Thursday, August 27, 2009
Art The Brooklyn Museum Unveils Personalized Smartphone Tours
Posted by Benjamin Sutton on Thu, Aug 27, 2009 at 2:09 PM
It basically works like so: after you list some basic preferences, the application tells you which pieces you'll probably like in each room as you enter it, then, based on what you do or don't like, the program re-calibrates your preferences and makes updated recommendations. It also lets you create your own tour of artworks in the museum, basically like a playlist. Obviously, this program is both completely genius and slightly problematic.
On the one hand, museums need to find creative and useful ways to attract larger audiences and introduce contemporary technology to their often low-tech or downright antiquated facilities and programs. In that respect, this is a great, interactive, somewhat stimulating improvement on the dreaded audio tour concept, one that requires at least some level of engagement from visitors and forces them to develop a sense of their own aesthetic tastes and interests, which is crucial. On the other hand, if you tell Pandora you like a song, you tend to hear it 2-3 times per hour. Similarly, if you claim to only like black and white photographs of New York during the Great Depression, will this program only point you in their direction to the exclusion of everything else in the impossibly rich museum's collection? Perhaps using it as a system for generating recommendations makes more sense, rather than a guiding program. If anybody has tried this thing please let us know what it's like.
Related Locations
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Brooklyn Museum of Art
- 200 Eastern Pkwy., at Washington Ave (map)
- Crown Heights
- 718-638-5000
- (based on 1 user review)
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