Entries include projects created by students that meet the criteria for any of the listed categories (Audio and Visual Tours, Interactive Kiosks, Interpretive Interactive Installations, Multimedia Installations, Online Presence, Podcasts, Video, Community, Games, PR and Development, and Teaching and Outreach) Student entries can include finished projects created for museums, heritage sites, etc., as well as class projects, prototypes, or concepts.
Jury Chairs:
Herminia Wei-Hsin Din PhD, Univeristy of Alaska, United States
William B. Crow, Head of School and Teacher Programs, Associate Museum Educator, The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Charles Chen, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution
GOLD: Concept Design: Touch the Unreachable—Looking for Finnish Identity, Virva Emilia Auvinen
Aalto University School of Art & Design-MediaLab Helsinki, Finland
Judges said: It is a very attractive project that contains a wonderland-like environment and an interesting story that allows users to make their own decisions. With devices like this, museums would have no problem bringing their visitors a remarkable experience, and leaving a long term influence in their minds. A true inspiration.
Producers said: “Touch the Unreachable” is a concept design on how to use interactive storytelling techniques, video, 3D animation and graphic visualization for art education purposes. The “Touch the Unreachable” concept is an application designed for a museum environment and aims to promote knowledge of Finnish cultural heritage. Through 14 panels painted within the pavilion, the experience helps the visitor understand how Finnish figurative communication identity was build at the end of the 19th century and how the same illustration traditions are still in use during our time. Step by step the visitor follows Finnish artists through history and comes face to face with the same problematic situations as experienced by the artists. The main task of the visitor is to establish a theme and create four example prints that reflect Finnish culture and identity for the Finnish Pavilion in the Paris World Exhibition of 1900. Through doing and experimenting, the visitor builds up his or her own understanding of how the Finnish image identity was built at the end of the 19th century. The journey follows historical facts and chronology during 1899-1900 in Finland and Paris. Wemmeri and Ludzia (the tutor and antagonist characters) follow the visitor’s movements throughout the journey and actively participate in his or her actions. The journey is based on the narrative structure of Peter Howitt’s 1998 film “Sliding Doors”. The application is designed as a touch wall using Flash technology, video, and animation. The thesis work relates to the project of the 3D reconstruction of the Finnish Pavilion in Paris built in the year 1900, produced by the Media Lab’s Systems of Representation research group, led by professor Lily Diaz. The concept design consists of both a design & content document, and various artworks, including the visual study for the interface and the 3D characters of Wemmeri and Ludzia.
SILVER: Podcast Series: Johns Hopkins University Museum Studies and Hillwood Estate, Museum & Gardens
Museum Studies Onsite Seminar Class of 2009
Cristie Barry, Frances Boffa, Charles Chen, Ruth Cuadra, Melissa Diaz, Resa Erickson, Michelle Hammer, Meghan Kerr, Melissa Kipp, Michelle Landry, Valana McMickens, Samantha Merz, Karol Pesar, Eric Schwass, Anjuli Singh, Amy Fraser Sowinski
Johns Hopkins University
Judges said: The podcasts are a wonderful tool to enhance anyone’s visit to Hillwood. The combination of the curatorial voice with the student’s research and observations has created a project that is entertaining, and still maintains its academic integrity. Questions to stimulate thought help make sure that the listener is actively involved.
Producers said: Last summer, Johns Hopkins Museum Studies graduate students created a podcast series for Hillwood Estate, Museum & Gardens, as part of a two-week intensive seminar in Washington, DC. Students in the JHU Museum Studies program take 9 courses online and one 2-week session onsite, where they visit museums, meet high-level museum professionals, explore the latest issues in museum practice, and work in teams on a directed activity with a local museum. During last summer’s two-week session, the directed activity involved a close collaboration between 16 students and Hillwood museum’s curators, educators, gardeners, and other staff. The students explored, researched, and discovered Hillwood estate and gardens in order to understand its audiences, collections, and the history of its founder, Marjorie Merriweather Post. The project allowed the students to build on what they had learned in their previous courses, work in collaborative teams, and apply theory and practice to a real-life scenario of creating, planning, and producing a program with a museum and its staff. It also introduces students to the educational and technical aspects of podcasting. Each team was invited to choose an object or area of the estate to examine in-depth. Two teams were assigned to choose from the museum, two the garden, and two the life of Mrs. Post. Interwoven with the many other activities undertaken during the 2-weeks of the seminar, students wrote scripts, learned audio software, recorded and edited audio files, and presented their final projects to others in the seminar and to Hillwood staff. The results of their work are the six audio files presented here as a podcast series, which can be used as an extension of a visit to Hillwood Estate, Museum & Garden.
BRONZE: Video: Emerald Cities: Arts of Siam & Burma: Conserving the Collection
Letitia Carper Long, John F. Kennedy University
Judges said: Overall, I believe this video to have greatly enhanced the corresponding exhibit. So many times, you visit a gallery and see the objects and read the labels, but with this video, you get to look behind the scenes. The quality of the video is outstanding– both in content and appearance.
Producers said: The “Emerald Cities” exhibition, held from October 2009 to January 2010 at the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, is composed entirely of objects from the museum’s permanent collection. Most objects date from the 19th century, and quite a few had been damaged or deteriorated over time. Art conservators worked some 7,500 hours to prepare the objects for the exhibition. The video, which was shown on a loop in one of the galleries throughout the exhibition’s duration, needed to tell three stories. The principal story is a “behind-the-scenes” view of the process, procedures, and methodology of art conservation. It shows conservators working with many mediums, including paint, textiles, wood, and brass. The video also provides a brief introduction to the art and culture of 19th-century Siam and Burma, and tells a key story of Buddhism, which is the theme of the artwork presented. Finally, because some 70 percent of the objects came from the collection of the late Doris Duke, the video also delves briefly into her story as a collector of Southeast Asian artwork.
Jurors:
Jewel Lin, Co-Chair of Media and Technology SIG, MCN Taiwan Chapter, National Palace Museum
Meg Chen, Graduate Student, Fu Jen University
Bridget Callahan, Luce Foundation Center for American Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum
Richard Urban, doctoral student, Graduate School of Library and Information Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
