What was there?

Here's an interesting project that extends the Museum of London Street Museum application to map historical photographs through crowd sourcing. I suppose ideally it would balance individual and institutional data, but open source projects can be limited by copyright restrictions and the occasional insular archive. Hopefully it will become a really useful resource.

http://whatwasthere.com/

There's also a free app for iDevices if you're that way inclined:

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/whatwasthere/id421576457?mt=8&ls=1

The End of Gallery Rage?

Since the recent Gauguin show at Tate Modern attracted criticism for inducing 'gallery rage' as a result of overcrowding, it seems particularly interesting that Google has just released its Art Project, which has repurposed the cameras used for its street mapping activities to allow digital 'visits' to international museums and galleries. I wonder how an isolated, two dimensional ocular encounter might disrupt the socio-behavioral function of the museum and if it remains an embodied experience? I'm starting to miss the troublesome toddlers and walkie-talkie static already.

New Technologies in Museums

Crossover Summit

Wednesday 3rd November

For those interested in the application of technology in museums and galleries, this is an interesting session being offered as part of Sheffield Documentary Festival:

'There will also be a special showcase of how archives, museums and galleries are exploiting new platforms to enhance public access to launch a new Crossover Lab programme designed to forge collaborations between film-makers, games, web or mobile developers and archive holders.'

Augmented Reality

The Museum of London have recently brought our their own iPhone app called Street Museum that uses geo-tagging and augmented reality to overlay images from their archive in real time and space. Seems like it could have interesting implications for diffusing museum collections and content, and it's free!

Leeds Public Art Map

Here's a sneak preview of the Leeds Public Art Map made in collaboration with the Leeds Public Arts Officer, which you'll hopefully see embedded in the Leeds Art Gallery website and elsewhere very soon. We've had lots of interesting conversations over the last six months about what constitutes the 'public' and 'art' of public art and how best to determine and collate the knowledges that surround these interventions into the social sphere. Hopefully this map represents a template which will be edited and added to, documenting also what is lost, temporary and still in production. I'd be very interested to see what you all think, there's a link to the full version at the bottom of the map.

View Public Art in Leeds in a larger map