode on the iPod called Notes-Only, or “Museum Mode” and was eager to become involved with the project. After some negotiations between departments I received the green light.

Using my iBook and the iLife suite of applications on it I was able to create 12 tour stops for 12 works of art in the exhibition and an introduction by the museum director. The scripted stops were recorded by two vocal talents associated with the museum. The scripts written by the Director of Education and the Manager of Visitor Services tied the subjects in the selected paintings with current California events. Using the recorded vocal tracks I spliced in popular music at the beginning and ending which related to the themes and subjects in each featured artwork. The combination of music and vocals created a rich audio experience used to enhance the visitors understanding of the artwork. Here is an example of one for artist Dihn Q. Le:

Ten video iPods were purchased by the museum which were offered to visitors who did not have their own. With the audio loaded on each device I was able to lock each one into Notes-Only mode. In this mode when the iPod is launched the typical iPod menu structure is non-existent. Instead the user is presented an iPod “note” which is basically formated like a small webpage. The note can contain links to other notes, audio, video or images. Here is an example of how it works (on a different exhibition):

Additionally, as mentioned above, we offered the content via cell phone as Guide by Cell’s first prototype. The audio clips that were created were uploaded to the Guide by Cell system and made available via visitor cell phones. The works that were selected to have audio commentary were labeled with special labels directing visitors to either checkout an iPod or take out their cell phones. On the label was a number which visitors would enter on their phone to listen or match up the number to a list presented on the iPod note page.

Results: The tour was well received and eventually led to the creation of my position as Manager of Interactive Technology. The director Dan Keegan, who has since moved on to the Milwaukee Museum of Art, saw the need for an additional layer of technology in the galleries because of our location in Silicon Valley and the movement of museums towards a participatory culture. Since this first introduction of iPod use in the gallery we have consistently offered some form of iPod component with at our museum in selected exhibitions.

Our exhibition, Visual Politics: the Art of Engagement, traveled to the Katzen Arts Center at American University, and when they heard we had the audio component to the exhibition they insisted on offering it to their visitors.

The cell phone component garnered the museum the most press coverage because it was one of the first implementations of its kind in a museum setting. The museums phone was ringing off the hook because an article about it was picked up by Associated Press. Guide by Cell has become a successful company and currently lists over 200 museums, galleries and other institutions who are using their service. I still work closely in my position at the museum with Guide by Cell and offer thoughts toward improving the service and adding new features.