In The Moving Garden, Lee Mingwei asks visitors who take a flower to give it to a stranger.

One of the great things about working with living artists is the chance to work with them when they bring projects into the building. When I first heard about this piece, I was struck by what could happen between strangers in the exchange, so Eugenie and I asked the artist if he would let us create something that would allow visitors to document their gift giving.  He felt that the mystery of giving the gift was central to the piece, but he was also curious about exchanges and thought we could try it as long as we made it clear that the documentation was an optional step in the process, not a requirement to take part.

I gave my flower to a stranger at the corner of Washington Ave and Lincoln Place. It was an experience I'm not likely to forget.

With that, #mygardengift was born.  It’s a simple interactive that we hope extends the life of the project outside our walls.  Visitors are invited to document their exchanges by tagging on Flickr, Twitter and Instagr.am.  In addition, for the first time, we are using SMS text messaging in an interactive.  Visitors can text us about the exchange and we use the Twilio API to map their responses and bring them into the interactive. There’s a page on the website that shows all the responses and we also use an iPad to display the exchanges in the gallery.

This is really the kind of project that we want to be using social media for—working directly with an artist to show a community’s experience around a work. Given the four platforms that we are using, I’m curious to see which ones get used the most and how the information coming to us may differ on each.  Mostly, though, I’m excited to see our community participate and to watch the mystery unfold in some of the exchanges and I can’t wait to talk to the artist to see his own response to this part of the project as it grows.

If you come to Lee Mingwei: “The Moving Garden”, take a flower and then use #mygardengift to document your exchange.

We're going to utilize Instagr.am for photo sharing across social networks during live coverage of 35 animal mummies going to the Animal Medical Center for CT scanning.

As many blog readers and followers on our social networks know, we do a lot of live coverage when we’ve got something special going on.  From human mummies visiting the hospital for CT scanning to the re-wrapping of an anonymous man to the installation of a 26′ Blackfeet tipi in our Rotunda—the hope is we can take our visitors behind the scenes during complicated installations and highlight some of the interesting work that our staff do here on a daily basis.

What you may not know is how difficult it can be to cover these events.  During the last run to the hospital for mummy CT scanning we had three point and shoot cameras, a laptop, a video camera and several staffers and interns running back and forth capturing the spectacle.  Once materials were in hand, we were posting to several social networks at the same time, which proved to be a more difficult task than one would expect.

This time around, we are going to simplify a bit and concentrate on two platforms for most of the live coverage: Twitter and Instagr.am.  Luckily, Instagr.am can share images across networks easily, so you’ll see images popping up on Flickr, Facebook and Twitter utilizing our Instagr.am account and we’ll cover almost the entire trip using my iPhone.  Video and better photos will be posted after the fact, but for the live coverage we are going to keep it simple and streamlined.

Many of these field trips have yielded tons of surprises and you just never know where the journey will take us.  We hope you can join us online Friday—come with questions and we’ll work to get you answers!