Sometimes the magic works -- museums in Second Life

~~~

Visiting a not-so-great museum build in second life: the amphitheater in the Exploratorium sim. And yes, it is big enough to hold five times as many avatars as can actually fit in a sim at once. Wtf?

Having worked for a number of rl museums in the course of my rl career, I enjoy thinking about the potential for museums to utilize the Second Life platform. Sadly, while the thinking about the possibilities is lots of fun, actually looking at the experiments that museums carry out in SL tends to be much less pleasant. In fact, with some notable exceptions, SL museum projects usually just irritate the fuck out out of me.

But hey, you know me, ever the eternal goddam optimist, I thought I would do a search on “museum” tonight and see what turned up. And what came through actually proved to be pretty interesting in a number of ways.

Before I go any further, I want to remind you that as a rule, I am not going to write about people I utterly loathe or projects that simply blow. So if you don’t see a build get covered on this blog, it is either because I think the work itself is a total mass of petrified dog turds on dry white toast, or I think the people responsible for the build are peckerheads of epic proportions. Or it could be that I just haven’t heard about the build and haven't gotten around to seeing it yet. With that in mind, I might as well ask you right now to let me know if you have any suggestions for something you think I should look at. I'll be happy to check them out and if they are in fact just oozing with awesome goodness, you'll get to see me extol the virtues of said virtual exhibit or museum on this here ridiculous blog.

Anyhow, the first thing I noticed was that when I did a search for “museum” the top thing on the list of results was “Virtual Bucharest" with over 30K in traffic. Okey-doke, so I made a mental note to go look at that sometime. Never been to Romania, who knows, it could be cool. Then I started moving down the list looking to see if there were any projects by real life museums represented in the search results. Finally, at number 40, I finally found something that rang a bell -- a build presented by the Exploratorium, a well-known, hands-on science museum in San Francisco.

Now mind you, I generally hate science museums unless they have really, mega-cool shit, like in Chicago at the Museum of Science and Industry. But the museums that offer nothing more than a glorified science fair exhibit of turn-the-crank and light-the-lightbulb bullshit that is supposed to foster a new generation of kiddies who are hopped up about someday being scientists--that crap pretty much bores me shitless and/or makes me insufferably grumpy.

Well, the Exploratorium is sort like the grandaddy of that kind of museum, and whoopity-doo they got a very large area in SL. Not really my cup of tea, but I figured, what the hell, I’ll go look--maybe they fired up their imaginations and did something really out-of-the-box.

Well...they didn't. But I gotta tell you, it was...not terrible.

Ok, I'll admit I didn’t like it. I didn’t enjoy it. I didn’t think it did a very good job of teaching anything of significance. But I didn’t hate it. And I wanted to talk about this build because I think its creators made a noble effort that mostly fails because they made the mistake that is most commonly made by rl museums in SL.

Instead of breaking new ground, the Exploratorium folks made what was essentially a virtual version of what they do in real life: a disjointed series of more or less unrelated push-the-button-and-something-happens kind of experience that might teach you something about...oh...stuff. The biggest difference between the SL Exploratorium and the real-life one was that unlike in the actual bricks and mortar museum, most of the virtual exhibits seemed to be working and did not have little "out of order” signs hung on them. That was kind of nice. And mind you, I really didn’t think the thing sucked. The main thing that was disappointing was that they really weren’t using the technology of the platform to do something genuinely innovative. It was their same old shtick, just made from pixels instead of laminate and rubber tubing and hose clamps. The other thing about it I should mention was that it was completely empty--I had the entire place to myself, which wasn’t surprising considering that its traffic was only 646.

An exhibit in the Exploratorium build--it teaches us that "gee it's a long way from the sun to Earth." Or something.

Even though my head was starting to hurt at that point, I decided to take a stab at one more build off that list of search results, and hoo-boy, am I glad I did.

The thing I decided to check out was a place slightly higher up on the list (1658 in traffic) called the “Primtings Museum.” I thought hey, that sounds different, so just for shits and giggles I popped over there. I was pleasantly surprised to find that it is in fact an innovative and unique use of the technology to accomplish something that would not have been terribly practical in a bricks and mortar context. The organizers of the Primtings museum have invited SL artists such as AM Radio, to take real-life two-dimensional paintings by famous artists such as Dali, Van Gogh, David, and others, and translate them into three-dimensional presentations.

It was pretty much in the realm of fuckin’ awesome.

But sometimes, the magic works! Standing inside the 3-D interpretation of Van Gogh's "Vincent's Room," by SL artist Dekka Raymaker.

The build is the brainchild of Ina Centaur, an SL arts-entrepreneur, who describes the project on her blog thusly:

“Primtings Museum is a sim-sized “prim’ed paintings” gallery. Famous paintings in RL are interpreted by SL artists in a variety of ways via prims into 3d paintings. Built to “feel” like a RL museum, where visitors can take their time to explore and “stumble upon” an exhibit, visitors can also quickly “teleport” to a particular primting via Primtings.com’s search-able web directory of all primtings. Artists may also submit their primting for consideration as an exhibit in the museum. We will be exploring some notable Primtings in the interactive part of the tour.”

Ms. Centaur also explained that the project--like some others she is involved with--is "fiscally-sponsored by sLiterary, Inc., a nonprofit organization dedicated to furthering the arts in virtual worlds. sLiterary.org offers a variety (from historical to modern to cozy!) of high quality inworld facilities, open to the public for events and other activities...”

You can go look at her blog, though she posts only periodically. Still it’s interesting reading for a number of reasoms, some of which we might go into at another time.

Anyhow, I really enjoyed the Primtings build. Not only can you go and interact with these art works that you have known and loved since Art History 101--and getting a new and fresh perspective on them in the process--but in many cases you also get information about the virtual artist who executed the 3-D interpretation of the 2-D work, along with a discussion of why they think that particular work is so freakin' cool, and even what kind of modeling software they used to create their version.

Ha! This is what happens when you click on the 3-D rendition of Dali's "Persistence of Memory," created by Voodoo Shilton--I think Dali would have appreciated this, being as he had a pretty wacky sense of humor.

This is what museums should be doing in SL: looking at the platform and saying, "hey, how can we do something we really couldn't do in meatspace?" And one thing that the platform is extremely good for, is the creation of three-dimensional environments and offering an immersion experience for the visitor. How bloody remarkable is it to be able to interact with a surreal Dali landscape or to sit in Edward Hopper’s famous “Nighthawks” diner?

The other remarkable thing about this project is that it that was initiated by an individual, not a real-life museum organization. But maybe that shouldn’t be surprising...too many museum people are locked into thinking about doing things a certain way. And that’s probably why so many of them are in so much fucking trouble these days.

Sitting in Edward Hopper's diner from "Nighthawks," created by Tezcatlipoca Bisiani--gotta come back with friends all dressed up in 40's clothing and see what the place feels like with more folks in it.

You can visit the Primtings museum at:

http://slurl.com/secondlife/Primtings/179/67/53

~~~

3-D modelling and the future of virtual museums

~~~

Wandering through a 3-D representation of "Fallingwater"
in the Frank Lloyd Wright Museum of SL

I am intrigued by SL's potential as a means for creating and presenting innovative exhibits: the platform offers opportunities for museums and individuals to experiment with concepts that someday could contribute to the evolution of new approaches to presenting exhibitions. I have hopes that these new approaches could enable museums to engage expanded audiences and perhaps even avoid descending further along the path to irrelevance. So far, some interesting steps have been taken, including a recent new arrival on the SL museum landscape, the Frank Lloyd Wright Museum of SL in Dilemma City.

Whenever I hear about some new museum or exhibition popping up in SL, sooner or later, I drag myself over to have a look. I had been reading about the FLW installation for a little while and finally decided to go see it. Mind you, I have a love-hate relationship with museums, both in meatspace and in-world. I love the idea of what museums can be and what they can do. And I usually hate actually going to them and wading through the poor execution of what a museum can be.

In fact, I am a terrible museum goer. I always refuse to follow the path that the exhibit designer was trying to make me follow, I don't like reading labels, and most attempts at high-tech interactives just irritate the fuck out of me.

I like a museum that lets you get a close look at great artifacts or art within a context, that tells stories well, that transports or immerses you in another time and place, and/or that has well-trained friendly, intelligent, LIVE people for you to interact with.

Cats are good too (although the Ernest Hemingway House in Key West is the only museum I've seen that really pulled that one off successfully).

Anyhow, ever since JJ Drinkwater at the Caledon Library pioneered the 2-D panel/notecard-and-link giver style of SL exhibition, various groups and individuals have taken small steps in advancing the concept of virtual exhibits further. An area that holds perhaps some of the greatest potential, of course, is immersion exhibits. You can try telling your story with 2-D panels and text on the walls of your virtual exhibit space, but it lacks the impact of telling that story within a three-dimensional recreation of a structure, an historical or literary environment, or even another world.

There are some immersion environments in SL that work pretty well. I think Deadwood is one, of course, although it is more or less "inspired" by the historical town, rather than being an accurate, literal recreation of the actual historical built environment. With its people and the detail it encompasses, it can give you a certain "feel" of the historical environment. But the realities of sim size, prim limits, accommodating vendors and residents, and the limited availability of detailed information about the actual historical environment necessarily impose limitations on detail, scale, and appearance.

Consequently, I was interested in seeing the FLW museum, because I understood it included some good three-dimensional recreations of some of his most important designs. I wanted to see how it worked. And once I got there, and found my way past the initial conventional exhibit elements with big pictures and some relatively uninformative notecards, I thought it worked ok.

There a number of structures including Fallingwater (pictured above) and the wonderful Robie House. These recreations appear to be based very closely on the actual structures in terms of scale, detail and layout. It would seem that the actual plans were used in creating the representations of the structures. And other than feeling like you are standing in a series of sterile models, rather than walking through living architectural environments, it was kind of cool being able to stroll about the Robie House and peek in the closets (which were empty of course) and explore the various levels of Fallingwater. I tried to imagine people living in these houses -- cooking breakfast and dressing for cocktails with elegant friends -- but it was kind of hard to do so. They just lacked life. There was no story being told.

And that's ok, because after all, this was an experiment. Everything we are doing in this silly world is still an experiment, and each experiment is usually just one piece of the puzzle. But I will say that I think the curators of this three-dimensional show certainly succeeded in taking the plans of these architectural masterpieces and translating them into a more engaging form than the 2-D plans would have been.

I won't even get into the issue of whether or not the creators of this exhibition covered the necessary bases in getting permission to reproduce FLW's buildings, or if they even really had to do so. I have no idea what they did in the legal department and it's not really something I give a rat's ass about one way or the other right now. Nor will I get into some of the issues about scale -- I assume they made the buildings to a realistic scale, which of course leads to some problems with SL avatars (most of whom, if transposed to rl, would be over seven feet tall and possessed of shoulders, breasts and other body parts of outsized dimensions that won't fit through accurately scaled doorways). But I will say that I believe that the folks who built this installation took an interesting step here.

Now the next step is to take this accurate recreation of structures and environments, and marry it to the lively storytelling and detailed furnishings and accessories of a Deadwood. Then I think we're going to see something in-world that will genuinely advance the cause of virtual museums.

~~~

Simple but effective: an exhibition of Folk Art

~~~

I'm on a couple of groups that periodically churn out announcements related to museums in Second Life with a landmark to some virtual museum spot or other. Usually, if I go it's either a yawner or it just doesn't really work in any kind of a cohesive way. And you say, "My Golly, that was a noble attempt" or something like that, and then wander off to go shopping for a new gun or some other piece of shiny virtual hardware. So today I got one announcing that the Folk Art New England Museum in the Mystic sim had reinstalled a small show of...wait for it...*drum roll*...Folk Art in New England!

And I figured, "oh what the fuck, why not"...

...and you know what? I was pleasantly surprised. It was a modest but attractive, thoughtful little exhibit. As far as I was concerned, it worked and worked well. Damn if I didn't enjoy it.

The TP brought me smack dab to the door of a recreation of a simple sort of vaguely federal-style style house and inside on the first floor was a series of about 15 images and some interpretive text around the walls. The curator of the show very effectively used the style of SL exhibit that, as I recall, was pioneered at the old Caledon Library in Tamrannoch by the esteemed JJ Drinkwater. The exhibit began with some good, readable labels that laid out the interpretive themes of the show, and then as you went around and looked at the reproductions of framed paintings, quilts, etc., you touched them and got a relatively detailed but not overly lengthy notecard with information and interpretation for each individual piece. And like I said, I enjoyed it...I spent a while looking around and even read some of the notecards and found them enlightening.

The art itself was fun stuff--I mean hell's britches, look at the above image and check out the kid pictures (which along with a whaling scene were my favorite pieces in the show) and tell me if they don't make you smile, at least a little. If they didn't, then goddammit you either got a heart of pure lutetium wrapped in dried dog turds, or you need to check yer goddam pulse cuz yer probably dead.

Upstairs there was a second exhibit that focused on the work of a particular artist, but I had church services in Deadwood to get to so I just skipped that for now. Maybe some other time...

At various points you could get a notecard that explained who was behind this admirable little effort. Let me quote from it to give you the basics:

"This museum is a project of the Fenimore Art Museum in Cooperstown, New York, the repository of one of America's greatest collections of American folk art. All of the items included in this SL museum hail from New England, and represent one of the finest assemblages of the region's heritage anywhere. Make sure you see both floors.

We will change exhibitions regularly in order to highlight the many important artworks that are currently in storage. We are also actively pursuing partnerships with other museums in New England to bring you more exhibitions of a wide variety of collections. PLEASE TOUCH THE ARTOWRKS TO RECEIVE NOTECARDS.

For information about the Fenimore Art Museum, please see www.fenimoreartmuseum.org."

The contact person listed was Nicolo Anthony. I want to tell Mr. Anthony and his colleagues that I think they did a nice job. Their museum and its exhibits are easy to find, straightforward to navigate, clean-looking and they successfully convey a message (you'd be astonished how many sl museum projects not only don't do an adequate job of conveying their message, they don't seem to have any kind of coherent point at all...but that's another rant for another day).

If you want to go see this it's at:
Folk Art New England Museum, Mystic (52, 60, 24)

~~~