What if you could see through the walls of every museum and something could tell you if you’d like...

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What if you could see through the walls of every museum and something could tell you if you’d like it? Chris Thorpe ArtFinder HTTP://WWW.FLICKR.COM/PHOTOS/ JAGGEREE/ I’m going to start off this talk by saying why I think this is important. Culture is such a key part of the fabric of our society in my eyes and yet it is something that is often perceived, rightly or wrongly as something not for me. It’s for the intelligentsia, the liberal classes, the trendies. This is so untrue, but it’s something where there is a perceived risk to self esteem in trying new things. We have to break this, we have to make culture more democratic, more inclusive, not by dumbing it down, but by making systems which talk to each other so that the good experiences you have in one place can lead to good experiences in other places.

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A talk I was asked to give at Culture Hackday in London, talking about the thinking that's been going on in the latest project I'm a part of; Artfinder.

Transcript of What if you could see through the walls of every museum and something could tell you if you’d like...

Page 1: What if you could see through the walls of every museum and something could tell you if you’d like it?

What if you could see through the walls of every museum and something could tell you if you’d like it?

Chris ThorpeArtFinder

HTTP://WWW.FLICKR.COM/PHOTOS/JAGGEREE/

I’m going to start off this talk by saying why I think this is important. Culture is such a key part of the fabric of our society in my eyes and yet it is something that is often perceived, rightly or wrongly as something not for me. It’s for the intelligentsia, the liberal classes, the trendies. This is so untrue, but it’s something where there is a perceived risk to self esteem in trying new things. We have to break this, we have to make culture more democratic, more inclusive, not by dumbing it down, but by making systems which talk to each other so that the good experiences you have in one place can lead to good experiences in other places.

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The concept for me of seeing through the walls of buildings all really starts with this man who I expect none of you to know. He isn’t famous, apart from for me, he’s my maternal grandfather.

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Who went by the great turn of the 20th century name of Cyril George Evans. He was an architect who designed mainly civic buildings like schools and offices. But most importantly to me he’d draw buildings and taught me to draw them and about perspectives and projections.

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He and I would also look at this wonderful book which is one of my most treasured things. The wonderful History of Architecture by Professor Banister Fletcher and Sir Banister Fletcher.

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And I loved pages like this, where you could see into buildings, see through their walls

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See what was inside, it’s like what we now know as MRI scans for buildings.

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It seemed to me the most magical thing to be able to see into a building. It’s such an unusual thing. Buildings are largely solid and opaque.

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HTTP://WWW.FLICKR.COM/PHOTOS/HUMAIN/

Unless of course they’re totally transparent like the Farnsworth House with all of the interior on show. It’s an unusually knowable building.

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HTTP://WWW.FLICKR.COM/PHOTOS/SHANEGLOBAL/

And that is the opposite of many galleries. From the outside they are unknowable in many ways. Solid edifices.

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HTTP://WWW.FLICKR.COM/PHOTOS/JORDAN-SIM/

Or ones which seem to categorically state what they do or what they are, which may in some cases intrigue and in other case put off.

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HTTP://WWW.FLICKR.COM/PHOTOS/SRBOISVERT/

They can be dominant facades, bereft of the ability to see in, to see what may be there.

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HTTP://WWW.FLICKR.COM/PHOTOS/SHANEGLOBAL/

Yet they can hold surprises and often things which unexpectedly fit with your tastes.

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HTTP://WWW.FLICKR.COM/PHOTOS/MPIE/

Such as the excellent collection of impressionist works at the National Gallery which you always associate with old masters and renaissance art.

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HTTP://WWW.FLICKR.COM/PHOTOS/JORDAN-SIM/

And at the moment the Guggenheim in Bilbao, that high temple to contemporary art.

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Is housing an exhibition of Dutch and Flemish painting

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HTTP://WWW.FLICKR.COM/PHOTOS/SRBOISVERT/

And when Tate Modern opened it’s doors it contained a beautiful juxtaposition of a site specific work by Richard Long

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HTTP://WWW.FLICKR.COM/PHOTOS/JUSTINMASTERSON/

And Monet’s Waterlillies. There are always surprises and galleries which you feel may have nothing for you often do. It’s just hard to know where to go, to see through the walls.

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In theory websites should help. But the problem for me is that I need to know what questions to ask of them. They are centered around the needs of the gallery to broadcast. They are user centric in their design. However this doesn’t feel enough to me, I want user centric information more than I want user centric design.

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HTTP://BERGLONDON.COM/PROJECTS/HAT/

Bend services around the user

I want the services I use to bend around me, and for the services I make to bend around the user. Whenever I think about this concept I always think about this wonderful map from Jack Schulze. The city and the possibilities open up from my point of view through the way it bends around the point I’m at.

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HTTP://WWW.SCHOOLOSCOPE.COM/

One site which does this beautifully is Schooloscope, again from BERG. Where the information about schools is bent around the person’s location and the information is presented in a user centric way.

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HTTP://OWLSNEARYOU.COM/

And for me the best example is the wonderful Owls Near You, which does exactly what you would expect. It tells you where the nearest owls to you are. If you’d like more than owls, there is Wildlife Near You.

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I think there’s a fascinating opportunity around art and around the hidden art in our world, things like the Government Art Collection. It’s the ultimate unknowable gallery, until it’s exhibitions at the Whitechapel next year you can’t see it in an exhibition where mechanisms such as serendipity can help you discover what is in it and what you may like. At Rewired Culture I made this prototype of an iPad explorer for the GAC, which at it’s heart was about demystifying and knowing it, the opening screen presented a random collection everytime you returned to it.

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For a while now I’ve been thinking about one of my favourite scenes from a very trashy film, Disclosure. I love the concept of the angel which acts as the guide in the virtual reality filesystem explorer. It’s what I want for galleries, an angel on my shoulder whispering to me about the artist’s intent and about pertinent and fascinating facts about the art history, artist, technique and provenance of what I’m looking at.

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HTTP://WWW.FLICKR.COM/PHOTOS/STUNNED/

What I don’t want really is this, augmented reality, the noisy attention seeking display of data.

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Over Christmas I watched Wall-E and it became so clear to me of what I didn’t want for gallery spaces and why I don’t want augmented reality apps. The screen gets in the way of art, you don’t see what is there and your eye isn’t drawn to the wonderful thing juxtaposed with the thing you came to see. It becomes all about information delivery and less about the natural interactions that lead to discovery.

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HTTP://WWW.FLICKR.COM/PHOTOS/JUSTINMASTERSON/

Look at art not screens

It feels simple to me. Look at art not screens. Yet so many gallery tours are full of video and you see people wandering round, being educated but not really experiencing the things they’re learning about.

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HTTP://RUSSELLDAVIES.TYPEPAD.COM/PLANNING/2009/11/PLAYFUL.HTML

This is what we really need. This was a wonderful prototype made by the people at the Really Interested Group, an audio based augmented reality app. But even then, it needs to be quiet a lot of the time so you can experience the whole experience of where you are.

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HTTP://WWW.FLICKR.COM/PHOTOS/NIMINIA/

Technology should get out of the way.

In all cases, this should be true. The technology is not why you are there, it needs to know it’s place.

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HTTP://WWW.FLICKR.COM/PHOTOS/MPIE/

How to do zoom in gallery apps...

I was recently asked how we planned to zoom into the pictures in the smartphone guides we’re making and thinking about at the moment. For me it’s obvious.

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Walk towards the painting.How to do zoom in gallery apps...

You simply walk towards the real painting that’s here and now with you in the gallery.

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HTTP://WWW.FLICKR.COM/PHOTOS/HOBER/

For me the role of technology aside from being a mechanism to inform and enhance the experience is to capture what you’re looking at, what you love, what you’ve seen. A sort of flight data recorder for gallery visits.

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Something a bit like this treasure hunt game I made for the Hide and Seek festival which gave you and end of day essay telling you what you’d seen, with each object being a pathway to more discovery, you clicked on it’s name in the essay which parodies the school child’s end of summer holiday back to school essay, and discover who else has seen that thing and what they saw... serendipity and filtering and recommendations through implicit and explicit recording of actions.

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HTTP://CONTENT.STAMEN.COM/PRETTYMAPS_ON_20X200_PRINTS

I’ve been pondering also of late how this sort of big data can be presented back to the user spatially. And of course a good way to start thinking of this is to look at some of the lovely work of Stamen Design in San Francisco.

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Prado

Reine Sofia

Thyssen-Bornemisza

I’ve been playing with their Polymaps framework thinking about how this “flight recorder” data can be used to start recommending to you where you should go in cities to see the art you’d love. This for me is the classic example, every guidebook will tell you that the must see gallery in the city is the Prado, but if you love contemporary art, the Thyssen-Bronemisza and the Reine Sofia are more likely to be the places you’d want to spend more time. We can build an atlas of the art that you’d love. This reduces the risk in a way of a visit where you felt uncomfortable, or that it wasn’t to your taste, or that you didn’t find anything you wanted to see and felt that it was a waste of time or money to go to the gallery, experiences which may reduce your desire to visit more galleries to engage more.

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HTTP://WWW.FLICKR.COM/PHOTOS/JAGGEREE/

As I was writing this talk I noticed that there is a perfect example of this just around the corner from the office in a tube station I use on many days. On the Central line platform there are graphics of the pillars of the British Museum interspersed with images of some of the artefacts in the museum. It is as if the walls of the museum are stripped away, revealing the contents that lie inside. It is the essence of seeing through the walls and seeing hints as to what you will like within it. I hope we can make this manifest in many ways and in many places so that more people will find the things they love and can enrich their lives.

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[email protected]

Chris Thorpe

[email protected]

Mark Norman Francis

[email protected]+44.7976.212.023

James Aylett

[email protected]+44.7718.694.329

Paul Pod

[email protected]+44.7968.801.069

Spencer Hyman

[email protected]+44.7595.775.169

Priscilla Li

[email protected]+44.7974.159.437

Paul Holberton

Chris ThorpeFounder/Technologist@jaggeree


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