Digital art or art digital

…there’s no doubting that the technology at MONA turned my experience from a 3 hour run-around, into an 8 hour immersive experience.

By Paul

By Paul Wilson

It’s interesting to see how many people are quick to make comments about QR Codes.
“No one is going to open an app on their phone to scan a little black square that takes you to a website or worse, another app”. Although this does indeed sound convoluted, in reality QR codes are pretty simple. In fact, I even had a practical example of this recently when I found myself at Sculptures by the Sea in Sydney (a must if you haven’t been).

During my visit there, I found a crowd of people gathered at one point on the walk, and rather than looking at the art entitled ‘message in a bottle’, they were fixated on a A4 laminated instruction board. The board gave instructions on how to download an app using either a web address, or a QR code to discover more about the art and, as it turned out, a cause. Admittedly the board could simply have been used to hold a printed message telling you about the art instead, but people of all ages with a bias to baby boomers were successfully giving it a go and preferring the QR code to typing an address on mobile.

This leads me to the next story, of the $175+ million MONA gallery in Tasmania and their assisted gallery experience. I could either bore you to death or ruin the experience by talking about how amazing MONA is, so I won’t spoil the surprise. However I will chat about the technology.

When you enter MONA, you receive an iPod (with custom case) and headphones. By clicking on the ‘near me link’ you will see a brief summery of each work, and more detail via the ‘art wank’ button (funny in itself). The device will automatically hook up to any live media that is associated with many of the works, keep track of your tour and will email you afterwards with details of everything you saw and items that you didn’t. It gives gallery metrics on the more popular pieces, and how long people spend looking at some pretty weird and wonderful stuff. Of course, owner and curator David Wash wishes to use this data to remove the popular items.  Which you can do if you own the gallery and it’s work and want to make a random statement about your eccentricity.

There have been similar tech setups in the other museums across the world as well. MOMA New York, not to be confused with MONA Tassie, have also had a go here with their augmented reality exhibition. Of course, only Melbourne would come up with a hybrid of these ideas with (un)seen Sculptures, an augmented reality version of art where you can only see it though your mobile device.

But the real question is, “should people have to have the art explained”.
I went to art school - well the commercial sell out equivalent, ‘design school’. This obviously means that I should have some appreciation of the material already.

But there’s no doubting that the technology at MONA turned my experience from a 3 hour run-around, into an 8 hour immersive experience. A great job to the in-house team who did the project, I can only imagine the headaches in making the technology work as well as it does.

Let your head think about the possibilities using this technology as a basis for a retail experience, then take a couple of pain killers and go lie down.