Museums find an unlikely ally: The cellphone By Dan Goodin, The Associated Press.
Article and comment after the jump...
SAN FRANCISCO — Art lovers, history buffs and science devotees, take note: To get the most out of your next museum visit, make sure you have your cellphone with you.
By Paul Sakuma, AP / http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/techinnovations/2006-03-19-cell-museum-tours_x.htm?POE=TECISVA
Not to gab on, of course, but to listen to audio tours that weave music, narration and recordings from historical archives designed to bring more context to the exhibitions. For many visitors, it comes as a welcome alternative to the decades-old system of museums renting out expensive handheld devices.
Museums across the country, once averse to noisy cellphones, are suddenly encouraging their use. In the past year, about a dozen art institutions — including museums in Los Angeles, Berkeley, Calif., Tacoma, Wash., Minneapolis and Greenwich, Conn. — have begun offering cellphone tours, mostly for free. Dozens more are in the process of implementing the service.
One reason for the surge is the emergence of companies such as Guide by Cell of San Francisco, Ashburn, Va.-based Spatial Adventures and Minneapolis-based Museum411, which run computer servers and phone systems so museums don't have to.
"I generally don't buy the audio tours when I go to a museum unless it's a Monet or somebody really impressive," said Chris Mengarelli, 53, who recently used her phone to tour the exhibit Visual Politics: The Art of Engagement, at the San Jose Museum of Art.
"It was much more convenient than having to rent a head set and worrying about what kind of germs are being transmitted."
Museums have been making audio tours available over cellphones since at least 2002, when Southern Utah University opened an exhibit of historical photos documenting 100 years of local theater. Matt Nickerson, a professor of library science, wrote the script and taped old actors recalling their performances in Shakespearean plays. He recruited an actor and engineer to record and mix the audio tour at a radio station.
"It turned out to be much simpler than I thought," he said.
Using the museum services is as easy as dialing a number and selecting the code that corresponds to the artwork a visitor is viewing. While each museum's system is different, visitors generally can stay on the same call throughout the tour and switch from one exhibit to the next by entering different numbers into their phones, similar to the way callers navigate a voice mail system.
At least one tour, offered at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, responded to voice commands, but museum officials there discontinued the feature because chatter and ambient noise often interfered.
Companies such as Spatial Adventures plan to offer text, pictures and video in the next year or so to take advantage of new capabilities being offered by cellphone carriers such as Verizon and Sprint.
For now, most museums offer cellphone audio for free, although users must deduct the time spent listening from their monthly allotment of minutes. They also must pay any roaming charges or other costs that may apply to their cellphone plan. Those costs differ widely depending on the carrier.
Many museums are able to give away the service because companies such as Guide by Cell, living off investor financing, offer free pilots of the service as they try to jump-start the trend. About half of Guide by Cell's customers are paying for the service, while all of Museum411's clients pay.
"When we have to pay, or someone has to pay, we may have to change things," said Suzanne Isken, director of education at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, which started using Guide by Cell audio for one of its exhibits in January.
The chief benefit of cellphones is their ubiquity. With almost 204 million Americans carrying a cellphone, according to wireless industry group CTIA, museums no longer have to maintain fleets of handheld devices.
Isken recently decided to not to offer an audio tour using the dedicated devices for an upcoming exhibit on the work of artist Robert Rauschenberg. She estimates that her museum would have spent $20,000 just to pay the staff that checks out, cleans and recharges the dedicated devices, which are provided by a company called Antenna Audio.
"We were concerned that we wouldn't be able to make back our investment," Isken said, explaining that under financial arrangements with Antenna, 20,000 visitors would need to buy the $6 service for the museum to break even.
cellphones also make it easy for visitors who have decided to skip the audio tour to spontaneously change their minds.
"You don't have to go back to the desk and rent something," said Robin Dowden, director of new media initiatives at the Walker Art Center.
Not all museums are embracing the trend. The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art is studying cellphone audio tours but has decided to hold off for now. Instead, it offers audio files that visitors can download from the museum website and play on their iPods or other portable music players while viewing exhibits.
"Just because you have a phone in your hand and can call up a message about every piece in a gallery doesn't mean those messages are going to be engaging," said Peter Samis, associate curator of education at the museum.
"Museums themselves are relative novices at this and don't have any experience producing this type of content in-house," he said. "There's a steeper learning curve than many proselytizers of the technology are willing to acknowledge."
Mengarelli, who toured "Visual Politics," confessed to finding some portions of the audio tour "distracting." She also complained that her arm got tired holding a cellphone to her ear for 30 minutes.
Still, the San Jose Museum of Art's experiment with cellphone audio has already changed the way some visitors take in art.
Ben Patel, a 29-year-old hotel worker who arrived just before closing time one day last week, quickly snapped pictures of the images on his digital camera, so he could view them later on his computer while listening to the narration on his phone.
"It's a good idea," he said. "I'm short on time and the museum will be shut before I can view all of them."
When I was in Wellington at Te Papa, I tried out the PDA virtual "tour guide" for the "Made in New Zealand Exhibit" - it wasn't perfect, but it was an interesting concept that went a little further than a generic audio tour. I really like the idea of making audio guides more accessible to visitors though, because they (if done well) can really enhance the experience in a particular exhibition. I think a lot of museums are put off by the huge costs involved in creating/providing/maintaining audio tours, however, and it's pretty rare to see them. This proposed service would be a lot more accessible for visitors, and sounds to be a lower cost than hand-held units; overall a terrific idea and it's something i'd love to see happen in Australian museums. A while back I heard about MOMA's audio tours, which come in multiple formats (hand-held and downloadable, mainly) and I think it's the perfect way to approach it. Podcasts appeal to me particularly, because I think it's something that could be done (reasonably) easily and low-cost in-house in museums. I'd like to work to put something together for one of the permanent displays here at the Queensland Museum, most likely the "Discover Queensland" display - it's a broad, all-encompassing display that presents the state well but could be enhanced with an audio tour with some more background and history. Once the school holidays are over, i'll talk to my manager (who was one of the main people involved) and possibly our "new media" person and see if it's something they'd be interested in.
Thursday, April 13, 2006
Article repost and comment - Museums find an unlikely ally: The cellphone
Article repost and comment - British Museum returns aboriginal ashes to Tasmania
British Museum returns aboriginal ashes to Tasmania.
British Museum returns aboriginal ashes to Tasmania
The British Museum says it will repatriate two bundles of aboriginal human remains back to Australia after they were taken more than 160 years ago.
"It will be a very joyous occasion when we've got two stolen remains back to Tasmania,” said Trudy Maluga of the Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre. "These two bundles are the only two known to exist today so it's very special to us."
Maluga said aboriginal representatives will travel to Britain soon to arrange for the return of the remains. She wasn't sure exactly when that would be.
She declared the move a “historic victory” after battling for 20 years to get the ashes back. She said new laws passed last year in Britain allowed public museums to return ancestral remains.
"We do know that one other public museum over in Britain has Tasmanian remains and so we've started the process to try and get those remains back to our country,” noted Maluga.
She said another eight British institutions, including the British Natural History Museum, have aboriginal items that interest her centre.
Museum officials said the bundles were taken from Australia in 1838 by George Augustus Robinson, the chief protector of aborigines in the Port Phillip district of Tasmania.
The ashes, wrapped in animal skin, had been used as talismans to ward off sickness.
“Robinson took these from sick aborigines when they were close to death. They were effectively stolen,” Maluga told The Age newspaper in Australia.
Maluga said the bundles were to be buried with their owners and so, by taking the items, Robinson interrupted the process of the two people being laid to rest.
The London museum, which acquired the remains in 1882 from the Royal College of Surgeons, said on Friday that the aborigines’ claim “outweighed any other public benefit.”
“The museum looks forward to continuing to work with indigenous Australian communities in furthering the worldwide public understanding of Australian aboriginal culture, both past and present,” said Helena Kennedy, a British Museum trustee.
The museum is creating an Australian and Pacific Gallery slated to open in 2008.
It's good to hear that the BM have made the positive move toward repatriating human remains, especially considering it's difficult for Tasmanian descendants to pull together much material regarding their history on the island. I wonder if they'll make the effort for any more (non-Tasmanian stuff) they hold in their collections? It's a pitfall of so many Ethnographic museum collections that their histories are peppered with less-than honest acquisition methods. While a lot of collecting done for Australian museums was slightly dubious, and often paid for in trade goods, there's little (that I know of) of this outright stealing, especially of such sacred stuff. It'd be interesting to know what policies the BM and other museums in the UK have for repatriation to colonies, and whether it's limited to human remains - considering their reluctance to allow the Dja Dja to retain the bark paintings loaned to Museum Victoria in 2004. And, y'know, there's their whole Elgin Marbles problem. I suppose when you have a museum with so much history it tends to manifest as authority - and while museums are definitely keeping places and stewards of cultural heritage, there's a point where they have to consider those cultures and their wants and needs.
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