The Brave New Museum Sputters Into Life

The Brave New Museum Sputters Into Life
Welcome to a Medical Battery specialist of the Fluke Battery
With so many visitors—particularly the young—obsessively attached to digital devices as instruments of learning and sharing, even the most traditional art museum officials can no longer deny the imperative for technological interventions in what used to be a relatively unmediated relationship between viewer and object. First there were audio guides and websites. Now art museums are embracing everything from apps to robots to interactive pens, hoping to discern how best to enhance the gallery experience for savvy digerati, without ruining it for diehard technophobes.
Having recently explored the digital prestidigitations of several pioneering art museums with battery like Fluke TiXB Battery, Fluke Ti9 Battery, Fluke TiRX Battery, Fluke TiS Battery, Fluke 215C Battery, Fluke 19XC Battery, Fluke 2X5C Battery, Fluke 435 Battery, Fluke 225C Battery, Contec ECG-1200 Battery, Edan SE-1200 Battery, Contec ECG-1200 Battery, I have arrived at one firm conclusion: I have seen the future and we’re not there yet.
The technological transformation of the art-museum experience is still an experiment in which visitors play the role of guinea pigs. I uncovered promising tech tricks at the De Young Museum, San Francisco and the Brooklyn Museum, New York, that will enhance both knowledge and pleasure for those receptive to new pathways for art engagement. But in other instances, hyperactive interactivity and exasperating glitches interfere with enjoyment of the objects themselves:
• Dazzled by the acclaimed digital Collection Wall at the Cleveland Museum of Art, children excitedly rush over to tap one image after another, enlarging them but barely looking at them, let alone absorbing the accompanying information. Adults often gaze at, without engaging with, the wall’s enticing but random and every-changing array of interactive images. This superficially entertaining eye candy offers no way for art lovers to search for a particular object, artist or period of personal interest.
• At the Cooper-Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum in New York, a boy races through the permanent collection, pressing the slanted end of the custom-designed Interactive Pen (lent to each visitor) on every label he encounters, but never pausing to look at the objects themselves. The Pen is designed to collect object information from the label’s NFC tags (stickers with microchips that can be read by mobile devices), for later retrieval on the museum’s interactive tables or on one’s home computer or mobile device. Since the museum reopened in December, only about one-third of its visitors have accessed their personally assigned URLs on the museum’s website to learn more about the objects they selected—a follow-up rate that “needs improvement,” according to the museum’s self-assessment.
• Also in New York, the Museum of Modern Art’s Audio+, available free on lent iPod Touch devices and promoted as “the next generation of museum audio guides,” conveniently lets you email to yourself and others images and information about the objects you admire. But some important special exhibitions (including MoMA’s acclaimed Jacob Lawrence show) had no audio tour on either Audio+ or the museum’s mobile app. While using the app in the permanent-collection galleries, I found that the audio went silent if I merely listened without tapping the screen. (This annoying glitch has since been corrected.)
Surprised by my disappointing experiences with the digital gizmos that others had praised, I could only conclude that some of the proponents hadn’t spent much time using them and observing how others were using them. Intended to inform and delight, these innovations are often unintuitive, inadequately explained, or exasperatingly dysfunctional.