By Marjorie Schwarzer
This article was published in Museum News, July/August 2001.
"So much is missing when art sits alone in a gallery. The artist isn't there, the studio isn't there, the time in which the piece was created is most likely gone. Technology allows us to re-create and explore these associations." -Peter Samis, associate curator of education, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA)
"The next thing you know everybody will be issued a little TV set and you won't have to actually look at the damn art at all." -Los Angeles Times1
Introduction
Who was the first person you knew who owned a cell phone? A laptop computer? A personal digital assistant (PDA)? We all know an early adopter, the person who has to try every new gizmo on the market. Perhaps you recognize yourself in this description. As someone who still doesn't own any of the above items, I guess I fall into the category of belated adopter (if not resister). Perhaps, then, I fit well in the museum profession. As institutions, museums-especially art museums-have entrenched reputations as late adopters. Yet resistance to digital technology is weakening. At least a third of randomly surveyed U.S. art museums2 are currently experimenting with these technologies as a means of dramatically increasing public access to information about art (see page 73). The most popular technologies are computer kiosks in permanent galleries and random access audioguides for temporary exhibits. An evolving consumer technology, the portable digital hand-held computer, could transform the art museum visit even further.
Hand-held devices (hand-helds for short) are part of a drive toward "augmented reality experiences." Unlike virtual reality, which offers imaginary experiences, augmented reality uses computers to supplement the user's perceptions of his or her actual surroundings. Due to the recent frenzy of capital behind new ideas and niches, hand-helds are getting cheaper, faster, thinner, lighter, and more networked. Already, text portions of Web pages can be presented on cell phones and PDAs via wireless access. Within the next few years, audio, video, written text, and wireless communication will merge. This powerful fusion of information will be available on a hand-held as small and light as an eyeglass case and much cheaper than a pair of prescription glasses.
Although art museums are not currently targets for commercial companies that produce hand-helds, a few art museum professionals recognize their potential. With assistance from an early adopter, museum studies graduate student Mandy Smith,3 I spoke with visionaries-as well as skeptics-in art museums and companies piloting different kinds of hand-helds. I also tried out a variety of devices. This article reports on what I discovered and raises issues that art museum professionals will undoubtedly face in the future, as hand-helds continue their blistering advance.
All Ears: The MP3 revolution
The foundation for innovation in handhelds in art museums is the audioguide. These devices have become as ubiquitous to an art museum visit as wall labels and docents.4 They allow visitors to look at a work of art and simultaneously listen to information about it, an interpretative technique that helps visitors retain content. One recent study showed that in the short-term only 6 percent of visitors retain information about an object from labels, but more than 30 percent remember what they hear about an object from audioguides.5 In addition, as explained by Leah Schroder, assistant educator at New York's Museum of Modem Art (MoMA), audioguides offer increased access to art for people with disabilities. People who are hard-of-hearing or have a learning disability can benefit from audioguides because they filter out ambient noise. A printed transcript can provide an additional format for obtaining audio information. Audio-description-carefully crafted vivid language used to describe a work of art to people who are visually disabled-coupled with Braille on devices is, a developing tool for providing access to art for people with visual impairments.6
Advances in audio technologies and more inventive scripting have altered audioguides considerably since the dryly narrated tours on heavy reel-to-reel tape players of the 1950s. Sound quality has improved. Random-access technologies allow visitors to choose where they want to go and set their own pace, rather than follow a set tour. In some installations, infrared transmitters located next to selected objects trigger related audio. MP3-a format for reducing the size of a sound sequence into a very small computer file while preserving original sound quality enables a small device to hold up to 80 hours of sound. MP3 lets museums provide more information and deliver it in more creative ways. On a single device, museum-goers can access a variety of tours told from different perspectives. An audio technique called "branching," similar to links on a Web site, gives users options for delving more deeply into a topic.
Among the newest audioguides are random-access lightweight "wands" that resemble elongated cellphones, and headphones attached to small digital players that resemble walk-mans. Another audio device that helps art museums better serve visitors is a radio-based intercom system. While leading a tour, a docent speaks softly into a small microphone. The group on tour listens on earphones without the distraction of ambient noise. Other gallery visitors benefit from a quieter space.7
Taking a significant step forward, the Dayton Art Institute (DAI) became one of the first art museums to use MP3 audio guides in its permanent collection galleries. In addition to a grant from Ameritech, a surprising group of financial sponsors was DAI's docents. They were offered the opportunity to "adopt" a work of art for $1,000 so that it could be featured in an audio tour. When DAI's visitors rent an activated wand, they can then choose from seven different tours, or "layers," on the wand, including commentary from an artist or curator, a children's tour, and the docents' selections.8 The Metropolitan Museum of Art's (Met) audio program is even more ambitious. A single device is loaded with audio on both temporary shows and the permanent galleries. Visitors don headphones and tote a small player around their necks through the Met's galleries. By pressing numbers on a keypad, they can learn about artwork in five languages delivered fluently by the Met's director Phillipe de Montebello with a sixth language, Japanese, narrated by a native speaker. The Met selected the familiar headphone system over the wand because it fit better with the museum's institutional culture; wands resemble cell phones too closely and the Met does not allow activated cellphones in its galleries.
Personally, I found the task of navigating the Met's vast permanent galleries with the device confusing. The most useful portable item was the map a kind audioguide attendant drew for me. In addition, some of the Met's audioguide content sounded more foreign to me than de Montebello's palette of languages, proving that cool technology must be backed up with accessible content. For example, before a painting by Edouard Manet, I was instructed to notice how "Manet willfully manipulates an autonomous pictoral depiction," a sentence whose meaning still eludes me. On the other hand, in the Met's Coptic Gallery, the narrator drew my attention to details in tiny Coptic coins in a lit case; without the audioguide I would have walked right by the case and never stopped to appreciate these treasures.
Leonard Steinbach, chief information officer at the Cleveland Museum of Art, believes one beauty of hand-helds is their ability to enhance the emotional qualities of, and personal connections to, art through the telling of stories. This was the case for me a few blocks from the Met at the Whitney Museum of American Art, where I used a lighter-weight MP3 player to tour the permanent gallery. While looking at Big Heat, a painting by Martin Wong, I listened to a close friend of Wong's share a moving story about the artist's personal struggles, romantic visions, and death. The poignancy of the oral history about Wong-told by someone who knew him-has etched the painting of two lovers embracing in front of a burning building into my mind. The content took over and the technology became invisible. I forgot that I was wearing an audioguide and almost walked out of the museum with it!9
For the Hands: Virtual Maneuvers
Many visitors connect better to aural stories than label text. Other visitors learn best when they have the opportunity to physically manipulate something. For years, children's and science museums have had an advantage over art museums in this regard because they construct hands-on exhibits that allow visitors to touch or manipulate objects. Today’s digital technologies can add this interactive element to art viewing. The most popular method is an interactive computer kiosk where, by clicking a mouse or touching a screen, visitors delve into information on a CD-ROM, DVD, or Web site. The mouse is a forerunner to even newer digital technologies: those which allow virtual handling of objects. An example is the "Make Your Own Gallery" kiosk that premiered in SFMOMA's "Points of Departure" exhibition in spring 2001. The exhibit features works from the museum's permanent collection arranged to correspond to themes developed by the curatorial team. By using a mouse to "drag" images of the show's art pieces into a virtual onscreen gallery and a keyboard to add their own commentary, visitors can essentially re-curate the show by arranging the art according to their own themes.
Another ingenious device that allows virtual handling of objects debuted at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in fall2000.10 The event was an exhibition of Japanese Renaissance Master Hon'ami Koetsu's scrolls and pottery. Curator Felice Fischer, graphic designer Yasuhito Nagahara, and students and faculty at the International Academy of Media Arts and Sciences in Gifu, Japan, fashioned a device that allowed visitors to virtually handle a fragile 17th-century, 27-foot scroll and a tea bowl. In the 17th century, scrolls were unrolled by hand while the poetry within them was chanted. In a Japanese tea ceremony, tea bowls are customarily rotated, caressed, and admired. Fischer, a scholar of medieval Japan, wondered how the museum could convey such tactile experiences without endangering the objects. The answer was to apply digital technology. For the scroll, a blank paper scroll with dowels at both ends sat underneath a sheet of glass. The glass became a display screen for images from the original scroll connected to a projector attached to a Power Mac G4. When visitors rolled the dowels, which contained sensors, corresponding verse and images projected onto the paper. The device also played synchronized chanting of the poetry with English subtitles. In the future, similar hand-maneuverable technologies could allow visitors views of the inner pages of illuminated manuscripts and artists' books as well as the interiors of other fragile artifacts.
For the same exhibit, technology also simulated handling a delicate tea bowl. The black tea bowl Shichiri was CAT-scanned. It was then duplicated in hardened resin that picked up the texture, including the faint impression of Koetsu's fingerprints. In a gallery adjacent to the encased bowl, the resin bowl sat on a platform with a flat paneled computer screen behind it. The bowl was tethered by a cord containing a small receiver synchronized to the way the visitor rotated the resin bowl, with a three dimensional rendering of the real bowl on a screen. For me, the experience of handling the bowl was astonishing. Months later, I can still recall its surprisingly featherweight texture, something that simply looking at the bowl could not convey.
Fusing the Senses: Augmented Reality Devices
“It is important to take risks with new technologies. Even if the equipment isn’t optimal the first time out, the experiments allow museums to learn more about their audiences and look ahead to the next project.” – John Weber, curator of education, SFMOMA
Audioguides and interactive digital devices deliver powerful experiences for art museum visitors. Can we build on these successes? This question is inspiring some art museums to experiment with even more advanced hand-helds in their galleries. Yet, like all good experiments, the earliest attempts have had their share of problems. There are obstacles to being an early adopter. You must learn as you go, rather than relying on the tried and true.
"We undertook a noble experiment, but it crashed and burned," says Richard Rinehart, director of digital media at the Berkeley Art Museum (BAM), of his museum's experiments with hand-helds in 1995 and 1996. At BAM visitors could borrow an Apple Newton (an early version of a palm-sized computer) loaded with audio and text describing 15 works of art and bring it into the galleries. Although evaluations revealed that visitors liked the devices, front desk staff were reluctant to offer the devices to people because they were afraid of equipment malfunctions and theft. Moreover, the vendor was proprietary about the content and the software, meaning that BAM couldn't integrate them with its other systems. Then the company went out of business, stranding the project. The Smithsonian's National Museum of American History's 1999 experiment with an early version of ebooks11 in a resource area in its "About Time" exhibition met a similar fate. The vendor wouldn't alter the e-books for a large public audience. Thus delete buttons and a function that allowed users to type in e-graffiti remained, with predictable results. Visitors were so intrigued with the machines that they pulled the mechanisms apart to see how they worked. The Smithsonian had no choice but to remove the devices from the floor. They now sit in a storage area, waiting, perhaps, to be accessioned into a museum of dead technologies.
In 1999, Intel Corporation contributed funds and technical support to develop a portable computer prototype for the Whitney's "The American Century," a two-part exhibition of 20th-century American art. The portable device included text, audio, captions for the hearing impaired, and high-resolution color video and film related to 10 works of art. Dina Helal, head of curriculum and online learning, developed content for an experimental family tour that included kid-friendly audio (talking characters from one of the paintings), video (such as footage about the American flag that could be played in front of Jasper Johns' Three Flags), and art activities (like one that allowed visitors to digitally re-color a template that resembled a Mark Rothko painting).
However, the Whitney's project was discontinued. Unwieldy hardware was a serious problem. Visitors were put off by its heaviness, poor audio quality, and cumbersome earphones, complaints that recall criticisms of the first audioguides of the 1950s. Similar to my experience at the Met, visitors wanted more orientation to the equipment and the museum's floor plan, a need that could be met by adding a short tutorial as well as a map into a device. Most significantly, visitors tended to look down at the computer screen they were toting, rather than up at the art on the wall. The Whitney tried to alleviate this problem by flashing a message on the computer screen instructing visitors to "please look at the artwork." But like a tiny "please don't touch" label next to an enticingly touchable work of art, this solution didn't make much of a difference. Despite these hitches, Helal feels positively about the project: "It was a real challenge and visitors enjoyed the content; we also learned a lot about our audience's interest in technology, which is high."
A Systematic Approach
In a museum that concentrates on moving images as opposed to static ones, portable augmented reality systems may be ideal mechanisms for providing new layers of information to visitors. Such was the thinking behind eDocent™, a hand-held system proto typed at the American Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, N.Y., in spring 2001. Working with the company Organic, Inc., the museum created a system that uses off-the-shelf programming language (in this case XML and Javascript) and hardware (a Casio Cassiopeia Fiva). The idea, according to Carl Goodman, curator of digital media, is that the system can be updated as technologies improve. This approach hedges against the rapid obsolescence to which projects using custom devices and proprietary systems-like BAM's-have succumbed. eDocent sends information from a central database via wireless technologies to portable tablets toted by visitors. Four "tagged" exhibits in the museum-ranging from a photograph of film director Melvin Van Peebles to a movie palace designed by artist Red Grooms-sport infrared ports. As a visitor approaches a tagged area, the tablet (at times cumbersome) begins to download information (at times slowly) about the exhibit. Visitors can bookmark this information and re-examine it at a computer station in the museum or e-mail it to their home computer. Goodman's vision is to experiment with this interpretative strategy until it is past the novelty stage and can be built into the exhibition development process.12
In the Hand: Personal Digital Assistants
“Digital culture continues to foster grand ambitions; it nurtures not only the ongoing quest for the kill app but also the search for the one idea that will make sense of almost everything," -Harvey Blume, technology critic, The American Prospect 13
The Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) could be the next "killerapp" for art museums. PDAs were conceived in the 1990s as personal calendars, address books, and to do lists and instantly became popular with early adopters. As of December 2000, more than 8.7 million had been sold.14 PDAs continue to grow in popularity and the technology is improving. Many people interviewed for this article envision a time when PDA owners will be able to create their own tour from a museum's Web site, complete with different choices of narration, music, text, Web links, images, video, and a personal map of the galleries. They will then download the tour onto their PDA and take it to the museum. (A similar option is currently available from airlines' Web sites, which allow frequent flyers to download airline schedules onto their PDAs to bring with them to airports.) Already BAM is developing Web content that allows PDA owners to download lectures in MP3.Interest in these kinds of cutting- edge applications is so high that in spring 2001 the Computer Interchange of Museum Information Consortium (CIMI)-a group of North American cultural organizations that promotes digital standards for the open exchange of information- launched "Handscape," an in depth research project on hand-helds in museums of all types.15
Two museums in San Francisco, the Exploratorium-which combines art with science-and SFMOMA are actively researching ways to use PDAs. A grant from the National Science Foundation and in-kind engineering support from Hewlett Packard Labs and the Concord Consortium is supporting research at the Exploratorium, including a spring 2001 prototype information station. The Exploratorium envisions that in the future, guests will begin each visit by registering a "user name" on a PDA. As they encounter the station, infrared beacons will beam out a URL designed to open a Web page on the PDA. The visitor can choose to ignore the beam, bookmark the entry for later use, or read the information then and there. The museum also is testing a bar-coded wrist band that swipes and stores information and a Web cam that captures images of the visit. Upon leaving the museum, visitors would download everything onto a special "my visit page" on the Exploratorium's Web site. At home, they could open the Web site and retrieve information. A testing-ground like the Exploratorium probably has more liberty than a traditional art museum to experiment with this kind of technology. But art museums, bound by their need to protect original works of art, could benefit the most from portable technologies. As Peter Samis of SFMOMA says, "Art, especially art of the last 40 years, is very difficult to understand. Anything we can do to engage our visitors in what this art is truly about, whether it be through audio, additional videos, or access to Web sites is extremely valuable."
This notion led Samis and his staff to create a hand-held pilot for SFMOMA's spring 2001 "Points of Departure" show.16 Calculator-sized Compaq iPAQs were loaded with videos about artists in the exhibition. Visitors could use a device free of- charge and roam the exhibit with it. The shiny silver PDA has a small full-color screen, several buttons, and full-sized earphones for the user to wear. Touching a thumbnail image of an artwork on the screen with a stylus calls up videotaped interviews with artists as well as, in some cases, background music. The interview footage comes from a variety of sources and settings, from archival footage shot in Louise Bourgeois’s studio to Robert Rauschenberg in a museum explaining his infamous drawing Erased de Koonig. Initially, the device confounded the belated adopter in me. I couldn't pop the stylus out of its holder on the PDA, but did manage to accidentally eject the disk containing the content three times. I also had trouble simultaneously juggling a stylus, the device, my purse, and a brochure. But when, with the assistance of a museum employee, I finally got the device to work, the juxtaposition of audio, video, and artwork in the gallery was remarkable. Standing in front of Chuck Close's painting Robert, I listened to Close describe how he works and watched a short video of him creating a similar painting. After witnessing Close's process in front of one of his canvases, I will never again look at a work by him in any museum in the same way.
Digital Devices: Skeptics and Stakeholders
What is really going on here? Will handhelds truly change the way museum-goers experience art? The answer depends on who you talk to. There are many stakeholders in these kinds of projects who hold a wide variety of opinions. Most do agree on one thing; the devices are not money-makers. In fact, hand-helds are very expensive to produce and maintain. Are digital technologies, then, publicity stunts to help art museums raise sponsorship funds from technology companies and compete with the entertainment industry? Certainly, there are plenty of gimmicks out there, such as devices embellished with company logos, audio tours with movie star narrators, and sleek devices fashioned to evoke what marketers call "the cool factor." Yet, there is more to hand-helds than gimmickry or the cool factor. Art experts, educators, docents, and technology companies have all weighed in as to their ultimate value for visitors.
To begin with, audioguides and their offspring have plenty of detractors. Many art experts agree with New York Times art critic Michael Kimmelman, who in 1993 tartly described audioguides as: “canned experiences of…narrators doling out puffery on artists.”17 They express dismay at the Whitney’s experiment, which resulted in people looking down at computer screens while standing in front of a painting. One art museum curator blurted to me: "I would never allow one of those things in one of my exhibitions." Indeed, many art connoisseurs maintain aesthetic notions of art viewing as transcendent and self evident, in little need of explanation. Are hand-helds so distracting that they ruin the chance for elevated experiences with art? Or, by providing more information, do they actually increase visitor appreciation?
In the case of audioguides, which have stood the test of 40 years' time, the answer seems clear. Offerings such as music (e.g., melodies played in front of cases of instruments), artists voicing their own perspectives on their work and different curators' (and others) perspectives undeniably add a context for viewing art. "Our audience understands the value of audio guides better than the critics," declares Vas Prabhu, director of education, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. "When we don't offer an audiotour, visitors often ask for one. The audioguide provides a novice museum visitor with expert information in an efficient way. For the more knowledgeable visitor, the audioguide provides a perspective they can either accept or disregard." Although some museums report that visitors do not take advantage of audioguides even when they are offered free-of-charge, in other museums they are extremely popular. In 2000, they were the Met's most popular education program. Elizabeth Addison, former deputy director of MoMA, states that the average visit to MoMA lasts two hours. Those who rent audioguides stay for two and a half to three hours. But what about the newer technologies that fuse audio, video, and text? Preliminary evaluations show that despite the technical glitches, visitors of all ages are intrigued.
Visitors may be drawn to the new digital devices, but many docents join the ranks of the skeptics. With a term like edocent floating about, they have good reason to be wary, especially those who spend time on the floor witnessing equipment malfunctions and many visitors' need to interact with a live human being to understand how to use a device. Ten art museums contacted for this article reported that their docents feel unappreciated or under-used because of digital technologies. Docent relationships are a delicate subject; none of these museums wanted their institutions' names or experiences to be published. Ironically, just when museum visitors will increasingly come into contact with handhelds, the numbers of available docents may rise, as baby boomers retire and search for volunteer opportunities. Docents offer a human face to a museum visit. Hand-helds reinforce a societal trend toward isolated, individualized experiences. DAI's solution of involving docents in the creation of its MP3 audioguide was one smart way to bridge the potential chasm between docents and technologies. Another idea is for docents to use PDAs during a tour, combining the PDA's access to relevant visual information with the docent's ability to connect one on one.
Obviously, technology companies are large stakeholders in the hand-held market. As mentioned previously, art museums are not a target for most commercial products. Interestingly, the target markets for hand-helds and other wireless technologies-airports, transit systems, universities, medicine, and the military reflect societal trends toward movement, a knowledge economy, bio-technology, and surveillance, issues increasingly taken up by contemporary artists. Individuals within high-tech companies are often willing to lend expertise and company resources to pilot projects in art museums both for the intellectual challenge and the chance to court the art museum visitor as a potential consumer. Other companies have developed considerable expertise in bringing hand-helds into art museums. In the case of audioguides, two privately-held companies,
Acoustiguide (New York) and Antenna Audio (Sausalito, Calif.) dominate the market. Soundtrack (Santa Fe, N.Mex.) and Tour-Mate (Toronto, Canada) also work with art museums. These audioguide companies are well aware that hand-helds are a growth industry. In the past three years, they have invested millions of dollars to create better services and digital products for art museums and expertise in audio content development and logistics such as durability, security, maintenance, and storage.
Into the Future
As you read this article, digital technology continues to march forward despite the ups and downs of the computer industry. Digital technology is already creating a new level of accessibility for audiences with disabilities, speakers of different languages, and novice visitors. And it allows visitors to see artworks that were previously covered or closed, such as the scrolls at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The potential is even greater. .
Examined from a historical context, the enhancement of the visitor experience with hand-helds isn't even all that radical. Over the course of the 200-yearhistory of the public art museum, a succession of strategies has been used to improve visitor understanding of artworks. The grouping of paintings and sculptures into schools, movements, or themes is an educational strategy. So are labels, wall texts, and brochures. As art museum audiences become more diverse, so, too, does the need for even more diverse interpretative strategies. Many art museums will choose not to experiment with digital technologies, either for philosophical or financial reasons. These museums may actually find a niche for themselves, like the beloved corner grocery that still uses an old-fashioned cash register. But for most art museums, especially those serving a large diverse audience, swearing off digital technology would be akin to pretending that visitors don't know that it exists.
The Cleveland Museum of Art's Steinbach, who also serves as president of the Museum Computer Network, envisions a time when visitors will log onto a museum's Web site and answer a series of questions developed by cognitive scientists, ethnographers, educators, and curators. By decoding the visitor's answers, the computer will program a tour that matches the visitor's individual learning style and interests with art in the museum's collection. The museum-goer will download the tour onto her PDA or email it to the museum and retrieve it there. Other experiments, such as wearable computer goggles, sensors that respond to a person's voice, hand, and/or eye movement, and geo-positioning systems that "know" where a user is and guide him to his next destination, will likely push the envelope of how digital technologies can be applied to an art museum visit much further. Already gesture recognition technology has been adapted from its original military applications, commercialized, and made its way into a science museum. NASA's new bioastronautics exhibit, opening at the Johnson Space Center, Houston, in August 2001, will allow visitors to command a computer with a series of simple hand gestures to lead a virtual tour of a space station.
Today, when the meaning of art is more contested than ever, hand-helds offer visitors the possibility of diverse interpretations. The branches of information available on these devices are close in spirit to the multiple ways in which we engage art. As society is bombarded with rapidly changing multimedia messages, our ways of deciphering and understanding information have changed. We increasingly rely on a combination of sound, moving image, and text. Like it or not, new technologies outside of a museum's four walls alter how people process information inside the museum.
Thus, museum professionals will need to understand how to communicate information in new ways that mesh with the new technological devices. Writing scripts for audio is vastly different than writing text for catalogues or labels. Writing and designing for a hyperlinked system of audio, video, and text is even more challenging. How do you know when to use an image to convey information? Words? Audio? How do you design HTML pages so they can be read on a tiny screen? These questions point to a future where art museum professionals will need to develop expertise in multimedia communication and visual culture. They also speak to the direction that art itself is heading. The discord between electronic devices and physical art objects might soon be a thing of the past. The successors to today's handhelds could actually be necessary, not optional, for future art-viewing. Digital art is an increasingly large segment of contemporary collecting, as demonstrated by two recent exhibitions, SFMOMA's "010101" and the Whitney's "BitStreams." When the intentions and backgrounds for artworks are pixilated, composed of 0s and 1s, and written in code, digital devices might become as essential to viewing art as telescopes are to viewing the universe.
Many intriguing issues and unanswered questions remain. We know that people visit museums to socialize with their companions. Do hand-helds cutoff this experience or enhance it? We also know how difficult it is to absorb too much information. How will visitors filter through all of the available information and data that hand-helds can offer? As the recent Napster controversy has shown, digital technology challenges intellectual property rights for artists. There are also privacy issues for visitors whose movements are being tracked. How do these legal matters affect the future of hand-helds in art museums? With the digital device's ability to track which works visitors look at and for how long, will art museums become more capable of interpreting visitors than interpreting art? And will the experience of technology in an art museum eventually overwhelm the experience of art? Or will the experience of art and technology blend into another kind of undreamed of fusion? Perhaps this complex web of experimentation, speculation, and questioning is taking our field into uncharted territory. Yet, maybe in the end, one beauty of the digital device mirrors how my 96-year-old grandfather uses his hearing aid: when the conversation loses its appeal, he simply turns the device off.
References
1. William Wilson, '''Talking Pictures' Offers Few Bright Spots in a Mixed Bag," Los Angeles Times, April 2, 1. 1996, 10.
2. A conservative estimate based on a random survey of 169 U.S. art museums conducted by AAM in February 2001; of the 169 museums contacted, 60 reported that they are using digital technology as part of their interpretative strategies. Ninety-five museums did not respond to the survey.
3. In addition to those quoted, many professionals were extremely generous with their time and input Susan Anable (Dayton Art Institute), Ralph Baron Intel Corporation), Amanda Kraus (AAM), Eric Lefcowitz (Retrofuture.com), Kent Lydecker (Metropolitan Museum of Art), Laura Mann (Antenna Audio), Kathleen Mcloud (Soundtrack), Howard Morrison (Smithsonian National Museum of American History), Stella Paul (Metropolitan Museum of Art), Kathryn Potts (Whitney Museum of American Art),
Danielle Rice (Philadelphia Museum of Art), Barbara Roberts (Acoustiguide), Greg Sample (Ameritech), Diana Simpson (Museum of Modem Art), Rochelle Slovin (American Museum of Moving Image), Barbara Smith (Institute of Museum and Library Services), and Noel Wanner (Exploratorium).
4. See David Martin, "Audio Guides," Museum Practice, vol. 5, no. 1, (2000) pp. 71--81. Also, Ann M. Galligan, "Tape Recorded Tours and the Museum-Going Experience," The Journal of Arts Management, Law and Society, vol. 26, no. 1 (Spring 1996) p. 7.
5. Catrina Lucas, "Audio Guides," Museums Journal February 2000.
6. For more information on expanding access to museum visitors with disabilities through audioguide technology see Alan J. Friedman, "Expanding Audiences: The Audio Tour Access Project at the New York Hall of Science," ASTC Dimensions, July/August 2000, pp. 7-8.
7. John Cox, "Countering Noise Pollution in Museums and Art Galleries," Museum Management and Curatorship, vol. 16 (1997) pp. 79-97.
8. Research on the Dayton Art Institute conducted by Mandy Smith in November 2000.
9. Anti-theft strips and other security measures attempt to minimize theft of hand-helds.
10. Catherine Greenman, "Museumgoers Get a Virtual Hands-on Experience," New York Times, September 14, 2000, G9.
11. An evolving technology, e-books are book-sized computer tablets loaded with book-length text, as well as footnotes and auxiliary information about the texts.
12. Site visit to American Museum of the Moving Image conducted by Eric Lefcowitz, March 2001.
13. Harvey Blume, "Cyberbole," The American Prospect, March 2001, p. 54.
14. Simson Garfinkel, "Handheld Heaven," Technology Review, January/February 2001, p. 116.
15. See: www.hci.cornell.edu/projects/cimi_handscape.htm
16. Two other technologies used for SFMOMA's exhibition were computerized- "Smart Tables" and the "Make Your Own Gallery" computer kiosk. In spring 2001, the National Endowment for the Humanities awarded SFMOMA a $500,000 grant for its work with digital initiatives for the interpretation of art.
17. Michael Kimmelman, "Sampling Art in Sound Bites," New York Times, November 26, 1993, C1.
Marjorie Schwarzer is chair, Department of Museum Studies, John F. Kennedy University, Orinda, Calif.
