When  portrait paintings collide with digital technology, the result is emotive, engaging and “a little bit freaky”. Southland artist Greg McDonald’s collaboration with tech company Vaka Interactiv will be a “world-first” when it is unveiled later this month. The subject of Mr McDonald’s painting Descendant X, his niece, Claudia Ramsay-Aupouri, […]

Despite our global love of smartphones, some museums, curators, and cranky culture types like to complain about people using their phones in museums instead of experiencing the art au natural, so to speak. But a new survey shows that smartphones and mobile technology can actually enhance the museum-going experience.

AKRON, Ohio – She’s smart, she’s sassy, and she uses artworks at the Akron Art Museum to get you talking with your friends about art and life and the connections between the two. Meet Dot, the museum’s new chatbot digital tour guide. She’s got dark-frame glasses and a pink pageboy hairdo and she’s […]

Smartify is one of a handful of apps that allow museum-goers to use computer vision to scan works of art, bringing up supporting media and information. The Google Arts & Culture app also purports to have a version of this technology (although Google couldn’t tell me which museums offer the functionality). Other […]

Think differently and “belong to the public” Instead, the museum staff had to think differently and “belong to the public”, Makariou says. “Our team had worked well doing research but not necessarily thinking how to make the museum as open as possible. It was stuck in the 20th century but […]

Museum and gallery bosses have held a crisis meeting to discuss declining visitor numbers amid fears that people in the south of Britain are losing their love of culture. Visitor numbers at many of the biggest government-sponsored museums are falling, according to figures for the first three months of the […]

Groucho Marx once said that he never wanted to belong to any club that would accept him as a member. I feel a similar skepticism about being part of a club I never asked to join. But my 1983 birth grants me membership in what demographers and marketers now call […]

Over the last 5 to 10 years the digital transformation in many museums has gathered pace. This has leant on business practice and has embraced digital technologies to optimise the operational value and efficiency of museums through a range of new systems, processes and models. It applies the principles and […]

Walking under the belly of the fiberglass model of a blue whale, or circling the fossilized remains of T. rex, a visitor to the American Museum of Natural History in New York City gets a glimpse at parts of the world—and moments in history—they might not otherwise experience.

The Changing Face of Museums When I was younger, a visit to a museum could be a dry and boring affair. Walking amongst glass cases of items you could look at but not touch, lots of text and no interaction. Today technology is changing the look and role of museums, […]