17th Annual Muse Awards

This article was published in Museum News
November/December 2006.

The Media and Technology Standing Professional Committee of the American Association of Museums is pleased to announce the winners of the 2006 Muse Awards, which recognize excellence in media programs produced by or for museums. The 17th Muse Awards competition received 108 applications from a wide variety of institutions in North America , Europe , Australia and Asia . Entries included videos, films, DVDs, CD-ROMs, interactive handheld tours, websites, audio tours and gallery installations, as well as, for the first time, podcasts, blogs and cell phone tours. At the AAM Annual Meeting in April, we presented six gold, six silver, six bronze, 12 honorable mention and one special Muse Award. Thirty museum and media professionals helped select the winners; the competition would not have succeeded without their tremendous effort, commitment and service. For more information, visit the winners’ page at www.mediaandtechnology.org , which features jurors’ comments, tips from producers and color images of the media programs.

Entries for next year’s Muse competition will be accepted online throughout January. We expect the 2007 competition to be particularly exciting, with a greater focus on emerging technologies and trends, as well as an updated submission process, criteria and judging procedures. Please check the committee website for more details. We look forward to your participation.

—Phyllis Hecht, chair

Jim Blackaby Ingenuity Award

The Ingenuity Award honors the memory of Jim Blackaby, a valued colleague who passed away in 2003. It recognizes a project that exemplifies the power of creative imagination in the use of media and technology, has a powerful effect on its audience and stands above the others in inventiveness and quality. The winner is selected from submissions to all categories.

Street to Studio: The Art of Jean-Michel Basquiat, a website produced for teens by the Brooklyn Museum with Educational Web Adventures, received the award. Conceived in conjunction with an exhibition, this site encourages teens to think about Basquiat’s art in relation to social issues and engage in dialogue at a “What do you think?” section. A remarkable number of thoughtful posts to this section along with a large gallery of art works submitted by teens from around the world clearly indicated the site’s impact.

For Interpretation and Education in Art

Co-Chairs: John Gordy , U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum , and Megan Mellbye, Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Voices and Images of California Art: Robert Bechtle, an interactive kiosk presenting the life and works of the photorealist painter, was the gold Muse winner in the art category. Created and produced by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art for a retrospective exhibition, this kiosk program contained exceptionally produced, well-organized and easy-to-navigate material.

A silver award went to the Frida Kahlo Multimedia Tour-, the United Kingdom ’s first interactive handheld tour to accompany a major temporary exhibition. Developed by the Tate Modern with Antenna Audio, visitors discover the art and life of one of Mexico ’s most celebrated artists through an audio-visual PDA presentation. This interactive tour allowed users to explore Kahlo’s paintings in depth through well-chosen and excellently categorized materials such as rare film footage of the artist and her husband, Diego Rivera, video interviews with contemporary artists and commentators, and archival images.

The Brooklyn Museum ’s Street to Studio: The Art of Jean-Michel Basquiat, winner of the 2006 Jim Blackaby award, also received the bronze award in the art category. Developed with Educational Web Adventures, this colorful website geared towards teens is unified by themes of the artist’s aesthetic. The site features a variety of ways to explore the artist’s life and work, including a biographical timeline, thematic explorations of individual paintings, an online painting and sharing tool, and a discussion forum.

For Interpretation and Education in History and Culture

Co-Chairs: Herminia Din , University of Alaska , Anchorage , and David Stark, The Art Institute of Chicago

The VUEguide at (MOA), a handheld multimedia device with location-sensing capabilities, won the gold in the history/culture category. Developed by the Museum of Anthropology (MOA), Canada , with Ubiquity Interactive, this multimedia production brings rich media interpretation—video, audio, graphics and animation—to MOA’s collection of Northwest Coast art. As visitors move through the museum, the interpretive content is customized in real time, demonstrating how technology, arts and humanities can come together to be informative, entertaining and educational.

The silver award went to Churchill and the Great Republic , a website developed by the Library of Congress with Terra Incognita Productions. Produced in conjunction with a touring exhibition, the site was used to enhance the physical exhibition to allow visitors to chart an interactive, multi-tiered exploration of Sir Winston Churchill’s life and career. A timeline of his life and more than 200 items, including letters, photographs, maps and speeches, can be examined.

The bronze award was given to Collection Icons at the de Young, three touch-screen multimedia presentations created by the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the de Young Museum’s parent organization, with Without Walls, Rolling Orange and Propp+Guerin. Projected onto 12-foot-high, floor-to-ceiling, touch-activated glass panels in the de Young Museum’s Kimball Education Gallery, each presentation teaches audiences to look critically at art and learn about cultural traditions represented by the museum’s collections.

For Interpretation and Education in Science

Chair: Andrew Johnston, National Air and Space Museum , Smithsonian Institution

The Science of Gardening, a website created by the Exploratorium, won the gold Muse in the science category. This site is unique in that it emphasizes the alternative expert, the “accidental scientist,” who finds him or herself experimenting and thinking scientifically for the sake of a personal interest. Often, the individuals profiled on the site have extensive scientific knowledge but little or no traditional science training, showing that everyone can be engaged with science. Using a combination of interactives, text and video, this site relies on personal experience to convey the complex scientific concepts underlying this ubiquitous hobby.

Monterey Bay Aquarium with Cortina Productions produced Tide Pool Olympics, a multimedia computer interactive, which won the silver award. This interactive exhibit allows visitors to explore a virtual tide pool in a fun, informative, engaging game. A horizontally mounted video screen presents a rich texture of rocks, water and living things found in tide pools. As visitors navigate this landscape, points are awarded for choosing certain things to observe and visit. The superb visual design makes the complicated mix of objects in the tide pool easily understandable.

A Renaissance Cabinet Rediscovered, a kiosk produced by the J. Paul Getty Museum with Second Story Interactive, won the bronze award. This kiosk presents an in-depth exploration of a single object—a large wooden cabinet—that the museum studied to determine its date and place of manufacture. The program presents the research into the cabinet’s authenticity, with two videos exploring several complex scientific methods used to date the cabinet. The judges were impressed with the kiosk’s content, presentation and design, which successfully explained a museum process.

For Promotional and Marketing

Chair: David T. Schaller, Educational Web Adventures

National Palace Museum , Taiwan , won the gold Muse award for Old Is New NPM Image Advertisement in the promotional/marketing category. The museum’s mission is to protect and preserve the 7,000-year-old cultural legacy of China with advanced technologies. In this ad, which features film-quality cinematography and a dynamic soundtrack, contemporary computer music fuses the ideas of life and cultural aesthetics from a thousand years ago with modern technology to provide a perfect, new model for interpretation.

The New Newseum video, produced by the Newseum, was given the silver award. With the relocation of the Newseum to Washington , D.C. , and the construction of a new building, the museum began a transformation from a local museum funded solely by a private foundation to a national institution searching for broader funding. This video explains to potential partners the museum’s vision for the future, as well as its history.

Transformation: Building the Rubin Museum of Art, a video produced by the Rubin Museum of Art with VideoArt Productions, won the bronze award. This video documents the making of a museum through the transformation of a building, giving the viewer a glimpse into the joys and passions of collecting and what it takes to create a new museum from the ground up. This beautiful production, which features soft filters, fades and a color palette specific to the collection, aptly captures the spirit of the Himalayan artwork in the collection.

For a Collection Database or Reference Resource

Chair: Leonard Steinbach, The Cleveland Museum of Art

Koret Discovery Interface: Making Sense of Modern Art, a kiosk-based interactive, developed by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art with Method, Inc., won the gold award in this category. This extraordinary interactive in the museum’s education center brings art and artists to life for museum visitors. This program unifies content from 13 different programs, developed over 10 years using a variety of authoring tools and languages, into a new interface. The project enables visitors who have just come from the museum galleries to access resources within three clicks, even if they do not know the name of an artist, the title of an artwork or the program in which it originally appeared. With its detailed images to explore and videos that introduce artists, the judges found it clean, elegant, straightforward and graphically compelling.

The silver award went to CMA Collections Online, an online collection resource developed by the Cleveland Museum of Art with Cognitive Applications. The Cleveland Museum of Art, temporarily closed for expansion, wanted to make its collections available even with the physical doors closed. According to the judges, this site brings the wealth and depth of its collection online with a clean and clear design and offers visitors opportunities to make CMA’s objects their own.

American Art at the Phillips Collection, a website developed by the Phillips Collection with 4thought Inc., won the bronze award for opening the museum’s collection to a broader audience. Presenting 150 years of American art, the site offers audiences not only a full array of high-quality, full-screen images but also provides information about the works, the artists and collecting as a resource for educators with simple and elegant navigation and a beautifully designed interactive timeline.

For Two-Way Communication

Chair: Nik Honeysett, J. Paul Getty Trust

In Depth: Autopsy, a videoconferencing project by COSI Columbus, won the gold award. This program, the direct result of teachers asking for a resource to teach anatomy, features a no-holds-barred autopsy video mediated by an experienced coroner. Accompanied by a suite of forensic apparatuses and extensive Q&A, the program leads the student through deducing the cause of death. The judges were impressed with this remarkably powerful program, which creates an engaging and sobering experience.

The silver award went to Eye Level, a blog produced by the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Using the museum’s collection as a touchstone, the conversation at Eye Level is dedicated to American art as a mirror for the nation’s history and culture. The discussion extends beyond the museum’s collection to include other collections, exhibitions and events and offers the museum a new outlet for connecting to its virtual visitors. Eye Level documents the contributions of curators, conservators, handlers, historians, enthusiasts, critics, new media designers and, of course, bloggers to the study of American art.

SFMOMA Artcasts, interactive podcasts produced by San Francisco Museum of Modern Art with Antenna Audio, won the bronze award. SFMOMA Artcasts serve as an audio artzine for the museum, extending the stories visible in the museum galleries into the community through the Web and mp3 players. Each podcast consists of several short features: “Voices from the Collection,” audio of an artist discussing a work on view; “Guest Take,” music, poetry or commentary composed and performed by a local artist in response to something seen at the museum and “ Vox Pop,” audience responses to an exhibition. SFMOMA’s tightly scripted podcasts hit the mark and represent a new application for arts discussion.

Phyllis Hecht is a museum media consultant and chair of the 2005-2007 Muse Awards.

End Note: On behalf of the Media and Technology Committee, I would like to express our gratitude to the following professionals for the time and effort they devoted to this year’s reviewing process: Nancy Allen, Jennifer Amie, Phillip Bahar, Joseph Defazio, Carol DeNatale, Diana Folsom, Steven Gano, Michael Harrison, Julia Heighway, Erin Hersher, Kristen Hileman, Mary Lenihan, Sarah Marcotte, Anne- Lousie Marquis, Josh Mogerman, Tey Nunn, Julianna Rees, Angela Spinazze, Lawrence Swiader, Brenda Teats, Elvin Whitesides and Rhonda Winter.