Deborah Raven Fuller <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

>To add, a local columnist in the Washington Post wrote a
>commentary agaist the Newseum's (the new interactive museum of
>the news media) new ad campaign.  It shows a picture of the
>famous portrait of Whistler's Mother with the caption of
>"Snoozeum" next to a picture of one of their high tech
>exhibits.

There is a similar commercial here in New York for the PBS station where a
mean-looking docent (in black and white) walking and pointing at a row of
paintings is juxtaposed with the "fun" of shopping (in color) at the PBS
store.

I had Ralph Appelbaum, whose company designed the Newseum, for exhibition
design and when I asked him if he was interested in art museums his reply
was something like: "what, you hang some paintings on the wall and that's
it, what's to design?". He subsequently designed a particularly irritating
exhibit for the Whitney about Edward Hopper and the movies.

Appelbaum and Associates is one of the most aggresive firms working in that
space between the museum and Disney (The Holocaust Museum in Washington,
D.C., the Museum of New Zealand, The Motown Museum, etc). I believe he has
good intentions but, frankly, he frightens me because of that.



Stephen Nowlin wrote:

>My own experience comes from offline demos by software companies developing
>VRML and designers at my institution who create digital environments.  I've
>been around this stuff for awhile and am not so easily impressed any more,
>but a recent VRML demo left my jaw hanging.  The possibilities are
>staggering.


What's most exciting about VRML is that it is a language for spatial
articulation and world building and so the possibilities go far beyond what
many of the software companies have come up with -- for example, Black Sun,
which is now Blaxxun. After a false start that relied too heavily on models
drawn from authors such as William Gibson and Neal Stephenson (not to
mention Disney and the local shopping mall) there is now a great deal of
R&D going on to explore other possibilities. Rather than recreating the
traditional museum space online it is possible to create a museum metaworld
that reflects the concept of VR as "a network of possibilities" and can
redefine those traditional physical boundaries in terms of a global network.

 A good place to start is with the writings of Mark Pesce, co-creator of
VRML, to understand the spirital basis of his work:
http://www.hyperreal.org/~mpesce/









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ROBBIN MURPHY
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