CAM Interactives – CustomCat1

Easy Museum Interactive Using Custom Plastic Puzzle

Matt Isble — Thu, 25 Feb 2016 20:24:11 +0000

Hello MT Community,

Here’s a very basic interactive for your museum: a plastic puzzle using a custom image of the artwork.What we’ve provided for our visitors is an opportunity to sit and relax, helping them make it though our large museum. And here they can also spend quality time with a work of art. We all know how briefly people pass by individual paintings (bonus points for anyone who can add a comment below about any formal or informal study they’ve conducted at their institution). This interactive can engage visitors in looking deeply at all aspects of the painting, noticing things they had not caught upon their first glance. This type of puzzle can be bought online, with a 11×14″ version costing between $30 and $50. And your education department could definitely make use of it after the run of the show. Just be sure that you’ve identified the right type of art for this project, looking especially for complexity and depth. The end result? Visitors that are engaged and recharged. Maybe they’ll even look at that next painting a little bit longer?

This may not break new ground but it’s a highly functional project to pull out of the museum professional’s box of tricks. Please feel free to also cover something that you might think of as basic, too. Your ordinary is going to be someone else’s epiphany.

One Prototyping Form for an Art Museum Interactive and its Result

Matt Isble — Fri, 30 Oct 2015 20:39:13 +0000

I thought I’d take a moment to share the tool we used to develop two interactives in our galleries. The attached document was used by four groups of (three people per group) and the result was shared the entire group plus a few upper management staff. We whittled the ideas down to two (InSight and Arts and Letters) and then installed them in the gallery. Unfortunately I don’t have the prototype form used for the Arts and Letters interactive. Below you will see the CAD drawings for the interactive and I think they tell the story, but feel free to comment with any questions. We have not done any evaluation on this interactive, but we restock the blank forms regularly.

Building a Faux Cabaret for the Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec Exhibition

Matt Isble — Sun, 31 May 2015 17:30:51 +0000

Here’s a quick behind the scenes look at assembling a faux cabaret for the exhibition. Much of it was built and painted off-site and what you see here are the steps to assemble. It’s amazing how the most minimal of materials can give such a grand impression. We wanted to space to be dark and intimate so you’ll notice that we cover the windows with a dark blue vinyl to match an adjacent blue wall to mimic a sense of early evening at dusk. It was not entirely pleasant taking the vinyl off the east facing windows as much of the adhesive was left behind. Nothing that a lil orange cleaner could solve, but still, not pleasant. The rest of the windows were covered in heavy drapery and the number of light cans were reduced and used only as spot lights that were screened down. Finished cabaret images to come soon…

Gallery Interactive Game Encouraging Longer Looking and Use of Words

Matt Isble — Thu, 14 May 2015 04:20:57 +0000

This is part of our Game On Series, a series of interactives throughout the museum spaces; this one is called Arts and Letters. The interactive consists of a colorful pouch, a few pencils, a few pads of paper, a 26-sided die, and timer, and of course a set of directions. The pouches hang from their zippers on the doors to the gallery using magnetic hooks, and the doors are left open during public hours. We glued a piece of 100 lb paper to the back of the magnets to mitigate chafing on the door. To help with reset, we put vinyl circles on the doors because inevitably visitors will get “creative” with the magnetic hooks and move them around. There is a station at either end of the space so you can pick up on one end and drop off at the other and won’t have to back track to return the pouch. Often visitors take the bag into other galleries to continue the game and we don’t dissuade them from doing this. They end up returning the bags at the front admissions desk. There is a certain amount of loss of course, unfortunately I don’t have an annual cost to replace missing bags and parts.

Now onto the game itself, it’s a pretty straightforward riff on the game Scategories, only for this version the works of art are the focus for each round. We purposefully chose a gallery that lent itself to this kind of analysis, works with discernible images that are accessible to young and old. Pictured below are some examples from the space, feel free to play a round with the person next to you.

Roland Petersen, TWO SEATED FIGURES, 1967

Barbara Spring, A LA CARTE, 1961

George Herms, PANDORA’S BOX, 1992

Irving Norman, MY WORLD AND YOURS (AND THE GODS CREATED THE WORLD IN THEIR OWN IMAGE), 1954

Irving Norman, CELEBRATION, 1953

John Emmett Gerrity, UNTITLED (STILL LIFE)

Roger Medearis, OLD SHOES, 1950

Charles Griffin Farr, STILL LIFE WITH CABBAGE, 1939 & 1974

Otis Oldfield, NATURE MORT AUX TOMATES, 1921

Helen Clark Oldfield, GREEN PEARS, 1941