I am beyond excited that I have been awarded a Winston Churchill Memorial Trust Fellowship. I’ll be going to New York on the 1st of June for 5 weeks.

In the spirit of my research I’m keen to crowd source some tips and introductions 

Can you help?

• What museums should I visit? Are there any small museums that I might not have heard of, but are worth a visit?
• Who should I speak to? I’m keen to meet a range of education, digital and marketing people from museums, and tech companies.
• What events should I attend? i.e. special events, tours, talks (I see that the Whitney do Pram tours for new mums which sound great).
• Should I take a class? I haven’t taken an art or art history class in what seems like forever, does your museum run any adult saturday or late night classes that I could join?
• What else should I do? Restaurants, bars, shows, festivals

If you’ve got a tip leave a comment here, email me murphyoonagh@hotmail.com or tweet me @OonaghTweets

What & Why?

This is Our Playground is a project that was developed in response to the very traditional museum sector in Northern Ireland.  To put the sector into context, no museum in Northern Ireland has a blog, relative to England few museums utilise social media platforms, no museums have or our in the process of developing  an app.  No museums use 3rd party apps such as foursquare or Scvngr to engage with visitors. To date a key regional digital development fund CIIF (Creative Industries Innovation Fund) has received no applications from museums, or developers working with museums.

Yet despite the lack of digital innovation, Northern Ireland has some brilliant, indeed award winning museums. Whilst on the one hand my research looks at why digital uptake and innovation is so low, I was also keen for my research to challenge traditional museum practice.

Developing a Hack Day

Keen to develop new interactive experiences within a very traditional museum sector, we decided to train the next generation of museum professionals and interactive designers to produce site specific experiences. Interactive Media Arts BA (hons) students and Museum Studies MA students attended a number of lectures and workshops on creating interactive experiences for museum visitors. Building on the classroom based teaching students then took part in a 12 hour hack day at the Ulster Museum.

The interactive experiences developed by students question the notion of play in the museum, and recontextualise the collections and gallery spaces to create new modes for the public to investigate and interrogate the spaces of the museum and develop new dialogues with the exhibits. You can see what they came up with here>>

A unique feature of this project is the limited involvement of the museum, whilst aware that the hack day was taking place the museum was not directly involved in the planning or running of the event, instead students observed the normal museums rules and regulations, and in many ways looked and behaved like traditional visitors.

The aim of this project is to work outside the traditionally slow, often bureaucratic management structure of museums as a means to explore how time constrained working can facilitate innovation within museums.

For myself and Alan the Hack Day was as much about refining the format as it was the actual hacks produced by students.

What Next?

Following the hack day we have taken the students outcomes to a number of strategic bodies and are looking at ways to roll out this format to museum professionals with a view to developing digitally engaged museum practice in Northern Ireland.

This project was about doing stuff, rather than sitting in meetings. Now we have developed our own examples we can move conversations with museums and strategic bodies forward.

The benefit of making first, asking permission after has on this occasion proved fruitful and we are really excited that we can now begin to develop work in partnership with museums.

What we have learnt so far

Sometimes we spend so long talking about making, that the process of making itself gets overlooked. This project puts the process of making first.

Having context specific examples opens doors for future work. Using museums in Northern Ireland to demonstrate how museums in Northern Ireland could use digital technologies to engage with visitors makes a really convincing argument. All to often I had been using international examples, and local museums simply couldn’t relate.

It seems that some photos of students pitching their ideas is a good way to end this post,

All of their ideas our CC by attribution so if you would like to develop them get in touch with me, I know they would love to hear from you.

well, it would look something like this….

Cardboard Cities was an interactive exhibition at the 2012 Belfast Children’s Festival. The exhibition let children play, build and create on a giant scale.

Rather than a traditional adult led workshop, Cardboard Cities was more like a blank canvas with adult support, children took their shoes of, put them in a shoe box, walked in and started making. There was a table with adult helpers, but rather than directing play the adults were there to help out when needed, be it to cut a giant piece of card (only grown ups are allowed scissors!), or to help them stick something really high.

It’s an unusual situation for children, seldom are they are allowed to draw on the walls and on the floor. At Cardboard Cities they could make whatever they like, they could be messy or tidy,  make big or small, create quietly in the corner, or run around and play hide and seek. The format worked well because it accommodates the needs, and play preferences of different children.

Whilst the Cardboard Cities format is all about letting children take the lead, its success is down to some very clever participatory design scaffolding (a concept that Nina Simon has talked frequently about in her blog, and book). Children like a bit of guidance, a bit of structure in their daily routine but also when it comes to play and creativity, that is why games have rules and teachers tell children from a very young age what they will be doing during each school day. The scaffolding in this instance is a cardboard road that leads from the entrance into the exhibition, and a couple of cleverly constructed cardboard buildings for inspiration. But even the buildings created by the adults are up for destruction, or additions – the installation belongs to the children, so no one is to precious about what the exhibition ‘should’ look like.

What I really loved is the element of trust, children are trusted to go and create, the process of making isn’t micro managed, the safe nature of a confined room lets parents and teachers chill out, sit down in a fort, or a castle and help their children out when needed. The result is funny graffiti, castles and forts, sky-scrappers, rockets and traffic cones.

What can we learn from this project?

1. Harness children’s ability to think and make big (don’t make them colour in boring A4 colouring sheets when you could have them drawing on the walls)
2. You don’t need lots of resources to create exciting and engaging opportunities for visitors young and old to participate and create. What you do need is a little bit of imagination, and a trust in your visitors ability to create.
3. Providing a little bit of structure or ‘scaffolding’ can help draw out children’s creativity. Give them guidance, rather than telling them what to do.
4. Blank rooms and empty spaces provide an excellent canvas!

As one child said to me ‘This is awesome, we’re never allow to draw big’

Cardboard Cities was created by artists Caragh O’Donnell and Ryan O’Reilly. The event revisits an exhibition which was created for the 2010 Belfast Children’s Festival by Caragh O’Donnell with Sinead Breathnach Cashell.

………………………………………………………………………………

This post was inspired by  This is what happens when you give thousands of stickers to thousands of kids an article about Yoyoi Kusama’s ‘The Obliteration Room’ in the Queensland Art gallery, part of the  Look Now, See Forever exhibition.

All images taken from original article, click image to visit source

100 Best Curator and Museum Blogs : This is a really great list by onlineuniversities.com

Top 25 museum blogs : This list is compiled using a range of different popularity metrics

Claire Ross Blog Roll : Claire’s list has a whole range of people from academics to people working in museums.

This article was written to help a group of Museum Studies students at the University of Ulster start their own blog.

….and here is the finished article Speed Blogging for Museums it’s only been up a week and they already have some great posts written!

Last month I saw a really interesting exhibition at the Oslo Museum. The exhibition ‘Faces before Facebook‘ placed the museums collection within a contemporary conversation, relating traditional portrait painting to its contemporary equivalent, Facebook ‘profile pictures’.

On the one hand this approach made the collection more appealing to younger audiences who could relate better to Facebook than the traditional historical narratives that are normally presented alongside portraits. And on the other hand the traditional nature of the paintings featured in the exhibition made the exhibition appeal to older audiences. By placing Facebook profile pictures within the context of changing fashions in portraiture throughout history the curator has cleverly demystified ‘Facebook’, and encourages audiences to recognise the influence of wider cultural practice on approaches to portraiture (from painting, to photography, to profile pictures).

Social media is often feared by those that don’t understand what it is all about, but by relating social media practices to non digital practices such as sharing family photo albums, or chatting to other mums at the school gates we can lay the foundation for greater digital literacy and cultural engagement. Museums are about education, and participation and a good exhibition should make us question what we see, and how we view the world. Faces before Facebook did not feature social media as an add on, or a bonus feature instead it used social media as a lens through which to examine a historical collection and contemporary cultural practice.

Super Going

Was launched as part of SFMoMA Art Game Lab exhibition. The site allows users to post challenges and tasks for other users to complete. Challenges are grouped by topics such as ‘SFMOMA’. Challenges under this topic include bring an unusual item and check it into the cloakroom at the museum, pictures responses show people checking in light sabers and fruit. Another challenge was to take a photo of your face responding to a painting, cue lots of really random and funny photos.

SCVNGR

Lets people build location based treasure hunts. Science Museum, Smithsonian and Topshop have all used SVNGR to build collection based trails.

Zondle

‘Zondle enables teachers and students to create games to support exactly their learning needs: phonics games, science games, language games and lots more’

Wild Knowldge

Is an information gathering tool, it allows organisations to crowd source information. The British Museum have been using it in workshops in their digital learning lab, sending school groups out with phones and asking them to research specific areas of their collection, by taking pictures, notes and interviewing people. The groups can then come back into the digital learning centre and share what they found.

Playfic

If I’m honest I don’t really get Playfic , but I’ve included it here because it sounds like it ‘should’ be a good thing, its developers describe it as ”a community for writing, sharing, and playing interactive fiction games (aka ‘text adventures’) entirely from your browser” This blog sums it up quite nicely. Would love to know if anyone is using it? and, if you think it’s any good?

Roamler

Is aimed at market researchers. It allows companies to create small tasks, such as asking people to check how a product is displayed in their local Tesco, they take a photo and get credit for doing it, these credits then turn into money. It’s essentially a crowd sourcing research app. It hasn’t been used by any museums, or arts organisations but  there is definitely room to develop Roamler for audience research.

Google Forms

I cam across a really interesting article on the Bionic Teacher blog about using google forms to create choose your own adventure text based games, it’s well worth a read!

Friday saw the first ever #ArtsNI meetup for people working in or with arts organisations in Belfast. The initial concept was to create an informal get together which would provide an interesting way to learn about new and existing digital ideas and hear how they worked for others. The Black Box kindly loaned us the use of their café bar and the space really added to the informal atmosphere we had hoped for.

Surrounded by a mixture of arts and digital people, freelancers and geeks, Oonagh Tweets (aka Oonagh Murphy) gave an excellent introduction to #ArtsNI and some useful stats from the Culture 24 ‘Let’s Get Real’ report.  If you’re interested in this report, but have limited time, Chris Unitt has outlined it’s key recommendations

Matt Johnston from Digital Circle outlined what the Creative Industries Innovation Fund was for, who could apply and gave a few examples of the interesting projects he had heard about.  It was refreshing to not only have some practical tips for applying, but also to see just how excited and inspired Matt was about the projects CIIF hoped to fund. If you are interested in finding out more about the fund there is more info here >> 

After a short tea-break with tea served in beautiful china teacups from Emma Victoria Vintage , we asked Alan Hook from the University of Ulster to tell us about his experiences of Alternate Reality Games. He made references to many projects, two of which really caught my attention – Invisible Belfast  an Alternative Reality Game that was created as part of the Belfast Book Festival and Where’s Wally?, created by a UU student.  It has certainly whet my appetite to find out more about ARGs and discover if developing a game might be an innovative way to attract more visitors to the www.testdrivetheartsni.org site which I manage.

Almost everyone in the room had used Twitter in some shape or form, whether for personal or work related reasons.  This made for an already converted audience for Chris Martin from the Grand Opera House to speak to.  Chris talked about the Grand Opera House’s Twitter Policy, trending and running Retweet Competitions.  There was discussion around how much time people should spending updating Twitter and Facebook and it was agreed by almost the entire room that, as always, there is never enough time.

We finished with Melissa Gordon from the Crescent Arts Centre who gave the group a quick run down of how QR Codes worked for her venue.  The venue use the codes quite extensively, on tickets, posters, print, internal advertising and on outdoor advertising such as Adshels.  Melissa explained her success at getting customers to click through for ticket deals, provided some tips on what we should remember when using a QR Code and showed us cute ideas from around the digital world.

As is always the case at these kind of events, the real networking started at the end of the event.  We had Marketers questioning Geeks, Arts Managers talking to Designers and Media people talking to Bloggers.  Lots of faces were put to lots of names and many new contacts were made. Feedback from the event was excellent and we hope to have another event very soon.

You can see what people where talking about on Twitter on our storify 

So any ideas, let us know on the Hashtag #ArtsNI and watch this space for news of the next #ArtsNI Event.

Karen O’Rawe @classygenes

The game is based on an art history timeline with famous paintings appearing through out. As the picture above shows, players can access power ups to help them on their journey, but must avoid obstacles and enemies such as art attackers!

Each decade forms a level, when you complete a level you get access to information on the art movements featured. The image below shows a futurist image alongside the graphic it inspired.

Alongside the strong links to art history in the app, another really clever feature of this game is the emphasis that it places on going to Tate Modern. To access Turbo Power, you have to actually be in the Tate Modern building.

I really like the game, it’s great for when you have 5 minutes to kill, but I think I may be stuck in the 1970′s until my next visit to London. Did I mention it’s free? …. and is available in the app store now, so yes it’s great, go and get it, but you may find yourself being very unproductive for the next few days (although on a plus note your knowledge of Art History will have increased!)

The Ulster Museum or as its know in Belfast ‘The Museum’ has taken an exciting approach to making a travelling exhibition a little bit more venue specific. To coincide with the V&A’s touring ‘Street Art‘ exhibition which is currently on in the Ulster Museum, the museum commissioned a  number of local artists to create their own ‘gallery pieces’. The exhibition of these commissioned works has been titled ‘Tags Not Labels‘

The travelling exhibition is great, its got all the big names from Banksy to Jamie Hewlett…but the addition of work by local artists makes it a must see exhibition. As someone that spends a lot of time in London when I visit museums and galleries in Belfast I often think I’ve already seen that exhibition in London, or I’ve seen that painting  in a bigger more compelling exhibition. But by creating a mash up of the the travelling exhibition ‘Street Art’ and commissioning new work  the travelling exhibition looses its pre packaged feel, and instantly becomes a uniquely Belfast show.

Alongside commissioning  new work, the Ulster Museum has really reached out to new audiences by using a blog for the first time …check it out here >> , advertised in AU a popular local youth / culture magazine, and also used Facebook advertising.

Adam Turkington a local arts manager, and former director of Trans Urban Arts Festival worked closely with the museum on this exhibition. This partnership and the use of relevant platforms for advertising and to facilitate online conversations creates a strong foundation for future projects to tempt a younger, dare I say it cooler crowd into the Ulster Museum.

The survey I carried out was distributed across all of the Irish Museum of Modern Arts’ Online platforms*, and gathered a range of data on the context of  visitors online experience. From their current location, to what other online and offline activities they were carrying out whilst engaging with the museum online.

The survey ended by asking two open response questions:

1.What do you like about what IMMA does online ?

2.What would you like to see IMMA do online?

One of the key, and perhaps unexpected trends that the responses for these questions showed was that visitors want museums to curate the web, and indeed the art world for them. For this blog post I have selected a few key, relevant comments to share. The comments show that visitors are keen to learn more about IMMA, it’s artists and the art world, they want to hear about these from a variety of sources and voices but rather than search the web for this information they want IMMA to deliver it to them via their website and social media channels.

Visitor comments:

**

‘Links to up and coming artists websites or exhibitions outside IMMA. Or you could possibly have a section where you can apply to have a blog or some other social thing eg: Twitter or something like that linked on the side page, perhaps this could be changed every month or so and be kind of like editors top 10 of the day/week/month. This could promote students work or ‘outside’ artists and maybe make the gallery feel like its not a locked door situation with regard to being a publically accepted artist and perhaps could give hope to young emerging artists and make it feel like a space for everyone regardless of who you are’

‘online collaborations with other museums and galleries’

‘More links to artists own websites (if living) or further study websites’ ‘Release info about artists currently showing. Not info about the show as such, but info about the individual’

‘Good but needs more activity’

‘Virtual link ups with other galleries and other art/cultural/fashion/heritage insitutions to make the art world more alive and tangible and interactive for the whole community not just artists’

‘I’d love to see more links to anything written about IMMA’

‘Reviews of exhibitions- art critics and man-in-the-street’

‘weekly debate’ ‘blog on events’ 

‘Greater online examples of work from the artists in residence scheme, links to other galleries with concurring shows by the same artists’

‘If I am bothered to follow someone on twitter or fan them on Facebook, I want to be rewarded for that. I’m not opting in to just get ads pushed out to me. I’m opting in to hear opinions I wouldn’t normally get to hear’

**

Having spoke to a number of museum staff at a range of institutions about the idea of aggregating content from external sources the issue of control has always been raised.

What if something on that external site is illegal or offensive? The Walker website however challenges this question and demonstrates that external content can be used successfully, this content is, after all curated and selected by museum staff so control of what visitors are directed to is maintained by the museum.

The positive feedback from a range of sources (The Atlantic , The Independent (uk), Art Daily, It’s That Nice), and social buzz generated when the site launched will perhaps encourage other museums and art galleries to embrace alternative voices and content as a means to generate a more engaging, welcoming and interactive web space for their museum or galleries visitors.

*The survey was distributed on IMMA’s website, Twitter, Facebook and two listings bulletins, 256 responses were collected. These are just a small selection of responses, I intend to publish an academic paper as an outcome of this research and this will include a more considered approach to methodology and data trends.