10 Arts and Culture Mobile Apps from 2010

Merely half a day away from the end of the year, today is a great day to reflect on all the different happenings in 2010. One of the big things I have been looking back on is the growth of useful mobile apps for arts and culture audiences and managers. Here is a look at ten of these apps from the past year selected by the Technology in the Arts team and you, our lovely readers:

The Florida Grand Opera | FREE

Available for: iPhone, AndroidThe Breakdown: A great app for the Opera lover in us all, the Florida Grand Opera app offers news about the company, events updates, listings of upcoming performances, and streaming audio of the 2010-2011 season. One aspect of the app I really enjoyed was the videos section, containing a multitude of interviews and performances from the FGO. The only real complaint I have about the app is the necessity to sign up for updates from FGO before being allowed access into the app.

Google Goggles | FREE

Available for: iPhone, Android

The Breakdown: Google Goggles is a visual search engine built into a mobile app. It utilizes your smartphone's camera to capture and scan an image, object, or landmark and perform a search online to provide information on it. This is a very fun app to play around with and can be very helpful when trying to identify an artwork without a clear label or an unknown landmark. The app is still in beta though and cannot identify anything that is not already currently online in some form.

The L.A. Phil | FREE

Available for: iPhone, Android, & Blackberry

The Breakdown: The LA Philharmonic app has a lot of same offerings as the Florida Grand Opera app in terms of news, media, and listings of events. What sets this app apart is the interactive Orchestra map, laying out the different groups of muscians in the LA Phil. When a user taps on a section of the orchestra, such as First Violins, they are directed to profiles of each musician with in-depth biographies. This app is packed full of great content and an excellent way to learn more about classical music and the people that perform it.

AMNH Explorer | FREE

Available for: iPhone

The Breakdown: The Explorer app from the American Museum of Natural History is a great guide for navigating a very large museum. The app acts as a personal in-museum GPS, finding your location and providing information on the exhibits within that area. The app can not only find your location, but provide turn-by-turn directions from one exhibit to the next. This may go against some museum purists love of getting lost within a museum, but on a busy day in a museum packed with visitors this app could be an incredible advantage.

Is This Art? | FREE

Available for: iPhone

The Breakdown: A fun app from the folks at Deeplocal and the Mattress Factory, Is This Art? is one way to win those age old arguments about what is and isn’t art. Users snap a picture of the art in question and open it within the app to test its validity in the art world. The explanations the app gives are often hilarious such as, "This makes me feel intellectually inferior, therefore THIS IS ART" and, "This piece is not accompanied by enough obtuse wall text, therefore THIS IS NOT ART". All of the images users put to the test can be uploaded to the project's ongoing blog.

Brooklyn Museum Mobile | FREE Available for: iPhone, Android, & Blackberry

The Breakdown: Another great app for a large museum, Brooklyn Museum Mobile has less of a focus on navigation and more on community and interaction. The app brings in aspects from social media by inviting users to add descriptive tags and/or "like" artworks from the collection. This acts as a recommendation system for other visitors and encourages a more participatory experience. The aspect I like about Brooklyn Museum's offering is that the app runs off of a mobile website, meaning that it is not device exclusive and anyone with a web-enabled device can join in the fun.

The Lighting Handbook | $4.99

Available for: iPhone

The Breakdown: This is a great app for all of you theater techies. The Lighting Handbook is exactly what it sounds like, an in-depth guide to all things lighting, conveniently in your pocket.

Chicago Gangland Tour | $2.99

Available for: iPhone

The Breakdown: Ever wanted to walk in the footsteps of famous gangster Al Capone? That's exactly what the Chicago Gangland Tour app helps you do, integrated with google maps to give users a handheld guide for a historical walkthrough of Chicago's mafia history. This app provides info on all the different sites historical relevance and invites users to add their own comments. My favorite aspect of the app is the drop-down menu where results can be sorted by subjects like murders, shootouts, and gangster hideouts.

At The Booth | $0.99

Available for: iPhone, Android

The Breakdown: At The Booth is a full-service app for attendees of Broadway and Off-Broadway shows in New York City. The main page updates with every launch of the app and includes the latest shows and theater locations. For each show the app provides info on the showtimes, ticket prices, discounts, synopses, links to reviews and videos, and nearby restaurants. Listings will appear with a pink undertone to let users know if there are long lines at the theater. The only real complaint I have about the app is that the listings are only viewable in list form, whereas a map option would really assist in seeing all that is available in the immediate area.

The Sundance Festival 2010 | $4.99

Available for: iPhone

The Breakdown: The Sundance Festival app acts as an online brochure for the annual film festival. In addition to offering videos and reviews on films being shown, the app gives festival attendees real-time updates as to what is happening with the film fest's various events and screenings. The one feature that this app lacks is a way to create custom schedules of screening times and events. This would be invaluable at a festival where multiple things are being offered at once and making the most of the your time requires a lot of planning.

Why Flickr? Using photos to tell your story

"Wire + Minipegs = Polaroid Wall" by FionaMclaren

While discussing various uses of social media by arts organizations, a coworker mused, "But why Flickr?"

"Why Flickr?" indeed.  Or perhaps, more accurately, HOW Flickr?  After prowling around in search of arts organizations that are using Flickr in interesting and relevant ways, it seems pretty clear that the question should be addressed.

Since the internet can transmit exciting, attractive, visual media, rather tell you about what you can do with Flickr, I will let the photos save me a thousand words.

The Mattress Factory's photostream -Inviting front page -Colorful photos with good composition and interesting content -Current (there's this week's snowstorm!) -Clearly organized into sets [e.g. "Behind the Scenes" (something that I strongly believe in--because, as we know, "Everyone wants to feel like an insider."), "Exhibitions" or "Events"] -Flickr page is linked from the social media ("Friendship 2.0") page on the Mattress Factory's website.

Misnomer Dance Theatre's photostream -Inviting front page -Colorful, bright, energetic photos -Clearly labeled sets -Misnomer home page has a Flickr widget at the bottom

Steppenwolf Theatre Company's photostream -Clear differentiation among sets (e.g. rehearsal pics in black and white) -Behind-the-scenes and production shots -Some albums show interaction with audience -Linked from SteppenwolfTheatre.org

The American Conservatory Theater's photostream -Don't all look professionally-shot, but convey a spirit and energy -Show many aspects of the production -Show interaction with patrons -Linked from ACT homepage

The Whitney Museum's photostream -User-generated photos -Linked from "Get Involved" page on Whitney's website -Discussion forum (with some involvement)

I do want to say what I have seen that I haven't found effective. Too often organizations do a couple of things: they have an intern, or a staff member, who manages their photostream (that's their page on Flickr) from a personal profile. That doesn't make me want to engage. Instead, it makes me feel like I'm encroaching on a space to which I am not convinced I'm invited. Organizations that DO use Flickr, and have someone taking photos to PUT on Flickr, should have an organizational profile and should have a Flickr widget or link prominently placed on the homepage. (And, pet peeve, I think the best widget is one that actually SAYS "flickr" and doesn't just have the dot-logo).

Other huge turn-offs? (Apologies for immenent snarkiness.) I don't want to name names here, but organizations that essentially just do a mass-upload from their camera after an event: shudder.  Do your audience a favor and sift through them to find the ones that actually look interesting and lively.  I don't particularly care to see an entire album of a group of students all with their backs to the camera.  Having endless posed pictures of people standing and smiling together like the social pages looks like bragging, and not a lot like fun.  It's fine to include a few, but thirty?

Yet another reason to own an iPhone

If you have been to the Mattress Factory recently to see the new Thaddeus Mosley exhibition, you may have noticed that the title cards and some of the minimal signage have these intricate symbols on them. What you're seeing is a two dimensional bar code called a QR code that can be used to access information via your mobile internet enabled devices such as an iPhone or Blackberry.

The code on the image above for instance, contains a link to a Youtube video of Thaddeus Mosley discussing the placement of large scale works within the gallery space.

Once you are in the gallery you can text QRCODE to 41411 to receive a simple walk through that tests to see if your phone is compatible with the suggested reader. The BeeTagg reader supports over 50 types of mobile devices and is available as an iPhone application as well.

After you have the reader installed you can access information from signage posted throughout the gallery space. Much like the guide by cell program, there is no proprietary equipment for the museum to pay for beyond the fabrication of the signage and developing the web content. However unlike a guided tour, this allows visitors to explore the space and access information that they are interested in when they want to.

Director of PR + Social Media, Jeffrey Inscho was kind enough to give me a guided tour on Thursday and pointed out some of the kinks that he is still working out. While most of the QR codes bring up URLs on your mobile device, some of them are text only which makes the codes much more dense. This can make it more difficult to take an accurate enough picture for your phone to recognize and decode the data. The smallest that the QR codes can be printed and still be read by most of the camera-phones on the market is about 1.5" square. So the text only cards may end up being replaced with a URL of the text to help ensure that they can be read. Shadows also tend to cause some issues while taking pictures, so you have to watch where you stand.

For the recent Predrive event, before they had installed the signage in the gallery, the Mattress Factory included a QR tag on their advertisement in the City Paper and received around 72 hits, which was more than Jeffrey had expected. Over the course of the exhibition the Mattress Factory will be able to monitor which tags receive the most hits, and get a feel as to how people are using the signage when visiting the museum.

As of right now, the Mattress Factory is the only museum in the United States that is currently using QR tags within the exhibition space, but the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney Australia has been using them for a a while and have outlined many of the issues that have cropped up in an amazingly detailed step by step guide.

Jeffery stressed that this was an experiment and an effort to help reduce the amount of printed gallery guides they use. It is not a permanent replacement for the printed material, but as the technology becomes more prevalent the QR codes will provide more in depth interaction and information to the visitors.

As of right now the Mattress Factory plans on continuing to use this new technology for future exhibitions and already has some just flat out amazing ideas on how to incorporate it into their Annual Garden Party but I don't want to spoil the surprise.

Best arguement thus far as to why I should update my phone from the bottom of the line Nokia I'm using.