One World Wallet and the Virtual Art Wall

Anybody looking for inspiration for how to use virtual spaces in real life could do worse than look in a oneworldwallet.

Artist Jon Coffelt is creating a virtual art piece in the gallery Ten Cubed. This virtual installation is then photographed and becomes the first in a series of art works made for oneworldwallet.

One world wallet in turn is a social network that people sign up to and receive a one world wallet. They then tell their stories around the wallet - where they take it, how people react to an art work wallet, and the artist creates more art works from their stories, photographs, videos, blogs.

Museums with Virtual Renditions

This quote from City News, a Canadian news service:

"Imagine asking the Mona Lisa a question, and instead of La Giaconda's enigmatic smile staring back at you, she answered.

That's what's in store at the Alive-Gallery in South Korea, where, if looking isn't enough, visitors can interact with priceless works of art.

The pieces, ranging from The Last Supper to The Last Judgment, aren't on loan - the gallery has virtual renditions of the world-famous works.

It's been a big hit with school groups."

I'll bet. My own kids each have around 40 avatars each by this stage and are very comfortable with a SIMS type reality, love the Miis on Wii and are stone dead jealous of my own activities in Second Life.

The US fashion retailer Target is a great example of thinking outside the box, and in this cawse outside the gallery or catwalk. Last autumn in staged the "first "model-less" fashion show in the vast expanse of New York City's Grand Central Terminal, with holograms sporting the latest fall and winter apparel lines strutting down virtual runways. By posting the show on YouTube and Facebook, the company ensured that viewership extended beyond the station's million or so harried commuters."

The YouTube and Facebook references are less interesting than the use of holograms, a reminder that virtual existence doesn't have to be contained within the frame of a computer screen.

Virtual Tech Museum

Had an agreeable visit earlier this week to the Tech Virtual Museum. This is an A1 initiative. Run by the Tech Museum of Innovation in Silicon valley, the Tech Virtual Museum encourages people to design their own museum exhibits.

"Want to create your own museum exhibit? Want to develop it with other creative thinkers and experts around the world? Want to share your exhibits with visitors in virtual and real galleries? This is the place to design and prototype exhibits online, using the web and Second Life. Start here to propose exhibit projects, share wild ideas and prototype exhibits."

The museum has two full time staffers on hand to help and a budget of around $700,000 to realise virtual exhibits in real life.

Global Art and The Museum

This too might be of interest, a little something I came across on the ZKM site.

"....the first initiative to document a new museum geography which mirrors the globalization of the visual arts. What used to be called contemporary art, reappears in an expanded production as “Global Art”. Art museums, as against art fairs, biennials, and exhibitions, operate in a local frame, whether national or urban. Thus, they face very different audiences with an equally different notion of art and modernity. The website, with its link Global Window will serve as a platform and provide news of the changing museum scene."

ZKM, Virtual and Immersive

I'm suspicious of the idea of immersive experiences in virtual spaces. Yes, I know. Don the hat and the gloves and it's a different world. But when you move around virtual worlds you are somewhere different already and to constrain that in any way seems to me potentially harmful.

So it is I wander through the occasional 360 degree art work thinking, well that didn't last long. Have I benefited from the idea of immersion?

Over at ZKM Island this morning in SL I wandered through a piece called You Universe. It is essentially a construction of television test cards that you can enter. The act of entering deconstructs the panels of the object so that you are not fully immersed but have in front of you evidence of where you broke in.

It's well worth watching too when another avatar enters and the shape reconstructs itself. In truth this is an interactive rather than immersive experience. You can find it via the ZKM Website and this is the page you need to go to.

There are some great ideas here - not untypical of the german art ambience. I have to give a talk next week on immersive art and now at least I have a starting point.

Museum Blogs

Just noticed a number of virtual museum blogs cropping up. Nina Simone's Museum 2.0 looks the best established so far and I came across this earlier today: virtualmuseums.

Here's an interesting one as well, a page only but a short list of virtual museum links.

The design museum blog has this: "Virtual Design Museums must not only be virtual presentations of products, but could also be a good platform for historic software and their surfaces. I knew some good sites showing historic web design. The Vintage Mac Museum is a good sample for a combination of showing historic soft- and hardware as well." That's on the Vintage Mac Museum and this from the Design Museum London.

"The Design Museum London is at this time the only design museum with both, an important physical and a virtual department." This on Thessalonika is also worth a look as is this page.

Art Salon's take on the subject is here. A little outdated technically. But via Art Salon here is Organism Museum. It needs a plug-in which might be a result of not trusting in the online virtual worlds out there or in pure browser alternatives.

I'll return to this post a few times - in my spare time I might try to form a small directory here on this post.

Online Museums

The point about online museums and online galleries is that they really need to be transformed when they are made into virtual worlds.

I had a trip around the virtual Dresden museum in Sl recently. I hate to express disappointment particularly as it was recommended by someone really in the know. The virtual Dresden museum is too literal in my opinion, too true to the original, which may seem a harsh judgement. They after all clearly intended to do the virtual in this literal way.

We're waiting with bated breath for the arriveal of the upgraded Guggenheim. upgraded that is fromonline gallery to virtual Guggenheim. Designed by Asymptote architects of New York we don't yet know a whole lot about it other than you can expect it to look nothing like a museum. It will take full advantage of the virtual.

Meanwhile for those who want to get an early fix on what's out of this world - try the International Spaceflight Museum, an SL speciality museum. As far as we can tell this museum only exists online - and it shows a way forward.

The Virtual Cinema as Virtual Exhibit

This comes courtesy of The Georgetown Voice. It seems in DC Hirshorn Museum owners have begun an experiment in making cinema itself the subject of a virtual event- within the cinema walls, sort of.

“The Cinema Effect: Dreams” (the first exhibit in a two-part series, to be followed by “Realisms” in June) wants to explore the impact of cinema on our perceptions of reality and address film’s ability to transport us into a dream world."

The Hirshorn have transformed the museum’s second floor gallery space into a virtual series of theaters, with tall dark walls, low lighting and separate galleries for each film. Members of the public queue outside these mini-theatres as they would for a cinema.

Sounds groovy.

David Rumsey Pioneers Online Exhibits

This is surely one of the big stories in online exhibition and online galleries. Map collector David Rumsey has about 17,000 maps in his collection, many of the 18th and 19th century maps of North America.

Amazingly he has digitised all of these at full resolution and many are now on display in Second Life at Rumsey Maps islands. Rumsey has already teamed up with Google Earth to use 17 of his maps as Google earth textures. The online collections are themselves worth a trip but as an SL app it is peerless.

Rumsey also collaborates with a number of other image collections to bring their works into online galleries and exhibitions and to a wider public.

It's the type of pioneering work that points the way to how virtual worlds are going to enhance our appreciation of and access to historical documents and contemporary imagery. The online gallery and museum is transforming into the virtual gallery and virtual museums. We're beginning to see them emerge.

Exhibit Files

If you're in the exhibition, museum, or gallery business and you have a yen for the online and virtual end of that then you may want to take a look at exhibitfiles.org. This is a social network for the museum and exhibition industry. I'm not massively sold on the idea of social networks for niche markets or for niche sectors and industries but this is a good clean site without all the paraphernalia that makes social network such as drag on your time.

It's early days for exhibitfiles.org but take a look, join in.