I’m happy to mention that Brooklyn-based artist Paul Notzold will be bringing TXTual Healing to our upcoming Target First Saturday on May 3rd. I’ve long been an admirer of this project and am thrilled to be able to see it live and in-person in our lobby.

TXTual Healing is an ongoing series of interactive performances that encourage the creation of dialog through text messaging from mobile phones. The project harnesses the SMS capabilities of the cell phone as a medium to interact with and explore our shared public and physical space, not as a means to escape it. TXTual Healing builds community through public story telling.

Using the speech bubble as a symbol for communication, participants send text messages to a provided phone number that automatically, anonymously, and in real time, displays these messages inside the bubbles projected onto the facade of a building. The result of projecting in shared public space give participants in the street a voice as loud as the corporate and government entities who financially predetermine the information in these spaces.

TXTual Healing encourages the public sharing of thoughts, experiences and ideas using networked mobile devices that typically support more private communications. Positioning the projections next to windows, or integrating the SMS interactivity with religious, political and socially charged graphics, invites people to share their own uncensored views of the information around them in the form of interactive theater.

For our installation, Paul has adapted the system to display images from our Utagawa exhibition and worked with our Education and Curatorial staff to give txters questions to ponder. If you are coming this Saturday, be sure to bring your cell phone and if not we will be posting photos to Flickr and hopefully a really awesome video soon after the event.

Pics in this post are from the dry run last Tuesday. While I was in Denver for AAM, Bob was having fun testing and sending me pics (see below – very funny Bob).

Linda Nochlin and Maura Reilly, co-curators of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art’s inaugural exhibition, recorded the introduction to the Global Feminisms audio tour today. This tour, free to our visitors and delivered via cell phone, will feature many of the artists in the exhibition responding to their relationship to feminism.

Cell phone audio has helped us in many ways. One of the nice things about the new production method is that tour stops can be recorded via phone, similar to leaving a standard voice mail message. Since the show consists of work by approximately eighty women artists from around the world, we found this aspect incredibly helpful in producing our tour. We could send questions to many of the artists and ask them to record their answers via phone. We didn’t have to worry about arranging for a studio offsite or asking them to make a special trip to do a recording.

If we can arrange to do the recording onsite, the quality is often more predictable, so we try and take advantage of this when we can. For this session, Maura and Linda also took the opportunity to try out a new shade of MAC Cosmetics lipstick, Plumful.

Judy Chicago dropped by to record the introduction.

Susan Zeller, the Brooklyn Museum’s Assistant Curator for the Arts of the Americas, recorded the piece for the Sacajawea place setting.

Radiah Harper, Vice Director for Education, recorded one of Sojourner Truth’s most famous speeches “Ain’t I a Woman.”

Bob Nardi, our resident sound wizard, set us up and watched over the recordings in progress. Thanks, Bob!

Joelle, the Museum’s Network Administrator, tests cellular signal from our rooftop.

When the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art opens in March 2007, we will be delivering the Center’s audio guide content via cell phone. Problem is, we don’t get cell service within our building’s very thick walls. By installing several antennas on the roof, we can grab existing outdoor cellular signal and bring it directly into the galleries.

Luckily we get a strong enough signal up here to funnel it inside, so there will be no dropped calls as our visitors listen to The Dinner Party audio tour.