'Augmented Reality' Smart Phone Apps Revolutionize Museum Audio Tours

Art Gets Unmasked in the Palm of Your Hand

By ALEXANDER FIDEL

PARIS — “In the ’50s, we were the first museum in the world to have an audio tour,” Hein Wils, a project manager for the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, said last month. “Today, we’re one of the first to have augmented reality.”

Mr. Wils was speaking about the museum’s project that lets people use their smartphones to enrich their museum visits. Smartphones can overlay digital content, like images or movies, across real spaces. Mr. Wils wants visitors to use their phones as lenses, allowing them to see otherwise invisible images — like sleek computer-generated sculptures or floating interviews with artists — on the screens as they walk around the Stedelijk and point their phones’ cameras at objects. This creates what developers are referring to as “augmented reality.”

The Amsterdam museum is not alone in its use of smartphones. Within the next year, many of the top museums in the world — especially contemporary ones — will introduce applications for smartphones, if they have not done so already. The Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art offered smartphone applications this summer, and European museums are following suit. Think of it as a 21st-century update on the audio guide, that staple of museum education departments.

By next spring, the Stedelijk will allow people to interact with exhibitions on smartphones while at their home or in the museum. Although the Centre Pompidou in Paris has no anticipated starting date, it is six months into the production of a smartphone application and already sells exhibition guides to be used with smartphones. The Reina Sofía Museum in Madrid and the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin are expecting Web sites or applications designed for mobile technology in the next two years.

The Museum of Modern Art’s application is one of the most popular. Since its iPhone application was introduced in August, it has been downloaded more than 400,000 times, according to Allegra Burnette, the museum’s creative director of digital media.

Drawing on earlier applications like those from the Museum of London and the Brooklyn Museum, MoMA’s application offers a selection of audio tours with images and videos and access to one-fifth of the museum’s collection. MoMA also started offering a Web site for mobile phones last month.

MoMA’s effective use of audio, video and slide shows on its smartphone application is likely to keep drawing new users, but the future of museum applications lies in how these features are combined. The Stedelijk is taking a gamble, putting audio and video features on an “augmented reality” Web browser on the smartphone. Stedelijk is using Layar, an application that lays three-dimensional objects over the smartphone’s screen when the phone’s camera is pointed at real rooms and buildings.

The Stedelijk used the Layar application at the Lowlands music festival in the Netherlands in August and in September at Picnic, a yearly conference in Amsterdam on art, science, technology and business. At Stedelijk stations set up at the events, visitors thumbed through collections showing the museum’s works. The works included bar codes that people could scan using a separate application. They then received a digital version of each work. Using Layar, they could “hang” the work on a geographic coordinate within the grounds of the festival. When other Layar users pointed their phones at the coordinate, they could also see the hung work.

The Museum of Modern Art was the site of another Layar exhibition. The Conflux Festival in New York held a show in October, using Layar on smartphones to display art in the museum’s galleries without first asking the museum.

Ms. Burnette, the museum’s digital media director, was unfazed by this new use. “That’s something we were really excited to see,” she said. “For us, it means that they care about the museum enough to participate actively in it.”

Participation is important for the new generation of applications coming from these museums. The Stedelijk, for example, intends to ask a lot of the user. “We want to make an A.R. project with strong emphasis on user-generated content,” Mr. Wils said, referring to augmented reality. He also emphasized the importance of getting artists involved in the process. “We want to see that artists are using the technology to come up with new user experiences,” he said.

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art started offering an application last summer, called “In Still Life 2001-2010,” that required user participation.

“I myself would call it an interactive participatory work of art, but it’s up for interpretation,” said Amy Heibel, the museum’s director of Web and digital media, referring to the application that lets people rearrange 38 elements of a 17th-century Dutch still life.

This application, produced by the technology companies For Your Art and Ovation, yields results in the style of the contemporary conceptual artist John Baldessari. Its introduction coincided with the June exhibition of Mr. Baldessari’s work at the Los Angeles museum.

The general smartphone application for the museum is expected to be introduced by the end of this month. Through an icon that appears on the smartphone’s screen, the phone’s browser will be connected to the museum’s mobile Web site, where users can see 175 works from the permanent collection, with supporting text, video and audio from the curatorial department.

In Madrid, the Reina Sofía is taking a different track. Chema González, the head of cultural activities, says the museum is focusing on audio programming, in an effort keep visitors’ eyes on the artworks while enriching their experience. It plans to have four audio podcast channels from which people can download programming onto smartphones and use at home or in the gallery.

“The key is not to offer a substitute for real experience,” Mr. González said. With podcasts, Mr. González wants to mix oral history with the museum visit. “What is important is not to narrate each specific work of art,” he said. “The works are politically and socially engaged moments. We will focus on context.”

Beginning this month, two channels will have programming by exhibiting artists and curators. Another channel will draw programming from the museum’s 1970s collective conceptual art, and the last channel will be left for more conceptual programming by artists.

Most museums’ smartphone application projects have a similar approach to development, through contracting with outside companies or experts in the digital arts sector. The museums all offer information and gather feedback on social networking and media sites, and almost all the products are free. The Centre Pompidou sells smartphone audio guides to special exhibitions, and the Stedelijk is considering offering premium smartphone editions. But for the most part, all of these new experiences cost nothing but the time it takes to download them.

 

This article is from: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/02/arts/02iht-rartsmart.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1

 

Dutch Museums Getting Big Makeovers

Museums' Changing Face

In the Netherlands, the Mauritshuis is the latest to renovate

By JOEL WEICKGENANT

The Hague's Mauritshuis Royal Picture Gallery enjoys all the benefits of being housed in a mansion, with its reddish brown-brick exterior and Greek columns that instantly draw the eye away from the opulence of the adjacent Binnenhof government complex in the Hague's downtown.

Despite its curbside appeal, every house occasionally needs to be brought up to date. Nowadays, if you want to draw visitors indoors to see, say, Vermeer's "Girl With A Pearl Earring," among the most famous of the museum's holdings, you need to open up the small rooms that are constraints of the original building.



The Mauritshuis will be the latest in a line of landmark museums in the Netherlands to undertake major renovations. The museum will essentially turn into a complex, with an underground extension that will connect the old house to Plein 26, an Art Deco building across the street that will now house spaces for cafes, conferences and exhibitions. The €22 million project will almost double the space of the museum, to 6,400 square meters.



Aryan Sikkema:A computer-generated image of the futuristic, glass-encased, new annex of the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.

 

"You can think of a cross between the Apple store in New York and the Louvre," is how Mauritshuis Director Emilie Gordenker describes the museum's hopes for the extension and renovation. "We're going to open up the gates. Then you come in and you end up in a very large, spacious and light-filled foyer."



A survey of some of the most important cultural institutions in the Hague and Amsterdam paints a dramatically shifting landscape. Some are slowly re-emerging after long closures, while restoration and bureaucratic hiccups keep other galleries in mothballs long past projected deadlines. Some are building new headquarters in unfamiliar neighborhoods, while others are redrawing the parameters of their old ones. Many works in the country's best collections lie in depots or travel to museums in smaller cities or abroad.



Far from being of interest only to museumgoers, many projects are changing the look and function of Dutch cityscapes. The Stedelijk Museum and Rijksmuseum, along with the Van Gogh Museum, sit along the grass-covered Museumplein (Museum Square). The futuristic, glass-encased new annex of the Stedelijk will bring libraries, a restaurant and an auditorium directly into the square, while the reopening of the bike passage that runs through the Rijksmuseum building will once again connect the city's core to the Museum District.



In the meantime, the skeleton of the Eye Film Institute's gleaming new headquarters across from Centraal Station offers a promise of what's to come when the new institute, which incorporates the former Filmmuseum, opens on the waterfront in Amsterdam Noord, the city's largest and quirkiest district. Last year's opening of Hermitage Amsterdam, in a 17th-century monument on the Amstel, has added a new dimension to Amsterdam's museum landscape: the museum draws its exhibitions from the collections of the Hermitage in St. Petersburg. The museum drew 630,000 visitors in its first half-year of operation, and on Oct. 23 won a countrywide design award. Amsterdam's National Maritime Museum, which began renovations in 2007, is on schedule to reopen in 2011. And around the corner from the Mauritshuis in the Hague, a pair of museums, the Prince William V Gallery and the Prison Gate Museum, staged a joint opening in September after a two-year renovation.



"We're a small museum, so in the end what we're looking to do is create a setting for the final event, which is the Mauritshuis with the fabulous collection," Ms. Gordenker says. Changes include a new entrance at the front, which is currently blocked off by an iron gate and fence. The entrance will lead visitors to the most prominent feature of the new design: the underground foyer, meant to flood with natural light, which will connect the Mauritshuis to Plein 26 on the other side.



"Using a building project like this is not only an expansion of your facilities," says Ms. Gordenker, "but also a complete rethink of who you are and where you want to go."



Amsterdam's Stedelijk returned to the core of its identity when a massive, ongoing renovation and expansion project began in 2004. The museum, dedicated to contemporary art, reopened its monumental building for a series of temporary exhibitions in August to show the public the work that has been completed so far.



Renovators of the Stedelijk sought to embody two key periods in the building's history: the original design by city architect Adriaan Weissman, and the interior design of Willem Sandberg, the curator-turned-director who radically implemented the "white cube" aesthetic that became the iconic backdrop for modern art around the world.



As part of the renovation, workers cleansed the building of "all the later changes and additions which were made because of a lack of space: little offices and small and low gallery spaces," says Patrick Van Mil, Stedelijk's business director. "This means that all of the historical building is going to be gallery space now, leaving more room to show the breadth and depth of the collection."



The Stedelijk maintained a shifting public presence after closing its doors six years ago. Until 2008, it hosted shows from a temporary space in a building near Centraal Station. Through a program called "Stedelijk in the City," the museum crafted partnerships resulting in shows such as the exhibition on religion and art, held in 2008 and 2009, in the Nieuwe Kerk on Dam Square. But the museum itself stayed closed until the partial reopening in August.



"The thing is the new annex took longer than expected" to build, Stedlijk spokeswoman Marie Jose Raven says, adding that since the museum belongs to the city and relies on government support, managing the project can be painstaking.



Managers at the Rijksmuseum understand the frustration. Delays in construction and fights with the neighborhood district that has to approve the design of the project have led to a five-year lag in the expected re-opening of the museum.



The Rijksmuseum is scheduled to fully reopen in 2013, and while the branch of the museum that remains open draws almost a million visitors a year, according to spokesman Boris De Munnick, most of its treasures remain locked in depots.



Back in the Hague, the Mauritshuis still has time before the doors close—the final design will be revealed next month and construction begins early 2012. Ms. Gordenker says she hopes the final result will be an open, inviting layout that appeals to a contemporary public; and a construction process that will avoid the pitfalls and delays that have plagued some other projects. "The Mauritshuis itself will really be able to sparkle," she says.

 

This article is from: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703805704575594590066431152.html?mod=rss_Arts_and_Entertainment