Week 7: The Infinite Museum

The Infinite Museum is a responsive website that was designed and written for the David Owsley Museum of Art at Ball State University in Indiana. The “responsive website” acts like a native application on a smart phone. Within the application/website is a collection of 1,500 short prompts that will help direct museum guests to a gallery or work of art that would interest them. Once they are paired with a piece, the prompt suggests a specific experience for the guest to have. They are then able to share the experience with others via social media, or they can save the prompt to revisit at another time. In addition, they can also share some ideas for new prompts for the application designers to add into the website.

I had an idea to produce a Web application that would help visitors to art museums experience the art in new and unusual ways: to treat the museum experience as a kind of performance art.

This was an extremely interesting piece of technology that I thought would be very helpful in the museum context. I also really enjoyed the amount of creativity that went into creating and executing the prompts—being able to think of personal and engaging ways to capture the museum audience is a difficult task in itself.

This actually reminded me of the Tate Ball that we had learned about earlier in the quarter. The way that the Tate Ball took different factors into play when generating a piece of art for the user is very similar to the way that this Infinite Museum works. The only difference is that the Infinite Museum has a much more thought-provoking aspect to it. The prompts range from silly and funny to a much more personal context, which is beneficial since it will appeal to users who are each looking for something different in a piece of art.

Check out the Tate Ball here!

Overall, this is definitely something that I’d love to try if I were ever given the opportunity to—the use of technology is innovative, creative and personal. It is so much more than an audio tour and that makes it really engaging to an audience that knows little.