Week 7 Post

Week 7 blog post (was sick with bronchitis)

For this week’s reading I chose to read Timothy Berg’s (et al) “The Infinite Museum: An innovative Digital Platform to Transform the Museum Visit”. The Infinite Museum is a web application that prompts users with unusual questions in an attempt to push viewers to rethink their museum experience. On the site there are about 1,500 short prompts that are used to help engage viewers in new and innovative ways for their usual museum visit. The prompts range in mood from reflective to silly and to strange — each asking the user to try and reimagine and rethink the normal way they would interact with an art piece. To encourage a social effect, users are encouraged to respond to prompts that have already been posted, by allowing a stream of posts to follow the art piece shown above – this part kind of reminded me of reddit.

I thought this website and platform was really interesting because it touches on what we have discussed a lot in class which is how viewer’s interact with art pieces. However I do not know how effective or useful it is in creating a dialogue for museums and artwork. I only say this because I think that the prompts are somewhat distracting and too random at times, and I feel that this almost detracts from the goal of creating a conversation about the piece and more so attracts attention to the question alone by itself.

However, I thought the concept was really great and that this platform could be effective if some of the prompts and questions were dulled down a bit – I am not sure if having so many prompts and a catalogue of items would be overwhelming for the user.