#hyperstudio

Hi folks—I'm excited to announce that I'll be presenting not once, but twice at this year's Museums and the Web conference. First, I'll be co-presenting with fellow research assistant Liam Andrew on the art discovery app we've been developing at HyperStudio, MIT's digital humanities lab. I'll also give a talk on my thesis research examining the emergence of museum initiatives inviting audiences to experiment with new technologies. I've included the abstracts for both paper presentations below.

This year's Museums and the Web takes place in Chicago from April 8 to 10. Hope to see you there!

Playful Engineering: Designing and Building Art Discovery Systems

How can we engineer the discovery of art? HyperStudio, MIT’s digital humanities laboratory, has been tackling this question through the development of Artbot, a mobile website that encourages meaningful, sustained relationships to art museums in the Boston area. Artbot combines two strategies to enable users to discover cultural happenings in the city: a serendipitous approach that allows users to explore via linkages between art events, and a recommendation system that suggests events based on a user’s interests. Using Artbot as its primary case study, this paper will examine the design and building of art discovery systems. First, it will survey other examples of art recommendation and discovery systems, such as Magic Tate Ball, Serendip-o-matic, Artsy, and the Powerhouse’s OPAC 2.0 collection project. Then, we will discuss the frontend design and backend technologies behind Artbot’s discovery engine and consider how other cultural institutions can implement these approaches.

Museum Making: Creating with Emerging Technologies in Art Museums

Hackathons, startup incubators, maker spaces, and innovation labs. These terms are common to the world of tech, but recently, they’ve appeared on museum websites and in press releases. The last few years have witnessed a wave of art museum initiatives that invite audiences—from casual visitors to professional artists and technologists—to take the reigns of creative production through experimentation with digital media and fabrication technologies.  Where is this interest in engaging audiences with hands-on, technological creation coming from? And how are museums, which might lack the necessary funding and technical knowhow to work with new technologies, able to make these initiatives happen? This presentation is informed by the extensive historical and ethnographic research I have conducted for my master’s thesis in comparative media studies at MIT. This presentation is informed by the extensive historical and ethnographic research I have conducted for my master’s thesis in comparative media studies at MIT. Case studies include the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s Art + Technology Lab, a program that awards artist grants and mentorship from individuals and technology companies such as Google, DAQRI, and the Jet Propulson Lab to develop art projects and artistic research; the Peabody Essex Museum’s Maker Lounge, an in-gallery space in which visitors are invited to tinker with high and low technologies; and the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Media Lab, a section of the Digital Media department that invites both visitors and artists to experiment with new technologies through programs such as 3D printing workshops and hackathons.

Download HyperStudio 5 for Mac

In the digital humanities, we often talk about how we can use technology and big data to accomplish what Franco Moretti calls “distant reading” of literary, historical, and artistic texts. But Wyn Kelley uses Annotation Studio, our web-based, collaborative annotation application, to engage her students in close reading and writing. (source)

A spate of recent websites and mobile applications, such as Artsy, ArtStack, and Curiator, allow users to aggregate virtual collections of art. The missions behind such websites often have a democratic impulse, making works of art accessible on the web and transforming users into art collectors. As a museum educator, I am all for democratizing the art experience, but I wonder if we’re asking the right questions. What the internet affords us is a wealth of art images at our easy disposal, and web projects like Artsy allows us to cull through them in one place. But how, then, do we create meaningful experiences from these images? How do we get people to look closely, think critically, and engage in conversations with others about a work of art?

Retro-blogging, I guess they were trying to teach us

p.s. if anyone can tell me what this website creator was called if you recognise it that would be great because it was hilarious and I was stoked to be told there was the possibility we could buy a copy of it from the school but now it's like a joke of a program because we have torrenting and Photoshop and Notepad++ and all that jazz to create websites