INTERACTIVE MEDIA TECHNOLOGY
Artifacts Become Life
Georgia Tech's Interactive Media Technology Center creates "hands-on" virtual museum visits
By Amanda Crowell
IN THE HUSHED GALLERIES of the Michael C. Carlos Museum of Emory University , visitors can do more than just gaze passively at ancient artifacts and works of art.
Through the "hands-on" capabilities of multimedia technology, they can reconstruct a fragmented clay pot, draw their own masterpieces and play a tune on a 1,800-year-old, bat-shaped flute.
photo by Stanley Leary
Among the kiosk's offerings is an interactive map that
allows users to track a 1920s archaeological expedition.
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It's all done on computer kiosks, thanks to an innovative program developed by the museum and Georgia Tech's Interactive Media Technology Center (IMTC).
"People go to places like SCITREK (Atlanta's Science & Technology Museum), and everything's hands- on," says Ed Price, IMTC's assistant director and director of the Carlos Museum project. "You come here and you can look, but you can't touch anything. In a way, we're letting people touch the objects now -- look at them, turn them around, find out more about them."
Elizabeth Hornor, who coordinates educational programs for the Carlos Museum, agrees.
"It's a museum educator's dream to be able to present information in this way," she says. "It makes objects in the museums seem more alive."
To make sure visitors connect what they see on the computer with the real objects themselves, the kiosks feature a holistic "virtual museum" approach that closely matches the design and layout of the real museum. Using touchscreen computers, visitors can access video and audio clips, pictures, computer animation, flythroughs and manipulable 3-D models.
The kiosks are located in small rooms off the galleries, and all six major collections are represented: African, Classical, Ancient American, Egyptian, Near Eastern and Drawings.
Although the Carlos Museum is not alone in exploiting this emerging technology, it has been on the leading edge, thanks to the vision of former director Maxwell L. Anderson and a 1992 grant from the prestigious Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Museum Collections Accessibility Initiative. When the museum opened in a new building in 1993, it was the first art museum to have incorporated multimedia technology into its architectural design. It also was one of the first to set up a World Wide Web site.
photo by Stanley Leary
Visitors can use the kiosks to "play" this
1,800-year-old, bat-shaped flute. |
"I think their vision was there early on and very appropriate for what could happen with technology," says Katherine Jones-Garmil, program director of the Museum Computer Network, a nonprofit group that supports the use of computer technology in museums.
Since the early 1990s, more and more museums have turned to multimedia projects like kiosks and Web sites to enhance their galleries. Currently, the Museum Computer Network has Web links to over 1,000 museums worldwide.
Although the group hasn't begun tracking kiosks, Jones-Garmil says most of the ones she's seen are tied to specific collections or events, while the Carlos Museum kiosks are uniquely comprehensive. Although they feature only a few objects from each collection, they offer rich detail about the pieces and behind-the-scenes information on how museum staff members -- like conservators and curators -- bring the art to the public.
"I thought that was an interesting way to look at it," says Jones-Garmil, who also is assistant director of information services and technology for the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University. "It's not just focused on the collection, but on the working of the museum itself."
To achieve this result, the museum's curatorial and educational staffs developed the kiosks together, rather than handing the project off to a technology department to do in isolation, says Anderson, who now directs the Art Gallery of Ontario and serves as liaison for information technology for the Association of Art Museum Directors.
"We were always pushing the envelope and thinking about how network technology might ameliorate the visit for the average museum-goer," he says. "It was critical then and it is today to draw visitors into the multiple lives of works of art -- from the artist's studio to the conservation laboratory to the wall of a gallery."
Georgia Tech's involvement in the Carlos Museum project began in late 1993 after the Interactive Media Technology Center's mock-up designs convinced museum officials that the best talent for their money was just across town.
The IMTC was formed in 1989 as the Multimedia Technology Laboratory to help bring the 1996 Summer Olympic Games to Atlanta. Since then, IMTC's faculty and students have worked on a variety of projects combining technology with the arts, education, sports, medicine and marketing.
Specific projects include an ongoing collaboration with the Atlanta Ballet to integrate art with advanced motion-capture, computer animation and projection technologies; development of surgical simulators to train doctors on new medical procedures; and design of the Georgia Resource Center, a multimedia presentation system designed to attract new industry to the state.
For the Carlos Museum project, IMTC's staff learned to coordinate a variety of multimedia technologies, including audio, video, 3-D animation, computer art and interactive authoring. More than a dozen people worked on the project, including IMTC students from Georgia State University and Atlanta College of Art.
photo by Stanley Leary
Ed Price, Brian Jones and Tiffany O'Quinn of the
Interactive Media Technology Center examine a section of Carlos kiosk
work in detail.
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"While other projects generally require specific talents, the Carlos Museum project incorporated a wide range of multimedia technologies and allowed the majority of the lab to participate," says Brian Jones, an IMTC research engineer.
The finished product was installed in 1996 -- the first section in June and the final one in November. The long-term nature of the project meant researchers had to anticipate where computer technology was going.
"We realized that if the project didn't incorporate future technologies, the novelty of the kiosk might be lost," Jones says. "Therefore, such promised technologies as QuickTime VR were designed into the project's future."
Hornor praises IMTC's efforts, saying, "There has never been a single thing that we've wanted to do that, technologically, they couldn't figure out some way to do."
Others apparently agree. Earlier this year, officials at Atlanta's High Museum of Art hired Price and Tiffany O'Quinn, who served as IMTC's art director for the Carlos Museum project, to oversee a redesign of the interactive portion of their "See For Yourself" Visual Arts Learning Space. They also hired Anne Russell King, who served as the Carlos Museum's scriptwriter and consulting curator.
"When it came to finding an organization that we could work with and that understood museums, Georgia Tech immediately came to mind," says Kathleen Peckham of the High Museum's department of education. "They've been very good about knowing what they can do on their own and when they need to stop and check in with us."
The Visual Arts Learning Space introduces visitors to the four basic elements of art -- color, line, composition and light -- through interactive computer kiosks placed in the center of the room and representative art pieces on the walls. The kiosks offer a variety of multimedia features accessible through touchscreens.
"We really wanted to make this space very fun and interactive and hands-on and immediately engaging to people," Peckham says. "We knew that technology was one way to do that."
Whereas the High Museum kiosks provide more introductory information, the Carlos Museum program is designed to give visitors far more detail -- including historical and cultural context and art historical interpretation -- than the small label cards posted with the art itself.
For example, visitors to the Carlos Museum's Classical section learn that one particular vase is the only surviving piece of ancient Greek art depicting the story of Melanippe, a lost play by Euripides. They can hear Melanippe's story and how it relates to the figures on the vase, and they can learn more about Greek mythology.
This section is narrated by Rush Rehm of Stanford University's drama department, and some of the scenes feature Rehm sitting atop Georgia's Mount Arabia, which resembles the Greek countryside -- a subtle attention to detail found throughout the kiosks.
Other features among the kiosks' several hours of information include:
Detailed X-rays (called CT scans) of different parts of a 2,000-year-old Egyptian mummy, as well as scans of a living human body for comparison.
Visitors appear to love the kiosks so far, with many writing positive messages in comment books scattered throughout the museum. Molly Hill, a business communications instructor at Georgia State University and Emory University and a recent visitor to the Carlos Museum, cited presentations on ceremonial masks and the African water deity Mami Wata as favorites.
photo by Stanley Leary
This gold wreath
fashioned of sprigs of olive leaves and olives may resemble a victor's
award in ancient Greek athletic games. |
"I was surprised at the accuracy and the depth of the information," says Hill, who is working on a doctorate in English, focusing on primitivism and goddess imagery in 20th Century American literature. "I thought it would be more oriented toward children. While the format is ideal for children, the information is very thorough."
Hill also believes the kiosks should be linked to the Web, to "give children who don't have an opportunity to go to museums the same information as those who do."
Currently, visitors to the Carlos Museum and IMTC Web sites can access video clips and play the bat flute. Future plans include creating a searchable, Web-linked database of the museum's 15,000 objects and producing a DVD-ROM (which offers far more storage capacity than a CD-ROM) of the kiosks.
Anderson calls Web sites a crucial element in how museums should use multimedia technology in the future. He also notes that the Carlos Museum site was included on a list of outstanding Web sites in the February 1997 issue of Museum News magazine.
"I think one of the bigger questions with multimedia technology is how to ensure that it is available prior to the visit and after the visit to a collection," says Anderson. "The Web site should work hand-in- glove with the kiosks."
As for the future of multimedia technology in art museums, Ned Rifkin, the Nancy and Holcombe J. Green Jr. director of the High Museum of Art, calls it "just another tool in the tool box for people involved with educating through visual culture.
"I think this is a critical moment for museums to understand and embrace this technology," he says. "It is, to many people, very intimidating. Many of us who are leaders in this field of art museums are not necessarily conversant or fluent in the technology that our own children are mastering. But most of us, I think, are getting with the program and really understanding the power of the mechanism and the technology to really advance our missions."
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Last updated: July 31, 1997