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June 1, 2009

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Museums, Music, and Meara O'Reilly



CC-licensed Flickr photo from snoshuu

Cross-reference these two cool museum-related posts, both with generalizable implications.

First, Nina Simon posts the presentation she gave to the Smithsonian staff. This is her three-bullet distillation, and I promise you, it’s relevant to far more than just museums:

In condensed text version, here are my three steps to being a great multi-platform organization:
  1. Listen to and understand what your visitors/users need.
  2. Confidently and clearly state your institutional mission, values, and capabilities.
  3. Develop relationships via any and all useful platforms that allow you to connect 1 to 2.

I think step two is the most difficult, the most overlooked, and the most important. Confidently and clearly state your mission, values, and capabilities. Forget institutions… people should do this.

Second, the SFMOMA blog has a great guest post by Meara O’Reilly. The assignment: Connect items from the museum’s collection to interesting artifacts from your domain of expertise. In O’Reilly’s case, that domain is sound, music, and sonic illusions. (Sonic illusions!) The pairings are fun — like a weird super-hero team-up series. Except it’s art.

I really like the mash-up of image and sound here, and the length. This is no mere blog post; more like a mini-multimedia-essay. Don’t miss “Rumba” by Mildred Couper near the bottom.

Also worth seeing: O’Reilly sings with (across? into?) a Chladni plate, which you might have seen at a science museum, but never like this:

To me, that seems almost like magic. And, okay, a little creepy. Wait, you’re telling me those shapes are lurking in every human voice?

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Posted June 1, 2009 at 9:02 | Comments (0) | Permasnark
File under: Media Galaxy, Society/Culture
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