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!

According to Dennis:

My project will link tags from the museum collection to daily photographs I take for my personal blog. This will allow the museum collection to directly inform and inspire my personal photography.

Brooklyn Museum tagged “Red”

Starting with an item in the museum collection, I will review the tags, and the daily photo I take for my blog will match one of these tags. Next I search for other items in museum collection with this tag, from the search results I will pick a new piece and begin the cycle again. At the end of the project I will resend the images and tags in a chronological collection.

Dennis Bass, Red

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The 1stfans Twitter Art Feed is no longer a benefit of 1stfans membership, but the original feed in its entirety has been archived on the Brooklyn Museum website.

Her proposal for the Twitter Art Feed deviates from her current studies, however, and instead touches on her training and love of photography. In her own words:

In high school, I discovered a passion for photography. I continued this passion while working on my Masters in Arts and Humanities. This is when I realized my hobby and passion was more and meant more to me than something I just did for fun. I decided to take my art into a new direction. As a photographer and artist I’m always looking for new ways to take a photo of something. I want to spark conservations with my images, and I want to explore and share the things that I love. I love food, so why not combine the two. My feed will include discussions of food for 1stfans. Since food is a very broad topic, I will have weekly themes: week one will be about calories, week two about sharing and discovering recipes, week three  will include photos while dining out, and our final week will be random food topics inspired by 1stfans. This can include anything from photos of food to Halloween candy, the topics are up to you.

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The 1stfans Twitter Art Feed is no longer a benefit of 1stfans membership, but the original feed in its entirety has been archived on the Brooklyn Museum website.

Whether it’s through tweets, photographs, or ruminations that sometime exceed 140 characters, this character is intriguing not only because of the seemingly omnipresent reports on art and museum happenings around the world (though primarily focused on New York), but also because it reflects a highly personal, and unadulterated, take on everyday experiences with works of art. For the Twitter Art Feed this month, Museum Nerd launched a community project that is an ode to-what else?-museums that will unfold throughout the month for our followers. I’ll let Museum Nerd explain further:

“This month, I’m extremely excited to be Brooklyn Museum’s 1stfans digital artist in residence. Initially I conceived of this project as a collective “love letter” to “museums.” I posted a message on twitter asking if anyone who “loved museums and could lick a stamp” wanted to be involved in an art project and used the hashtag #MuseumArt. Since the 1stfans artists are kept under wraps until their project launches, I wasn’t able to explain exactly what #MuseumArt involved, but people were excited nonetheless. I asked them to send me postcards showing museums and to write what they loved about the museum on the back.

Since @MuseumNerd is a secret identity, I enlisted the help of museum world friends who tweet for their museums. They received the postcards on my behalf and I went on several #SecretMission operations to meet them and attain the postcards. On one #SecretMission I visited four museums in four NYC boroughs to pick up postcards. In part I wanted to give recognition to the real people behind museum twitter feeds and remind folks that museums are not monolithic unapproachable institutions.

This project falls into critic Ben Davis’s “Greimasian Semiotic Square” as a “social art collaboration,” and was partly inspired by artist An Xiao’s explorations of the relationship between digital and analogue communication, especially in her 1stfans twitter art feed. What started as a brief digital message evoked dozens of analogue communications (postcards) which will now be posted again as digital scans, but with my own creative intervention. These will be in the form of simple word bubbles which reflect my obsession with words and words in art (e.g. Ed Ruscha). This is part of a body of work that celebrates “museums” themselves as the wonderful inspiring places they’ve been for all the participants in #MuseumArt and millions of others.”

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The 1stfans Twitter Art Feed is no longer a benefit of 1stfans membership, but the original feed in its entirety has been archived on the Brooklyn Museum website.

Despite popular belief, museums are not proverbial ivory towers situated high upon hills, filled with curators and staff meticulously tending to their objects in sterile offices worthy of forensic crime television. In fact the truth is quite the contrary: the offices of a museum are crowded, cluttered and storied places often as interesting and convoluted in appearance as objects in the collection.  Throughout August I will conduct an exposé, wherein “portraits” of various museum offices will be posted to twitter.

Danny’s “self-portrait”

This idea came about through a conversation with a friend about the Brooklyn Museum.  Without a museum background, this friend assumed, as I think many people do, that museums exist in a bubble.  It was clear that people’s perception of museums as clean whitewashed spaces full of beautiful, pristine objects protected by high security extended to the perception that curators and staff work in similarly pristine conditions. This project is an opportunity to show that the reality is quite different and that often the work spaces of the collectors can be as interesting as the objects they collect.”

Please feel free to tweet your own desk to compare.

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The 1stfans Twitter Art Feed is no longer a benefit of 1stfans membership, but the original feed in its entirety has been archived on the Brooklyn Museum website.

July’s Twitter Art Feed artist is Brian Piana, who, in his own words, creates works “from the Internet, for the Internet,” several of which used Twitter as their base. While Brian often uses Twitter as a source for his works, one project called Tweeting Colors is particularly unique in that it puts control of the work into the hands of the public rather than his own. To elaborate, Tweeting Colors is a web page that displays vertical bars of varying color and width, but each of these bars is determined by the tweets of various unknown Twitter users.  In order to add a bar, one’s tweet has to include a few specific elements that designate the bar’s size and color. The Web page itself auto-refreshes a few times per minute, so that new bars are added from the left to create an ever-changing online visual.

If some of this is sounding familiar to 1stfans, you may be aware that Tweeting Colors is not only part of the Rhizome ArtBase, but it also played a part in ArtDialogue: conversations in images, January’s Twitter Art Feed project by Nina Meledandri. Nina’s work encouraged online conversations through the use of images, in response to various themes. When Nina introduced the theme of “Home,” some 1stfans deviated from using a straight image, and instead, employed Tweeting Colors to create a group portrait of the colors found in their homes.

Because Tweeting Colors is determined by people’s individual tweets, it wholly relies on the personal involvement and collaboration of a variety of people to maintain and manipulate the work. Much like Nina’s project, it is this collaborative nature that made Brian’s project so appealing to Shelley and me for the Twitter Art Feed. For the first time, Brian is going to customize Tweeting Colors and create a separate Web page for our followers. The private link to 1stfans Tweeting Colors will be announced within the Feed tomorrow, where you can then follow the simple instructions and add color bars of your liking. In the beginning, 1stfans are encouraged to play freely with the work, and as the month goes on, Brian will announce different themes and introduce new color palettes to the mix to encourage your participation. One thing 1stfans may notice when they first access 1stfans Tweeting Colors, is that it includes the Brooklyn Museum’s eight signature colors, all of which happen to be used in our multi-colored 1stfans logo (as vertical color bars, no less!).

See why this is a perfect match?

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The 1stfans Twitter Art Feed is no longer a benefit of 1stfans membership, but the original feed in its entirety has been archived on the Brooklyn Museum website.

ConnectTweet acts as a relay and allows allows us to connect staff twitter accounts directly to the main Brooklyn Museum account.  Basically, approved accounts can tweet with a hashtag and then that tweet will relay to @brooklynmuseum and show up via @BK_staffer.  There are several reasons why I think these changes are significant:

Keep it personal.  Given our community-minded mission, I’ve long been an advocate of figuring out how to get individual voices online, especially in social media settings.  ConnectTweet goes many steps beyond simple bio identification and background images (things people don’t see often enough) or initials after tweets (which can be hard to decipher).  In this case, followers can click on the byline and learn more about each person.

Foster internal advocates.  By far, the best advocates for our programs are the people actually working behind the scenes to make them happen.  ConnectTweet allows us to put those voices out there.  Now, followers can hear from a variety of voices about the programs they are working on.  To start, we’ve got folks in tech, digital imaging, exhibitions and membership with more on the way.

Sustainability.   I can’t tell you how many vacations I’ve tweeted through.  It got to the point on a recent trip to New Zealand, where the time zone changes alone were difficult, but timing announcements between plane changes bordered on ridiculous.  I’ve been thinking a lot about sustainability and ConnectTweet allows us to share the load without it being disingenuous to our followers.  For me, this is a bit of a happy relief.

To get started, we’ve got some familiar faces starting to relay on the account:  @shell7, @dwythe, @nkawatra, @jennybantz.   As we continue to test, we’ll introduce more voices as we go.

The upfront nature of this work, however, provides an interesting contrast to the fact that Mike also likes to tells stories. When we approached him about participating in the Twitter Art Feed, Mike explained that he’s always been amused by how much credibility Twitter has a source of information and being the satirist that he is, he wanted to play on that idea. I don’t want to reveal too much about what Mike is going to do—Shelley and I think it will be a lot more fun to let 1stfans figure out his project through the progression of his tweets—but I can say that it’s going to be focused on Museum and it will definitely keep you guessing. I’ve been amazed by the variety of ways in which Twitter has been used as a medium so far, and it will be interesting to see how Mike experiments with this medium while giving 1stfans a completely new way to engage with his work.

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The 1stfans Twitter Art Feed is no longer a benefit of 1stfans membership, but the original feed in its entirety has been archived on the Brooklyn Museum website.