2010-10-15

From Picassos to Sarcophagi, Guided by Phone Apps

Walk into a crowded museum, and what do you see? People with cameras or cellphones snapping pictures of people looking at objects. The artwork, document or fossil is a tourist site; the photograph is our souvenir. And the looking for which museums were created becomes a memory before it has even begun.

Now something else is in play that may distance the museum experience even further though it intends to do just the opposite. During the last week I have walked through galleries, half-looking at objects and half-consulting an iPhone screen.

I have swiped, tapped and maneuvered in iSpace while negotiating Egyptian sarcophagi, Matisse paintings and Apatosaurus bones. I have searched for item IDs, audio-tour-guide numbers and tagged thumbnail images while trying to get information about Pacific Islanders or Picasso. I have used museum apps to help me navigate museums. But I have generally felt used along the way, forced into rigid paths, looking at minimalist text bites, glimpsing possibilities while being thwarted by realities.

Free apps, meanwhile, proliferate, adding to their basic consumer information a varied set of technological virtues and flaws. The Brooklyn Museum has an app for the iPhone and Droid (Brooklyn Museum Mobile) that acts as a guide to the museum, allows easy access to its online catalog and turns every gallery into a kind of social-networking site...

The complete article: http://www.nytimes.com

New York Times, October 1st, 2010