Photo copyright Eric Orns 2000
The Brooklyn Museum used online crowdsourcing to a exciting end, in the conception and delivery of their Click! photography exhibition, in a process which invited the museum’s visitors, the online community, and the general public to participate in the exhibition process.
It began with an open call—artists were asked to electronically submit a work of photography that responds to the exhibition’s theme, “Changing Faces of Brooklyn,” along with an artist statement.
After the conclusion of the open call, an online forum opened for audience evaluation of all submissions (all works were posted as anonymous). As part of the evaluation, each visitor answered a series of questions about his/her knowledge of art and perceived expertise.
Click! culminated in an exhibition at the Museum, where the artworks were installed according to their relative ranking from the juried process.
The results are, of course, online, where the public can engage with discussions and analysis of the work, and the entire process.
Those of you who were at the Arts Council’s New Media, New Audience? conference last November may remember a speaker from the Royal Shakespeare Company. He spoke of the RSC’s strategy of using the internet to reach out to new audiences, many of which the RSC felt would never actually make it to their venue.
Their site is indeed a fantastic resource for anyone interested in Shakespeare, or theatre in general. You could, for example, watch insightful footage of a rehearsal of the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet. There is no direct ‘sell’ involved with this, i.e. they’re not selling tickets to Romeo and Juliet. In monetary terms it may be hard to see a financial return from this kind of web activity. However, this degree of online endeavour clearly reinforces the RSC’s brand internationally, and it’s claim to be the world’s leading authority on the works of Shakespeare.
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The Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam is taking things a step further, and are now ‘the first museum on the European Continent to have developed an iPhone application’.
The app, called “Yours, Vincent” is a little work of art in itself. Free to download from iTunes, it incorporates a selection of beautifully produced short films, interviews and images to bring the user through selected accounts from Vincent van Gogh’s letters, and related paintings.
The app was developed to go along with the exhibit “Van Gogh’s Letters: The Artist Speaks” which opened earlier this month, and runs to January 3, 2010 at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.
For those unable to make it to Amsterdam, all of the letters are also available to view online at www.vangoghletters.org.
This is a heads up… Platform Ireland, a dedicated online portal for Irish arts and culture content, is due to go live with a soft launch this month.
The site will bring together Irish arts and culture content from across all artforms, creating an online focal point where web users from around Ireland and the world can engage with Irish art and culture.
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a pre -launch peek at the site:
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In the Global Economic Forum in Farmleigh last month, a consenus emerged that arts and culture should be one of the foundations of the rebuilding of Ireland – delegate Shane O’Neill summed it up saying “There was a general consensus that culture was one thing we’ve excelled at” (Irish Times 26/9/09).
If this is indeed the case, then Platform Ireland could well play a part in this process, bringing the work of Irish artists to international audiences, in ways that a multitude of individual arts websites could not.
Further details will be posted here when the site goes live. Platform Ireland is being developed by Jessica Fuller of Stillpoint Productions, to get on their mailing list, or if you feel you have content which could be included, contact details are available on Stillpoint’s website.
While the subject matter may not be for everyone, Michael Scott’s forthcoming production of My First Time is using the internet imaginatively to generate content and build audiences, bringing the term User Generated Content to a new level.
The production is similar in format to the Vagina Monologues (another format which Scott very successfully brought over from the US). In the case of this coming production, the public have been invited to submit stories of an intimate nature on the production’s website. These submissions are then used as material for inclusion the production; 4 actors through the course of the performance take turns to read out a selection of these stories.
I imagine the call for stories could have legs virally (if viruses have legs) and that those who submit their stories would be keen to turn up to see if their story features.
In another example of using UGC to produce material, The Royal Opera Company in London produced Twitterdammerung: the Twitter Opera last month. Composed entirely of tweets from the public, the production was designed to make opera more widely accessible. The Telegraph critic wasn’t bowled over, but concluded “as cheap gimmicks go, this was a good ‘un”.
This is exciting to see… in a new departure for the Children’s Book Festival, Children’s Books Ireland have joined forces with blogger David Maybury to set up the WRITE STUFF, a unique online meeting-place for budding young authors and poets as part of this year’s festival.
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blogger David Maybury, currently in Australia it seems
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Writers Celine Kiernan, David Donohue and Mary Melvin Geoghegan will be stationed in public libraries in Monaghan, Sligo and Longford, but will be connecting with school children across the country, in a ground-breaking online creative writing project over the course of the month.
We’ll be sure to check in with The Write Stuff when the festival is well underway, and will post on this again.
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