The challenges of integrating interactive media into the museum experience are manifold. New technologies can engage but also potentially alienate museum visitors who have different cultural backgrounds and varying degrees of knowledge about the art form, history, and ideas involved. But at its best, interactive media that balances the creativity of right-brain thinking with the deductive logic of left-brain analysis can help with the intuitive discovery of unexpected connections and create newfound meaning.
The Concerned Camera builds on the success of earlier versions of this installation at the International Center of Photography in the winter and fall of , and at Photo London in May The Concerned Camera enables museum visitors to explore two distinctive virtual exhibitions.
The first is an intuitive journey called Unwavering Vision 3, and it is an interactive experience exploring the associations between five thousand images from the collections of the ICP that are not usually seen together. The visitor can summon hundreds of photographs by browsing thirty-two different timelines. They can enlarge and scrutinize each image in detail. The second virtual exhibition is a multimedia installation called Anne Morgan: Photography and Advocacy , with an interface that offers alternative modes of exploration and features seventy film segments and 1, images digitized from glass-plate negatives made during the period between and The installation highlights the pioneering use of media by Anne Morgan to chronicle the scope of the relief efforts undertaken by the Committee for Devastated France.
Below I outline some of the key takeaways from the symposium and discuss some of the most useful ideas museums can implement to start working with interactive media. JiaJia Fei outlined the progression of technology in recent years, from websites and social media to Google Glass and QR codes, and how museums have incorporated these innovations to varying degrees of success. These descriptions were created using their specially developed open source Coyote software.
Chun also pointed out how innovations created for the purpose of accessibility end up improving the overall user experience. Erin Fleming explained the thinking behind the massive renovation of SFMOMA and the design of PIG Photographic Interpretative Gallery , to create a social gathering space within the museum that mixed the physical and the digital to advance visual literacy and strike a balance between experience and interpretation.
