A Day at the MoMA

In an ongoing survey of museum companion applications, I made use of the official MoMA companion application during my visit to the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. I'm actually smartphone-less right now, so I rented out (for no charge) a new iPod touch from the MoMA with the museum's companion application installed. The iPod I rented came with a neck strap and a pair of headphones... Somewhat reluctantly I put the device around my neck and ventured off into the museum.

Surprisingly, I really enjoyed wearing the device around my neck. This allowed consistent access to the application, making it much less intrusive than taking out my smart phone. As a result I found myself using the app to take pictures as I made my way around the museum. I'm used to using the iPhone 4, so I really also enjoyed the large amount of screen real estate on the new apple device. 

Three stills of the MoMa App (courtesy of Rachel Sekai of Cooper Hewitt Labs)

The primary use case in the app is getting supporting content while viewing an artwork. To do this, you can enter a numeric code from the placard into the app and you will go right to the artwork's profile page. Here you can listen to audio content from the museum's curators. I had my first digital docent experience while looking at Picasso's Girl in a Mirror, one of my favorite paintings. The museum's (European) curator was talking me through a visual analysis of the work while I was digesting it myself. If there weren't an audio element to the application and I was forced to just read about the piece in the app, I would have been likely to forego doing so, particularly because the application doesn't make the accompanying text analysis of a work very easy to digest. I'm not super keen on having art explained to you, but I definitely enjoyed the experience of viewing an artwork while listening to the museum's curators. However, I didn't make use of it too extensively.

Images of Claude Monet's Water Lillies taken in the app.

From the artwork's profile page I could favorite the work to view later. In this fashion I went through the museum, locating work's I enjoyed and saving them into the application. I had just seen a Water Lilly painting by Claude Monet in the Cleveland Museum of Art and remembered that the MoMa has an entire triptych of his, so I definitely wanted to check that out. Using the app I searched for "Monet Water Lilly" and found that it was two galleries away, so I decided to skip ahead to check that out. One definite downside is that the application doesn't locate you in the museum, so I had to try to figure out where I was on the current floor based on the entire floor layout (total pain point in my ass). Before I knew it I had viewed Monet's Water Lillies and snapped two really great images of them using the application.

My favorite part of the application was the ability to share my entire experience through social media very easily. I signed in with my email address and was able to view a digital artifact of my entire visit through the internet. Revisiting my trip at home was really great and very easy to do. The app enhanced my experience by being so easy to use. I now have pictures that document my trip through the MoMA that I wouldn't have bothered taking if I wasn't using the application. 

Click here to check out the document of my MoMa trip! 

http://www.moma.org/path/208CB274-D058-416F-B96C-C0BCBFA166EC

Alive at Gallery One

I visited Gallery One today at the Cleveland Museum of Art. Gallery One is the latest in interactive museum experiences. The experience was really innovative. I, as a museum goer, was actively curating my way through the museum's extensive collection. It began with the large interactive touch screen wall which displays over 3,800 of the museums 40k+ works. Viewing such a significant body of work really let me dictate what works I had to see vs. galleries that I didn't necessarily need to visit. Placing the iPad we rented on the stand in front of the wall, the wall became our pool of artists and we were the curators. I didn't realize how to create a tour from the works we selected, so we had to manually check what galleries the works were featured in  and go from there. 

The functionality such as scanning works to get points of information was a really great feature, though it only existed for a small portion of the works. 

As a companion, I found the iPad to be very informative. I would often find myself reading descriptions of works from the iPad itself instead of the note cards on the wall. The navigation occasionally hiccuped, which prevented me from quickly accessing metadata about the gallery I was in. 

The whole experience leveraged the latest technology. Microsoft Kinects let users recreate works of art through body gestures and movements. I reconstructed (and customized) a clay sculpture from scratch, from rolling out the clay to placing all the features. I loved the work so much that I added my own likeness to the piece (example seen below). 

Points of contention with the UI/UX. The lack of general gallery pages in the iPad application was unfortunate, as I would have liked to browse the galleries from the iPad and create a tour on the fly. Instead we got narrow columns with featured works of the galleries. Additionally, the lack of an easy way to export my favorite works and artists that I saved during my trip was a missed opportunity to really bridge the experience between museum viewing and continued interests. 

That being said, the experience was really awesome. If I went back through the museum, its very likely that I would rent the iPad again.