The Future Museum of Public Art – Final Files

Here’s a link to the idea that we presented to our classmates in EMA 6361.
Full Presentation:The Future Museum of Public Art

And here’s a web-based prototype that gives a small window in to what we have envisioned.
Web-based prototype: Public Art Prototype

Filed under: Abimbola O. Ijagbemi, Ben Smithson, Catherine Rodriguez, Chelsea Conway, Nico Smith, Sydnie Montgomery

You want devil’s advocate? Fine. Here.

Rip and Remix present a utopian world where there is no copyright, ideas flow freely from one to another and the transference of information is the way it used to be, free. With no copyrights, the ideas will just start flowing and art will become better because it will be crowdsourced… music will be created and giving away… songs will be able to be chopped into little bits and rearranged in any order that anyone with Garage Band can imagine… The whole world will come together to create more and more art, because they are allowed to build on each other’s art with no recourse taken by the originator… I mean the price of the actual physical transfer of information, in whatever form you wish, is pennies, so all this is doing is allowing that to actually be the market rate, and pulling all ways to monetize information…

This is all great, if there was a viable way to monetize it. Let’s play the game with, as Gaylor says, everyone favorite subject… music. Let’s look at the best example of a band “giving their music away for free.” Raidohead released In Rainbows in 2007 with their “revolutionary” pay-what-you-want model. Here’s the problem… It wasn’t real. This was a promotional tool that they used to drive the initial surge of hype about the album, and it was removed 3 months after it was implemented. Their manager also said that they wouldn’t do another release in this manner. This is the plan? To move to a model that has been dismissed by most prominent users of it?

Comscore released numbers announcing that 62% of those who downloaded In Rainbows did so without paying a cent. If this was the new model… why didn’t they stick to it? Why didn’t they also offer their CD’s in a pay-what-you-want campaign? Why wouldn’t they do it again?

Even Trent Reznor, who is known for screaming to his fans to steal his music, was quoted as being ‘disheartened’ when his fans weren’t willing to pay $5 for a higher quality version of one of his discs. He announced that over 150,000 people had downloaded the album and just over 28,000 paid the $5 for the better version.  There is no monetization in free information distribution, there is only monetization when you move beyond the actual art. You move into some sort of service industry demands.

So without a solution to the monetizing the “free” model there cannot be anyone SERIOUSLY trying to create art. Sure, there can have more, but I know I would personally rather have the focus of the few brilliant artists, talented enough to make it in the current system then to begin crowdsourcing our culture. With copyright as is, artists have a certainly level of acceptance and approval to aspire to, and that level is compensated monetarily. To abolish this system is to abolish the ultimate goal of art… to be recognized for doing good work. Our society’s way of recognizing is monetarily, and that also happens to allow those recognized to focus on their next work of art… not to turn into marketers.

If you want to get into the fantasy world of free information where everything is candy and roses, that’s fine, but I’m trying to present reality. This is a problem for artists. They can’t figure out how to succeed in this new business model if their only product is music. Then again, if you want to force artists into a position where they are forced to move beyond a focus on the production of art, then sure, there are plenty of ways to monetize what they do. Performance, teaching, merchandising, etc. We could certainly move into a world where artists are forced to always do more than create art and tell them basically, “Sorry! Times have changed. Deal with it.” The point I would like to make is that they are now not allowed to focus on their art. There is no machine to earn them money. They have to be mostly marketer and less artist. By creating a world where there is no monetization of information, you devalue you the ability to make art while increasing the value in promoting and marketing art. Just beware what you’re championing.

And if you want a reason why the copyLEFT is ‘wrong’… it’s because it doesn’t make money. If it doesn’t make money, there will not be people trying to do it for a living. The copyLEFT is ‘wrong’ right now, because there’s no monetization in it.  Frankly, I’d prefer we let the talent artists good enough to become recognized continue to work as artists. Let’s leave public speaking and marketing to the politicians.

Filed under: Nico Smith

Yeah… Open Source sounds great and all… but is it really open source?

The biggest dichotomy for me when reading Benkler’s Wealth of Networks is the juxtaposition between proprietary and open source. It seems, generally, that open source is becoming the preferred method of creation online, and the tools that are becoming mostly widely used and accepted are those that have been going through crowd-sourcing for long enough to be somehow vetted by the open source community. There’s a level of acceptance and expectation that the web will entirely run (eventually) of free, open source software. “About 70 percent of Web server software runs on the Apache Web server – free. More than half of all back-office e-mail functions are run by one free software or another.” (pg 64)

My question with this… is where does that leave the 2 most secretive companies in the world that are both perceived to be thought leaders in this space? Google and Apple are more proprietary than any other companies I can think of, and yet, they are easily the most successful companies in utilizing the internet. How can a open source world have their two biggest success stories be the furthest thing from open source?

While the web certainly does allow the means to transfer information and allows conversations to occur that would have never been possible without it, I tend to wonder what the underbelly of it is actually based on. Google Buzz sounds great until you realize that by using it you’ve opened up your entire address book to any who wants to have a peek. IPhones are fabulous, until you realize that there will never be anything running on the iPhone interface that was not cherry picked by Apple and that, oh yeah, they now have access to every interaction you make online since you’re running it through their proprietary software and network.

I do, however, find extreme value in the crowd sourcing of thought. I again find myself wondering if the museum should be Wikipedia-esque. I’m a huge believer in open-source, and I firmly believe that the collective is stronger than the individual, which museums have always been… I’d like to get more into the concept of crowd-curating and not have a single curator decide what is and is not art or if an artifact worth of preservation. Maybe that truly is the biggest difference between now and the future museum.

Filed under: Nico Smith

Search and the New Museum… or a blog about Glut

In reading Glut: Mastering Information Through the Ages, it becomes very clear, very quickly that Wright believes that the sheer amount of information available creates a sort of overload that ultimately turns into confusion. He begins by walking the reader through the history of the creation of information systems.

Wright’s primary vehicle of explanation is the Library. The history of the library show its growth from a device used to ‘hoard’ knowledge to a centralized location for the continuance of a culture. The current day museums are trying to act more similarly to what the library evolved into.

Maybe the museum’s job in the future will, in fact be to house ‘everything’… Could the prototype of the museum be a searchable wiki that takes the collective knowledge and experience bases of all of its visitors and combines them to create a not only a crowd-sourced database of past knowledge and experiences, but what if the museum itself was, in fact, crowd-curated?

So if we play off the crowd-curated idea, we must reexamine the current parameters of search, as Wright has done. Wright states “Because it tries to be all things to all people, Google inevitably turns the Web into a kind of worldwide popularity contest, often at the expense of smaller, more focused communities of interest” (pg 204). Is there a better way to categorize information to more specifically compliment the museums’ field? Can we turn the popularity contest into a quality of information contest?

Ultimately, I believe the more clear take away from Wright is that when we present ways to utilize information and make it accessible to others, we need to realize not only where it came from, but how we can better categorize it to create a fuller, more specific consumption. If the museum of the future is crowd-curated, there also needs to be some of level of governance to keep it from turning to a popularity contest. “For all its populist appeal, Wikipedia’s sheer growth has forced it to develop a set of hierarchical control systems, instituting a governing organization and approval process to excert a measure of top-down regulation over the sprawling bottom-up activity of its contributors.” (pg 238) So too, must a crowd-curated museum. Ultimately, there must but one governing party who decides what is an artifact and what is art?

Filed under: Nico Smith, Glut, Wright

I wish we could all think like 5 year olds sometimes…

One of my favorite notions of Bolter and Grusin discussed was utilizing transparency in amusements parks alongside the  pure hypermediacy of the park that is forced upon visitors. Bolter and Grusin say “There are attempts at transparency in the narrative elements of theme parks… While meeting a larger-than-life costumed Mickey Mouse may not constitute transparency for the adults. , it does for children…” (171) This is a fascinating concept to me… Much like Ben’s point about the 5 year old calling Northpark Mall a museum, children have a different sense of both transparency and of hypermediacy and different instinctive reactions when each one occurs.

This is, I believe, one of the keys to creating a new museum in this world inundated with hypermediacy. This is not something that we should shy away from, as is the typical museum general response, but this is something to embrace. I love the ideal of “found art” and creating an exhibit that it’s possible to be a part of without even realizing it. This provides patrons an opportunity to experience the art but to also become the art and develop their own narrative in the process. The largest change that I personally have experienced with new media is the ability to create my own narrative. I’m no longer limited to a linear experience, and in fact, I’m encouraged to seek the narrative, not only at my own pace, but in my own order, in a location of my choosing, at a participation level of my own choosing.

This is similar to my previous experiences at museums. I’ve always been able to go at my own pace, in my own order, paying as much attention as I personally choose to each narrative. How do we take this staple of the museum and heighten it? This is great connection that I can find between the way we currently learn and the way museums have always been… so what can we do with this to make the transition not only possible, but seamless.

Bolter and Grusin bring up that “Cyberspace is not, as some assert, a parallel universe… It is rather a nonplace, with many of the same characteristics as highly mediated nonplaces.” (179) Is there a way to highly mediate the museum experience into real places? Or can we utilize hypermediacy to project the narratives of the past into the non-places of the future? Does that even make sense? Hmmmm…. I’ll keep thinking about this one…

Filed under: Nico Smith

Thoughts on Derrida, the future of books, and iPads

This is very odd day for me to be writing about this… I have just completed the development of a serious video game to train nursing students on neonatal respiratory care. This game is designed to be the first step in the development of a full curriculum based online that can be accessed anywhere and including every imaginable learn style to create a unique user experience tailored specifically to how a student learns. By providing the options of interactivity, text based learn, video, audio, mobile capabilities, serious video game technology, social networking, and online question answer interfaces, we are doing everything we can to kill the textbook. Simultaneously, Apple has just released the iPad, which some believe (the CEO of McGraw-Hill, one of the largest textbook publishers on the planet) will be the grand savior of the print industry. The savior of the print industry will be a paper shaped computer? Apparently.

With that, we dive into Derrida… I’m much more struck by his concepts about libraries than his diatribes about specific linguistics involving books and title and grammar. This is likely because of my focus on the museum and how the death of books can be paralleled by the death of artifacts and original works of art that exist but once.  Derrida says of libraries that they, “will more and more in the future have to collect together (in order to make available to users) texts, documents, and achieves that are further and further away from both the support that is paper and the book form.”

In relationship to museums, does this parallel? Will museums be forced into moving further and further away from the static images and artifacts that they are now based in? The Library has a model of what it will turn into… the web. The museum, however, is not easily scanned and loaded into WordPress. Derrida goes on to say that museums will become “dominated by texts no longer corresponding to the ‘book’ form.” So what is the art work/artifact equivalent? Can we look to serious video games to take the place of seeing the actual item? If you can virtually experience the burning of Rome, do you still value seeing a vase that made it out? If you can “interview” Michelangelo while he’s painting the Sistine Chapel, do you need to actually see the finished product?

I’m curious to start implementing Debray’s line of thinking when in his essay, The Book as a Symbolic Object, he said “Textual dematerialization releases though from the weight of things, increases its mobility, multiplies its possibilities.” Can the same be done to art/artifacts somehow? Can we dematerialize an experience that mostly based on specific and rare material? If museums become mobile, wouldn’t that inherently increase their possibilities? Is the importance of a museum the thought and emotions that are provoked or is it the tangible items that are provoking them?

The main questions I come out of this with is this… Do technological advancements and the ability to duplicate specific works of art and artifacts make the original pieces less important? Or do they make them more important than ever? Does it matter to anyone that they’ve seen the “real” Mona Lisa, when everyone on the planet knows what it looks like? Is there more or less value now placed in the tangible?

Filed under: Nico Smith