Uncanny Unease: The Digital Eye at the Henry Art Gallery

The digital eye is an uncanny one, at least as it stands in the Henry Art Gallery’s exhibition The Digital Eye: Photographic Art in the Electronic Age. Although this is not true of every work of art included in the show, a substantial number of the images create the distinct sense of unease that defines uncanniness through not only the subject matter depicted, but more often through the overtly disjointed way the photographic imagery appears within the frame.

Simen Johan. Untitled #83 (from the And Nothing was to be Trusted series). 1999. Toned gelatin silver print. Collection of Marita Holdaway. © Simen Johan. Courtesy Yossi Milo Gallery, New York.

The doll-like baby captured in Simen Johan’s Untitled #83 (from the And Nothing was to be Trusted series), with a menacing expression and a devil-like crown of black hair, would be disturbing independently. However, the image takes on a hyperreal quality through its heightened contrast: the fire burns with a radiating intensity that makes its innocent role atop a birthday cake lost in exchange for the threat of imminent danger. Likewise, the toddler becomes a ravenous, cyborg-like figure that belongs squarely in the uncanny valley, its eyes more robotic than human, its face shrouded in shadows, staring into nothingness.

Sigmund Freud presented one of the earliest and most longstanding definitions of the uncanny: a frightening instance that bears a relationship to the familiar. Occurrences such as prosthetic and severed limbs, ghosts and the dead, cyborgs, robots, doppelgängers and automatons fall within this understanding of the uncanny valley.  The arm that is a part of the human form seems so normal when attached to a person, yet becomes something else entirely when detached. The Addams Family took advantage of the latter’s affect through the “Thing” character, a natural fit within the show’s comically repulsive tropes.  Likewise, a prosthetic arm on an otherwise natural body can also be an jarring visual experience when unexpectedly taking the place of the skin and appendages we expect.

Still from The Addams Family. Image from addamsfamily.com

Many of the standard items included on the uncanny list appear throughout The Digital Eye.  Wendy McMurdo’s Helen, Backstage, Merlin Theater depicts a child and her doppelgänger posing as though there were a mirror between them that disappeared.  Herbert Bayer’s Lonely Metropolitan incorporates disembodied eyes and arms. Takeshi Murata’s amorphous form from a photographed film still in 001 and Jason Salavon’s Every Playboy Centerfold, The 1970s both create ghostlike-forms from their otherwise (relatively) ordinary subject matter.  When viewed in its entirety, The Digital Eye encompasses a fairly complete index of the uncanny valley.

Image: Wendy McMurdo. Helen, Backstage, Merlin Theatre (The Glance). 1995. Pigmented inkjet print. Courtesy of the artist. Image from henryart.org.

However, the more interesting relationship between the uncanny and this exhibition manifests more subtly, through the techniques employed within some of The Digital Eye’s most captivating works. Like many manmade objects, a particular fascination comes along with a photographic spectacle that is not immediately decipherable; the same way one stares from atop the Hoover Dam and attempts to fathom how mid-century technology enabled this sublime structure’s production, a similar curiosity arises when staring into a photograph that appears too composed to be real. Although the increasing prevalence of Photoshop may have dulled this effect in recent years, a fascinatingly unknown quality remains beneath the surface of a digital photograph that seems too composed to be true.

Julie Blackmon. Powerade (from the series Domestic Vacations). 2005. Pigmented inkjet print. Courtesy of the artist and G. Gibson Gallery, Seattle. Image from henryart.org

In The Digital Eye, Julie Blackmon’s pigmented inkjet print Powerade (From the series Domestic Vacations) makes this effect its focal point, integrating otherwise mundane imagery into a disturbing image that commands not so much a look as a blatant stare.  A mere glance at the photograph would suggest a boy playing in a yard. However, with any closer inspection, the red ball, the boy’s back and the blue bottle of Powerade ensnare the on-looking eye, naturally pulling its attention towards these objects existing on an overtly distinct plane from their surroundings.  Looking more closely reveals the “yard” as an estranged garden of sorts, more likely to house gnomes or the Fountain of Youth than the swing set and bicycle that one would expect to find in an ordinary boy’s world.  A sense of uncertainty pervades the entire image; what initially seemed familiar appears strange and hyperreal.  Despite the absence of an object of decided uncanniness, Powerade belongs in the valley as much as any disembodied appendage.

Although psychoanalytic theory has become largely dismissed as irreverent in contemporary society, the prominence of the uncanny within this photography show is not without significance: feared uncertainty prevails in our present moment. The indecisive politics, government upheavals too complex to read from afar, and an unpredictable economy only offer stability in their constant presence; every week similar stories surface in the news, but with conflicting endings. In this sense, The digital eye is also a reflective one, offering a mirror into a state of being less defined by its subject matter and more acutely understood through an inexplicable composition of elements that creates unease without resolution.

New American Paintings Blog: Letting Go of the Weight

Seattle-based gallery SOIL’s March shows Flat & Bright and The ghosts of Joey Veltkamp provide an antidote to the city’s dominance by heavyweight painter Picasso in recent months. I write up these two shows on New American Paintings Blog here.

Andy Arkley and Julie Alpert, Flat & Bright. Photo: Amanda Ringstad.

 

Joey Veltkamp. The Ghost of La Libertine. Photos: Amanda Ringstad

Media Control 2010: Up and Out, Chelsea Girls, and The Social Network

Christian Marclay’s Up and Out is a complex media product of its time.  The artist merges two separate, preexisting films into one to create the 1998 video: a soundless version of Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blowup (1966) plays in its entirety against the audio track of Brian De Palma’s 1981 Blow Out (a film partially inspired by Blowup). Each film’s narrative focuses on a crime scene; Blowup‘s incident involving a photographer is seen and not heard, while Blow Out‘s conflict centered around a sound effects technician is heard but not seen. Seeing the two together as Up and Out produces fleeting moments of synergy: chase scenes come together and then dissipate, investigations nearly overlap before going their separate ways, clues inexplicably translate across both storylines.  The mixing of the two scenarios controls the way the viewer perceives each, the product of this experience being the new film, Up and Out.

Excerpt from Up and Out, Christian Marclay (1998).

In order to maintain conscious awareness of both films, rather than  following one narrative of the preexisting films and ignoring the other, the viewer becomes keenly aware of his or her own media consumption process and how the two films control the experience of one another. Screened in Seattle in 2010 as part of the Henry Art Gallery’s exhibition Image Transfer: Pictures in a Remix Culture, Marclay’s video resonated particularly well in light of another local screening this year: Andy Warhol’s Chelsea Girls, shown at the Seattle Art Museum this past summer. Warhol’s 1966 epic film presents two 16 mm reels projected side by side.  Largely without a coherent narrative, the films focus on short sequences of the artist’s cast of superstars engaged in extended dialogues and ordinary activities. In contrast to the experience of Up and Out, during which there is an opportunity for the viewer to focus selectively, Warhol exerts a particular control over the audience by only providing a soundtrack for only one reel at any given time and changing the reel that has sound intermittently throughout the screening.  When Warhol removes the sound from one film and turns it on for the other, the viewer’s attention naturally follows.

Excerpt from Chelsea Girls, Andy Warhol (1966).

Chelsea Girls and Up and Out appear in comparable formats but were created over thirty years apart; likewise, each is definitive of its respective time. Warhol’s control parallels media culture of the 1960s in the sense that mainstream content at that time was under the control of small number of large corporate entities (CBS, NBC ABC in television) and limited philosophies (Hollywood productions in film); the content creator was in control while the audience consumed the content as it was presented. In contrast, Marclay’s film represents a time of controlled media options; the audience can choose to listen to Blow Out instead of watching Blowup in the same way an individual can choose to read the scrolling news across the bottom of a CNN screen over listening to the newscaster.

In contrast, 2010 is a year well into the media culture of customized and user-generated content. Hulu and iTunes offer extensive selections of media options; through YouTube, the viewer can be the content creator and consumer.  In this regard, The Social Network offers a relevant, albeit obvious, glimpse into the present moment of media culture. The Mark Zuckerberg character performs the most overt control exerted in the film: the network of his creation facilitates his control over both physical and virtual relationships, as well as over the identity he constructs and projects as his Facebook persona. The Social Network is relevant to its audience as a story they helped to create through participation on Facebook, likewise demonstrating the audience’s own control over the film’s outcome.

Trailer for The Social Network (2010).

Although The Social Network is most representational of contemporary popular media culture, the media consumption process exposed by Marclay’s film better maintains its original relevance.  Film and television may have changed hands in terms of content creation and composition but ultimately, Marclay’s media-on-media control still rings true; seeing Up and Out still can influence how we watch the dueling reels of Chelsea Girls while also bringing out the various relationships between individuals and social media depicted in The Social Network. Up and Out demonstrates to its audience members how they experience the entertainment and culture at their disposal. In short, similar to the outcome of Blowup, Up and Out determines it not what we see but how we see what we see.

Obscuring the Wunderkammern: Figurehead in the Peabody Essex Museum

Installation artist Charles Sandison has coated the Peabody Essex Museum‘s East India Marine Hall in a dark, drifting sheath of digitized ship logs and journals .  Titled Figurehead, the enlarged strings of writings travel across the historical space’s walls, objects and visitors in disjointed paths that correspond with the weather of Salem, MA, via algorithms and data pulled from the internet. After adjusting to the visual overload of the installation in the same way one’s eyes adapt to a darkened room, the finer details began to emerge; the museum’s founding collection is also in this room, the paintings, figureheads and other artifacts absorbing the projected strands of text.  Physically overwritten by the ship captains’ perfected script and darkened to the point that many objects were unrecognizable, the East India Marine Society collection was transformed by Sandison’s installation into something distant and phantasmal that hovered above the otherwise conventional museum.

FreePort [no. 001]: Figurehead, Charles Sandison, East India Marine Hall, Peabody Essex Museum. Image from metrowestdailynews.com.

The Peabody Essex is the oldest museum in the United States currently in operation.  As its complicated name might suggest, the institution has gone through various mergings and additions since it opened to the public in 1825 as the East India Marine Society Hall. The namesake East India Marine Society of Salem, Massachusetts was a group of individuals who “…navigated the seas beyond the Cape of Good Hope or Cape Horn, as masters or supercargoes of vessels belong[ing] to to Salem,” as was outlined by the Society’s 1870 bylaws.  This group of sea travelers convened in order to share information about exploration of what they referred to as the East Indies; part of this mission included sharing the objects accumulated during their travels as the public collection that ultimately became the museum. It was though this effort that Society members created a particular asset: an authentic, American wunderkammern.

“East India Marine Hall and General View,” H.P. Ives, 1859-1885, stereoscope, image from New York Public Library.

The image of the original Peabody Essex, alongside that of Charles Wilson Peale’s collection, comprises what popular culture has taught us us envision when we hear the phrase, “curiosity cabinet:” a wide assortment of aged cases and shelves filled with items that now would fall into specific museum genres, including natural history objects, historical artifacts and fine art. Most curiosity cabinets resulted from a particular aristocrat’s personal holdings of taxidermy, decorative objects and man-made wonders. Yet with roots in a collaborative founding rather than an individual’s point of view, the brand of wonder found in the East India Marine Society cabinet was also collective; as objects gathered by a group of entrepreneurs traveling trade routes in the 18th century there was a uniquely American aspect to this artifact compilation.

Charles Sandison’s Figurehead interacts with this original wunderkammern by projecting directly on top of its objects; figureheads from the Society’s ships absorb the glowing text most prominently but it also infiltrates the case containing a deteriorating, taxidermied penguin and floats across the paintings and busts of nineteenth century gentlemen.  Figurehead obscures all objects in the East India Marine Hall to the point that it is hard to even know for certain what one has seen while visiting this room; the pervading sense uncertainty characteristic of foreign environments has been created within one of the country’s most American spaces.

FreePort [no. 001]: Figurehead, Charles Sandison, East India Marine Hall, Peabody Essex Museum. Image from the Peabody Essex Museum.

While visiting the installation, other visitors I encountered in the space found the experience entirely frustrating; labels for the objects were impossible to find in the darkened room, as was often the case for the objects themselves.  The only readily available context was the reference to life at sea provided through the projected nautical jargon of the ship logs; the East India Marine Hall had been transformed into a place that could only be understood by viewing the objects extremely closely and deciphering the collection through the perceptions allowed by the conditions of the room. In this regard, Figurehead is  itself a total representation of the wonder to be found on an exploration.  While this affect is created by a media-based experience, it is also one that cannot be communicated through digital media alone; physically being in the East India Marine Hall is required.

Immediately outside the East India Marine Hall, the streets of Salem are flooded with commercial mini-museums, capitalizing primarily on the Salem Witch Trials and other clichéd urban legends connected to the region. These places are intended to appear wunderkammern-like without owning any objects that would be found in a true curiosity cabinet. One such place is the 40 Whacks Museum, which focuses on murderer Lizzie Borden and houses collections of skulls and hatchets, among other things.  The space is branded to look more or less like a wunderkammern, with aged props, elements of the grotesque among the collection and traditional cases much like those in the East India Marine Hall. Yet essentially all objects in the museum are reproductions, replicas and creative interpretations of historical objects, conceived of and arranged for the purpose of selling Lizzie Borden merchandise to tourists.

The 40 Whacks Museum, Salem, MA

Commercial museums like the 40 Whacks attempt to conform to the image pop culture has created for curiosity cabinets in order to capitalize on the public’s affinity for wonder. In contrast, Charles Sandison’s Figurehead is a contemporary version of a wunderkammern. Unlike commercial imitations, the artist has rethought the wunderkammern in terms of both the history of this concept and the Peabody Essex museum’s own history.  In this regard, Sandison distilled the essence a curiosity cabinet: the uniqueness of the individual museum in which it resides. Figurehead’s true medium was the historical context of the Peabody Essex Museum reconfigured into a representation that bridges the digital and physical roles museums now play. Poignantly, the relationship between physical and digital information is one museums still struggle to negotiate and fully understand; Figurehead‘s successful merging of the dichotomy suggests there is still something to be learned from the wunderkammern, even for the institutions built upon its foundation.

Bifocal 6: MTV and Thriller

“This became the new plan: to make a one-hour program for the fourteen minutes of Thriller and an accompanying documentary on the making of what, to that point, would be the most expensive music video ever made, and to finance it by selling the broadcast rights to television. The obvious choice would have been to approach MTV, but MTV wasn’t used to paying for programming, and [John] Landis and his partners had a different exhibitor in mind. ‘Cable TV was just starting,” says Landis, “and we sold it to Showtime. It wasn’t enough money, but it was a lot of money, and as soon as we sold the right to premiere  Thriller and Making Michael Jackson’s Thriller to Showtime, we got a hysterical call from MTV, saying, “You can’t do this to us!”

Excerpt from “The Transformation” by Jason Lapeyre, Wax Poetics, No. 37 Oct./Nov. 2009: 77-8. Print.

Image: MTV logo without “Music Television” and MTV logo with “Music Television.” Image from Rolling Stone.com

Arts Writing and “The New Thing”

Last week’s much talked-about Art Klatch, hosted by Scott Lawrimore at Cafe Presse, briefly touched on the question of whether online media prevents non-arts inclined members of the community from happening upon arts coverage and criticism (summarized on Translinguistic Other).  Based on my graduate work in the online realm, I knew I very much disagree with this concern but had not completely formulated why.  Fortunately, I discovered that diacritical already articulated many important aspects of the matter:

“The reason the critics were at newspapers was because that’s the place that supported them. As something else rises to take their place, the critics will go there.

I’ve recently come to feel that the new thing (whatever that is) won’t have a chance until the old order is disposed of. Newspapers are sucking up all the oxygen in the room, and the startups won’t have room to flourish until newspapers get out of the way.” (Douglas McLennan, “Creative Destruction and The Critics”, diacritical)

McLennan does not directly address the question of how the general public will interact with arts writing, but his advocating for “the new thing” is of utmost importance during the transition from print to online arts coverage.  Online arts writing is exactly that: a new thing.  It is a new medium that is still as public (or more so) as printed communication tools.  In turn, the public interacts with online writing differently than the media of the past.

The metrics of this blog provide some insight into how and why people are visiting Peripheral Vision (PV) as an arts-related blog. The most popular entry I have (this entry has around 1000 page views; the next most popular has about 400) according to WordPress* is “Dangerous Commodity.” This entry has never had an external link within the art blogging community and was published almost one year ago, during a time when PV had a smaller audience.  According WordPress’s statistics on search engines that lead Internet surfers to PV, “Dangerous Commodity” is viewed almost exclusively because of an image of a purse designed by Takashi Murakami for Louis Vuitton posted within the text (it comes up as one of the primary images on a Google Image search for the bag).   Ultimately, an image is leading unsuspecting shoppers to a blog full of quotations from aesthetic and postmodern theory.

“Arts writing” as defined by a Google Image search.  Image from Mrs. Allen’s 3rd Grade Classroom, Davenport School District.

This instance of writing on the arts intersecting with another aspect of popular culture suggests that happening upon an art blog en route to purchasing a handbag is as possible as happening upon an art review in a newspaper en route to the business section.  However, the methods for “happening” upon something in the online realm are entirely different from the methods for doing so in printed media.  While a physical structure enables a sort of spontaneity in newspapers, the Internet has its own set of structures in place for such interactions to occur.  In the case of the “Dangerous Commodity” blog entry, an image search is the mechanism that enables shoppers to use Peripheral Vision as a resource for their image needs.  Similar effects can happen as a result of tagging, another search mechanism that exists only on the web.

I have my suspicions that most seeking a Louis Vuitton handbag on the Internet do not actually read Peripheral Vision during their visit to the page.  However, the second most popular entry on PV is “The Raft of the Medusa and the Potential of Prospect.1″, primarily due to the tagging of The Raft of the Medusa.  This gives more hope that web search mechanisms and other unique aspects of the Internet will lead to the increased visibility of arts writing within broader communities, as well as among the general public.

The new capabilities and potential uses for online-specific tools reinforce the importance of seeing online arts writing as a “new thing” not yet brought to full fruition.  Although it is of value to acknowledge the aspects of printed media that initially seem “lost” in online formats, it is more important to explore the creative offerings of online arts writing.  Most critically, online writing is a medium in its own right that requires rethinking and re-imagining how we define communication, in order to expand beyond what know from the past.

*Wordpress is certainly not the most accurate metrics tool, but I am hoping it is mildly accurate in terms of relative statistics; for more on metrics and how they also must be redefined, read “Towards New Metrics of Success for On-line Museum Projects” by Sebastian Chan of the Powerhouse Museum

History, Critical Thinking, and MTV

It is always surreal to happen upon a retrospective on MTV.  Sunday night, I was watching a retrospective of MTV’s Total Request Live show, which ended that day after running for a decade.  Most people over 25 probably are not overly concerned with its departure, but my understanding from the little MTV I continue to watch is it represents the last of their prime time video-oriented programs on the main channel.  However, thinking this as someone no longer within MTV’s target audience inevitably begs the question I saw on another MTV retrospective that took place during their 20th birthday on August 1, 2001: is MTV getting worse or am I just getting older?

Carson Daly and Britney Spears on the set of “Total Request Live”, 2002. (MTV) Image from nytimes.com

In order to maintain a close relationship with teenagers, MTV has adjusted its format to fit current technological trends, including adding Mtv2 and MtvDJ to round out their digital cable offerings, as well as an extensive website that includes a series of blogs (primarily oriented towards celebrity gossip) and an online archive of 16,000+ videos that begins with the definitive “Video Killed the Radio Star.”  The Washington Post’s Hank Stuever noted during MTV’s 25th anniversary in 2006,

“The network is understandably cautious about nostalgic reflection or cutting much cake; its publicists are unhelpful about digging up archival photos, claiming even that no such history exists, that at MTV, it is always about the now. Its only nod to the occasion was to begin airing last week as ‘A.D.D. Videos,’ showing just a glimpse of iconic music clips from each year of its history, in five-year chunklets. (‘A.D.D.’ for attention-deficit disorder, which is one of MTV’s proudest legacies.)”  (“25 Years Down the Tube”, Washington Post C01, 8.1.06)

The “A.D.D.” style of music videos in general, with their narratives and non-narratives told through rapid images flashed around the screen, anticipated the multiple windows, sidebars, and popup ads of the Internet visual culture now standard for the “Millennial” generation (born approx. 1982-2001).  In 2001, Chicago Sun Times pop music critic Jim Derogatis commented on how,

“MTV has always been more about ”pop” (as in mass popularity, massive sales, and catering to mainstream tastes) than ”rock” (traditionally the music of excitement, rebellion, and individualism).” (“MTV’s 20th Birthday”, Chicago Sun Times 7.29.01)

Derogatis 100% correct.  A music video is not about music the way a song on the radio is about music.  Many criticize videos for limiting the interpretation of song by juxtaposing it with imagery often selected based on its appeal to a consumer market.  Likewise, TRL was disiked by many for its incessant promotion of mainstream pop music, beginning with Britney Spears and the endless stream of boy bands in the late 90′s and early 2000′s.   However, TRL based its model on the radio, allowing the audience to create the weekly top ten video list through their telephone and Internet votes.  In other words, the show was done Web 2.0 style before Web 2.0 fully existed, giving a few screaming teenagers their 15 seconds of fame weekly as they proclaimed their love for a particular video on live television.

This week MTV has been revisiting the TRL top 10 lists from the last decade, and there was clearly more generic slop than substance.  However, these were the teens’ choices during a time when arts education was fading quickly from public schools.  It may frequently have been an exercise in selecting between “bad” and “worse”, but ultimately, TRL can be understood as a teenager’s opportunity for critical thinking as it applied to visual culture. 

When the show first aired, I was a sophomore in high school.  While they certainly were not the most intellectual conversations of my life, I still recall afternoons with friends spent defending and arguing against the videos on the TRL list, as well as those that earned the coveted annual MTV Video Music Awards.  Videos by the Smashing Pumpkins and Fatboy Slim were briefly favored by the channel but remain formative in my visual memory.  It was only while in college several years later that I instantly connected with the 1902 Le voyage dans la lune during a film theory course because of its recreation in the 1996 Smashing Pumpkins video for “Tonight Tonight.”  Likewise, I was familiar with Doug Aitken first through Fatboy Slim’s video for ”The Rockafeller Skank,” as contemporary artists were never discussed during my K-12 experience.

I don’t intend to “wave my cane”, begging MTV to bring back the video-oriented programming that dies with the end of TRL.  The meaning of the music video has been altered by both the prevalence of reality TV (now MTV’s mainstay) and the on-demand qualities of video on the Internet (see the Top Rated of All Time video on in the MTV archive).  The one video program that remains on the main MTV channel is the fully Web 2.0-inspired FNMTV, which now airs at the unfortunate hours of 5:00 a.m. and 6:00 a.m. daily.  The question is simply, are the tweens missing something MTV once provided, or are they simply getting it somewhere else that an old Millenial era-fogey like myself wouldn’t understand.

No Known Copyright Restrictions

I can post this image, just as it is, because the Smithsonian recently published a group of photographs from their archives on flickr. They did this while recognizing the fact that these images have no copyright restrictions. This may seem obvious to anyone familiar with copyright laws and the notion of the “public domain”, but it indicates a grand stride in the museological realm. Those who have never worked in or with a mainstream American museum may not realize how many hours go into the credit lines audiences typically don’t even notice beneath images from an exhibition or from the collection. If you ever wonder why a museum doesn’t have more of its collection or exhibition images online, it may be at least partially due to fear of copyright law, or perhaps simply a fear of losing authority over their objects.

The Smithsonian’s project is revolutionary because it admits that there are works in the public domain, and that the museum is willing to relinquish their authority over those images. Authority is often the matter at hand in the museum, perhaps even replacing the financial values found within for-profit institutions. While museums do have authority as serious research institutions, there can also be another dimension to that authority that creates friction in the age of the Internet, where information exchange is at the forefront of daily life. Copyright cannot maintain its ultimate rule the way it did in the world of exclusively print media. Museums often forgo Internet advances such as providing digital versions of their collections, podcasting, blogging and social networking for fear of losing their audiences once the images of their objects escape their control. This is clearly irrational and prohibitive.

Are there really people who would prefer to look only at digital images online over seeing the actual art/historical/scientific object? I find this doubtful. The Internet is valued for its international information exchange, making small museums that would otherwise only exist as resources to their immediate communities suddenly become valuable to the country or world at-large through their online presences. Shouldn’t this be what every museum strives for, rather than being overprotective of the digital reproductions of their objects?

And yet, most institutions do not put all of their collections online. Clearly there are complications such as artists’ rights and donors’ wishes, but what about all of the works already in the public domain- why don’t we see them on more museum websites?

At Museums and the Web this year (debatably the most progressive North American museum conference on integrating web applications with museum practice), the hot topic was the mash-up.

This is a mash up of The Muppets and Pulp Fiction:

This is a mash-up of light sabers and The Princess Bride (via Boing Boing):

But the mashing up being talked about at Museums and the Web 2008 by innovators Sebastian Chan and Frankie Roberto was about the possibility of mashing up all museum objects (“all” as in every museum object that exists) into a single web resource, in order to make those objects and their information more accessible to the world (I suggest reading their papers, which are fully available here and here). While the Smithsonian’s flickr site is just one museum, it signals a movement towards sharing information and authority on a universal web resource not managed by the museum providing the images. This is one of the largest steps I have seen towards the grand resource Chan’s and Frankie’s papers imply as a possibility; it is a welcome sign of hope, as I continue blogging in a city where few museums have substantial portions of their collections online*.

*The Wing Luke and the Burke have the largest amount currently online of which I am aware. The Henry also has a project in the works, though I am not clear on the breadth of the final result that will be available to the public.

(link to Smithsonian story via Boing Boing)