Attention cultural historians, museum curators, and robot enthusiasts. On Saturday, the San Jose Museum of Art opened an incredible exhibition on robots that continues through October 19th. This compliments some previous observations I’ve expressed about the robot icon in American culture. Here’s the blurb from their website:
Robots: Evolution of a Cultural Icon examines the development of robot iconography in fine art over the past 50 years. In 1920, the term robot was coined from a Czech word robota, which means tedious labor. Since then, the image and the idea of a robot have evolved remarkably from an awkward, mechanical creature to a sophisticated android with artificial intelligence and the potential for human-like consciousness. As robotic technology catches up with the wild imagination of science fiction novels, movies, and animation, dreams and fears anticipated in these stories may also become reality. Artists included in the exhibition have responded to the technological innovation with optimism, pessimism, and humor, presenting work that ultimately explores our ambivalent attitudes towards robots.
And an introduction from JoAnne Northrup, Senior Curator:
As pointed out by Sheila Brennan, the Brooklyn Museum has released a Facebook application called ArtShare to display their art collection using the Developer Platform. You can add pieces of their collection that rotate on your Facebook profile page, and share them with your friends.
The WPBook plugin I wrote for WordPress that embeds your blog into the Facebook canvas could be adapted for an Omeka plugin to display a collection in a similar fashion. In addition to retemplating the content of the site, the plugin would push FBML to a user’s profile to customize the way item appears. I don’t have immediate plans to build this – it remains on a rainy day to-do list, but if there’s interest then I could be persuaded to create this sooner than later.
If a Facebook Application seems too large of a task, Facebook recently unveiled Pages, which allow institutions, companies, and products to essentially have their own profiles. Prior to this, Facebook had banned profiles for non-individuals. For an example of a page, I set one for CHNM that you can be a “fan” of. Similar to user profiles, pages can add applications designed for them, including have a wall where visitors can leave comments. CHNM will start pulling in future blog posts using a feed application added to our profile, and maybe we’ll toss in some other apps for good measure. Maybe superpoke? Well, maybe the virtual bookshelf is more useful.
At the time of writing this, 19 museums around the world and 145 libraries have already created their own Facebook pages. It will be interesting to see if these pages replace similar groups, which I previously suggested for libraries and museums that were looking for an easy Facebook presence.
