Weekly Update on Museums, Tech, Social-Media etc - free education makerbot future cities

Our Future is the Future of Our Cities; the International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam - Making a City
This Biennale was a call to action which invited architects from around the world to develop models for new urban developments. The main challenge the design of better living conditions for billions of people. But how to make these cities when also responding to urgent social, economic and ecological issues. The video made me feel that Museums need to be a little more active in this discussion if they want to maintain their relevancy in future urban centers.

BandResources.net is a free resource for the gigging band and musician. They are building a database of venues, recording studios, rehearsal studios and labels. None from Australia yet but hopefully that will change soon.

Shapeways CEO on how 3D Printing Will Fuel Creative Commerce

Peter Weijmarshausen believes Shapeways was one of the first companies to put a consumer spin on 3D printing. The startup’s website allows designers to upload their wares for printing and sell the results in an Etsy-like store. Those without design experience can tweak existing models to their liking before printing them in one of 25 different materials, including stainless steel, ceramics and sterling silver. Weijmarshausen says the company printed 750,000 products in 2011. He expects “many times more this year — millions.” The other company most often credited for the rise of the consumer 3D printing trend is



MakerBot, is a really cool new company which sells affordable kit-set 3D printers for about Au 2,200.

What engages students? 10 ideas compiled from interviews with 8th graders by HEATHER WOLPERT-GAWRON

Deconstructing Cinema - One Scene At A Time
By Patrick Samuel

This is a really nice project from Static Mass Emporium which each week takes one scene from a movie and deconstructs it to reveal what kind of an impact they’ve had historically and culturally. It started in September 2011 with A Place In The Sun starring Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor which looked at the stunning close-ups director George Stevens used for the party scene before moving on to Brian de Palma’s Hitchcockian intro for Snake Eyes, Chan-wook Park’s I’m a Cyborg, But That’s OK and Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ were next. Since then they have looked at key scenes from Remember Me, JFK, The Matrix and All The President’s Men.

The latest is a discussion on American Psycho ... check it out


Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson - False Resume Scandal -
This is just unbelievable no wonder employees find it hard to trust their bosses. Yahoo CEO and ex CTO of PayPal Scott Thompson was forced to apologise after being exposed for lying about false qualifications on his CV. According to Nicholas Carlson of the Business insider he ... wrote an email to staff, expressing his regret for the issue which saw a computer science degree he did not earn appear on his resume. Transcript from 2009 interview on his science degree contains the following ... Gunn: Your bachelor’s degree is in accounting and computer science. Now, from both of those, I mean that’s, that’s pretty obvious that’s Paypal. What are the most important things you learned?

Thompson: Yeah. You know, I think and I, I mention this to young kids when I’m on campus, and my son who I was just talking about at Santa Clara, what I’m happiest about in my background is if you work in technology you’re trained to solve problems.And that’s really it, you’re trained to pull apart very complex things and think about okay, how can I do this or how can I do that or how can I make it better?And that’s really the background that I have and it started back in my college days, and I think that’s really the wonderful part thing of being an engineer is you think that way.

and while we're on the subject ...

Megaupload's Kim Dotcom: Inside the Wild Life and Dramatic Fall of the Fat Nerd Who Burned Hollywood
by Daniel Miller, Matthew Belloni

Daniel and Matthew are right this reads like it was made to be a film. "Kim Dotcom, né Kim Schmitz, the 300-pound-plus, 6-foot-7 German hacker-turned-web mogul who founded Megaupload, the cyber-locker service that offered its 180 million users remote storage of movies, music and other files. The 13th-most-visited site in the world at one point, Megaupload was a pirates' haven -- a Napster on steroids, where members could share everything from Lady Gaga hits to Transformers movies with anarchists' abandon.

Part of the service's appeal was the antihero persona of Dotcom himself. The 38-year-old had become an online celebrity, as much for his over-the-top lifestyle of $400,000 supercars, supermodel hot-tub parties and the slick YouTube video he had made with Kanye West and Kim Kardashian (in it, he raps about Megaupload: "It's a hit! It's a hit!") as for the popularity of his website. And during those two days of meetings with Batal, Dotcom, a self-professed "Dr. Evil" in a loose-fitting black jumpsuit and closely cropped hair, revealed his plan to expand Megaupload, a wildly easy-to-use service, into an empire that would rival that of his idol, Steve Jobs."

This is Big - Free online Accredited Course



MIT offered courses for free when it rolled out its MITx online learning platform last year. However, Harvard took notice of its efforts, and has joined MIT online to form the edX platform and offer courses and content for free on the web. There's no word on the available subjects just yet, but video lessons, quizzes and online labs will all be a part of the curriculum, and those who comprehend the coursework can get a certificate of mastery upon completion. edX won't just benefit those who log on, either, as it'll be used to research how students learn and how technology can be used to improve teaching in both virtual and brick and mortar classrooms. The cost for this altruistic educational venture? 60 million dollars, with each party ponying up half. The first courses will be announced this summer, and classes are slated to start this fall.

Jelly beans used by artist to recreate classic art masterpieces
California-based artist Kristen Cumings was commissioned by candy company Jelly Belly to produce several pieces of jelly bean art to add to its collection ‘Jelly Belly Masterpieces of Confectionary Art’.

Digital items archived from the Occupy movement
This is an interesting archival move - already over 15,000 digital items have been archived from the Occupy movement. They are seeking contributions through a number of different places so if you want to contribute some of your own or are interested in researching there are a number of links from this article

Australian National Cultural Policy delayed
Sydney Morning Herald article by Jacqueline Maley

"The Gillard government's long-awaited national cultural policy has been postponed because of a lack of funds, a casualty of the tight fiscal environment before the budget. The cultural policy, the first such document for nearly 20 years, is still expected to be released this year, but hopes it would be published to coincide with the budget have been dashed, given the government's pledge to return to surplus."

Australian Heritage Strategy - Open for public consultation - closing date 15 June 2012

United States shipwrecks from Battle of the Coral Sea now protected under Australian law
Australian Heritage Minister, Tony Burke, today declared the United States warships the USS Lexington, USS Sims and USS Neosho sunk during the Battle of the Coral Sea as protected historic shipwrecks. On 7 May 1942 aircraft from the USS Yorktown and the Lexington sunk the Japanese aircraft carrier Shoho just before noon. At about the same time, and in a separate engagement, dive bombers from the Japanese carriers Shokaku and Zuikaku sunk the destroyer USS Sims and left the US fleet oiler Neosho a crippled wreck.

Later that day a support group including the HMAS Hobart and HMAS Australia were attacked by another force of bombers, which were based at Rabaul in New Guinea. The battle continued on 8 May, when the two main carrier forces engaged directly for the first time, resulting in the loss of the Lexington with 216 members of her crew. Victory in the Coral Sea was the first major defeat for Japanese forces and the beginnings of the long and difficult road towards victory.

Plastimake
This looks interesting - it comes in balls but when you add water they become mallable and you can mold them into shapes. The plastic then hardens and becomes usable in any number of ways.

Apple's Internal Marketing Video comparing itself to WW2 1944 propaganda film Jobs as FDR, Mike Murray 'The General'

Courtney Love is having her first art show, and what do you know?

IKEA makes digital cameras out of cardboard

Is the Museum Exhibition Model Broken?

Ole Worm's cabinet of curiosities, from ''Museum Wormianum'', 1655. Original source Smithsonian Museum

Over the last fortnight I've been in the midst of a lot of discussion about exhibition development for museums. Primarily the question has been approached from ... what are our exhibitions going to be about and how do we get them on the floor?

Both valid and necessary questions when it comes to upgrading the museum's exhibition space and it's certainly seen as core function of most museums - if not the primary function. Indeed for many the exhibition provides the main mechanism by which museum professionals believe they broker their mandate with the community at large.

But in the middle of a conversation about how an exhibition's design and content was to be fed into the 'Ford-like' production line to create the labels, design it, and then fabricate and advertise it I had this thought ...

PERHAPS THE EXHIBITION MODEL FOR MUSEUM'S ACTUALLY MINIMISED AUDIENCE INTERACTION WITH MUSEUM COLLECTIONS & THE PROBLEM WASN'T THE THEME OR THE DESIGN OF THE EXHIBITION - IS IT POSSIBLE THE ENTIRE MODEL IS OUTDATED?

This sounds a bit of a radical thought but perhaps not as much as one would at first think. Museum's haven't always adopted the model of using themed exhibitions to broker audience contact. In fact the earliest museums, the cabinets of curiosities and the history museums that followed them, were actually incredibly open experiences in relation to the display of their collections.

In the 1560s the Belgian scholar Samuel Quiccheberg made the modest claim that the museum (read .. Cabinet of curiusities) was,

"A theatre of the broadest scope, containing authentic materials and precise reproductions of the whole of the universe'

These private collectors could of course never attain such a universal collection but the objects they had were all on show for their public, albeit a very limited one. It's clear when looking at images of these phantasmagorical collections like those of Ferrante Imperato, Septimus Jorger,and Francesco Calzolari that the museum was a kind of scholarly open book, a visual microcosm of the worlds objects collected, and arranged, to inspire, amaze and encourage serious research.

The civic museum in the 19th century was also in many ways a much more open book when it came to brokering the interactions between audience and museum collections. And some of those great institutions like the British Museum, the Pitt Rivers Museum, the Louvre, and many others around the have carried that legacy right through to the present. Its embedded in their very DNA; the architecture that houses them, and the desire to be a three-dimensional archive of the culture that surrounds them.

But of course the scale of these collections ensure well over 90% of the collections are stored away from the public. And increasingly the museum as a site from which to glimpse the narrative of culture across time has shifted toward emphasising the culture of the present. Not really unexpected given change and culture appear to have sped up. It is now more global in nature, but change is also increasingly found in digital containers hard for museum exhibitions to grapple with, and produced on a scale that makes many ownable by people who once might have visited the museum to engage with these technologies.

But in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the exhibition was a solution for addressing problems relating to access to collections and contemporary culture. And its almost universal adoption has, for many years, made real sense of some of the museums activities. In the earliest years exhibitions provided a mechanism by which the curator,(and in those days it was a curator with a few assistants), could rearrange the displays in a designated area by changing over objects. Design was in fact quite modular as the existing cabinets and collection area designated how and where they were displayed. But it wasn't a very dynamic environment for other museum professionals and as museums expanded to include a broader range of staff: non-curatorial managers, registrars, educators, marketers, conservator, loans officers, etc., this curator controlled mode began to show signs of redundancy - and not just in the area of exhibitions.

The most prevalent exhibition model adopted seems to have been inherited from Art Museums. And this still shows in the way exhibitions are implemented and thought about. Even now discussions about exhibition are contingent on style, design, often white boxes, certainly white labels, and developed around a person, a single theme, a particular manufacturer. By the end of the C20th they had turned into the primary focus for resources in most large scale museums. They had also generated a massive infrastructure for developing and marketing exhibitions all justified because people coming though the doors of the museum were believed to be the primary way in which the museum brokered its madate and relationship with the communities that surrounded them.

All well and good. But what about now? Museums have their collections online, wireless devices mean people can experience these collections in spaces outside the museum, and its staff are interacting over multiple platforms in the social media space,publishing e-books, and talking live with students online: the list is an ever expanding one.

As Seb Chan points out in his blog post, mobile tech impacts in museums blog post, the new museum has to acknowledge the experience starts well before, and continues long after, the visit. In fact the notions constructed around building permanent or temporary, large or small, exhibitions and then tearing them down and replacing them with a new crop may also be open to question. I certainly believe the way people interact with museum collections and their interests are changing and broadening. These collections can now service a wider group than the cliched bespectacled enthusiast or academic.

In many ways museum business has already changed, its just we have spent such a long time developing a particular way of doing things its hard to change direction, and like ships it sometimes feels like the bigger the institution the bigger the curve it takes to change direction. Ironically I think we can actually learn some lessons from re-visiting some of the methodology adopted by the earliest museums. The open display style of the Cabinet of Curiosities with its multitude of objects when combined with new wireless technologies and interactive databases could provide engaging and ever-changing museum experiences. Ones tailored to the visitors needs not dictated by museum audience research. Scalable experiences where objects could be requested for display, stories are developed through broader community interaction and narratives are expanded to merge the past, present and the future.