 Kia ora, NDF. My river and mountain is the Kola River that I got up swimming in. My people are from Sydney, which is the Gadigal Nation, and my parents are Terry and Tina Smith, and my name is Kieran. Thank you for welcoming me. I'm going to talk on museums and on digital and on time. And in many ways, there's the many ways and the many temporalities that we think about. And it's going to be kind of fast at the beginning, and it's going to slow down. It's going to sort of meander a little bit at the moment. And this is the first time I've given this talk. And it's something I've been thinking about a lot, but not something that I've ever presented in public. So bear with me while I explore this with you, and please feel open to internalize your questions and explore and let them explode at the end as I go. So first of all, some table stakes. What do I mean by, you know, museums? I mean, all sorts of museums. And by museums, I'm using a stand in for galleries, libraries, archives, museums, parks, glam, all of that. And I mean, the sexy things on the outside and the ugly boring things on the inside, it turns out even in San Francisco, we also work in a lightless office. This is the light filled one. Mine is not. And the sexy behind the scenes stuff like the artist pigments that we've got in our conservation studio. And when thinking about digital, I'm kind of thinking about all the types of digital. So there's the digital where you don't have any control over it. So this is the map that comes up on Apple Maps for SF MoMA. For a long time, we were just listed as permanently closed because we were undergoing a refurbishment and they had two options. You could be open and permanently closed. And there's an excellent screenshot of a chat log that my colleague had with them. We're like, seriously, you're Google, you have two options. Is that, is that, are you sure? So some of the, some of the digital footprints our institutions have, we have no management of. Then I'm thinking about digital as a mobile. So this is us testing SF MoMA's now famous app. And this is before it worked. So these are five phones in the same room. Some of them saying there's no content. Some of them saying there's content in a different room. And some of them saying there's a content from the room you're in. And then I'm thinking about digital in terms of the things we touch and the things we do. So this is a group of, so I'll go back. This is a group of people from the White House of the Blind helping us debug the audio descriptions, the eyes free mode for our interactive spaces. Then I'm also thinking about like digital as social. I'm thinking about digital as behind the scenes. So this is us shooting a 360 video. There's, which is a great moment. There's a guy from Adobe taking a cell phone photo of 16 GoPro's that create this product called the Odyssey that shoots 360 video. And we're documenting in 360 audio and video like an ephemeral sound piece that you can't actually see. Which is kind of fun. Or it's, or we're thinking about technology as VR and all of the mess that you need to have an immersive experience. And also the unglamorous technology. In this case it's a printer you wear on your belt so that you can sell tickets around the galleries and print out a receipt for people. So all sorts of glamorous. And then we're thinking about time. And when I think about time, you know, I think about museum time, which is a kind of euphemism. In this case, I'm, this person's doing museum work, but they're doing it so fast they're blurry. You know, like this is real museum work at speed. And my notion of time, my sense of time, which I'm trying to apply in the museum context, actually comes from a life before the museum. So before I joined the museum sector, I worked at SPS. And at SPS there's a really, there's a really strong sense of time. Most things are wrapped around a notion of TX for transmission date. You can't be late when you're covering the election. It is when it is. You can't be late when you're covering World Cup qualifier and celebrations. The game's on when it's on. And so I worked on a series of digital properties over a number of years at SPS, food stuff, new stuff, film stuff, sports stuff, and big football fan. And it taught me that good enough for the moment that that goes on the TV is the way it has to be. And so it blew me away when I joined the MCA and we started talking about projects. And someone said to me, we're thinking about second or third quarter, two years from now for this thing. And I just couldn't like, I didn't have the skills to think about something in that scale. I'm like, how many elections away is that? I don't have a good framework for that. So then I started thinking about what are those, I started understanding, I started learning, what are the things that maybe a lot of you implicitly know. And in particular, I'm thinking about the kind of destination museum context here. So I'm thinking about exhibition time. I'm thinking about event time. I'm thinking about, and this is the hardest one, strategic initiative time. And I think that's actually when people say museum time, they're euphemistically talking about that. And then I'm thinking about how does that interact with what I know about digital time, about the speed and the tempo, something that is very present in San Francisco. So I'm going to get some help from some friends. So as I think about each of these senses of time, I'm going to husk. So I'm from SFMOMA to speak really briefly about their work, starting with one of my colleagues, Steve. Oh, or not. Let's go back. Is there a trick? I love it when the technology guy can't make the technology work. That's always a good sign. So what Steve is saying. Is there a chance that you will come back to speak on behalf of him? So Steve and I work together on a number of projects. He's a gallery technician by trade, but he works on all of the media arts projects the museum does. And I wanted him to describe to me how far in advance do they prep a media work before it goes into an exhibition that goes on view. And his response is well, it varies. I mean, we plan exhibitions as much as five years in advance sometimes. And then some of the work that we've collected, we're constantly working on. And so some projects that we've bought as an institution took us 20 years to learn how to actually display it in a gallery. And then other times, when it comes into the collection, I was coming in for acquisition, and we've got a couple of days to develop it into a position where it can be presented to the collections committee or to the curators. So this is sort of really elongated time. But in mostly it's in the 18 months to five year range. So that's kind of for me, that's kind of like object time, you know, and I think about object time in many different ways. This is a dental chair from 1950. I loved like nosing around the tepapa collection. Now I think about object time. So this is, this is a little sampling, it's about a quarter of the works that are in SF moments collection spread out over time from when they were made. So you can see photography in our collection started a little bit earlier than painting and sculpture did. Meteor arts, we started collecting around the 1970s when meteorites started to be made, architecture and design and sort of goes through these different epochs. So this is just a sampling of the ways you can think about time. And when I asked Steve, you know, when you're collecting something, when you're looking after something, how long do you think you should be looking after what's a horizon? And he said, Well, we used to think 200 years. So we used to think, what is the action that I'm making on this object right now, that will mean it'll survive for 200 years. But now they're thinking, let's keep it running all of the time. So we have some meteor artworks that instead of in boxes, we literally have them running on virtualized servers perpetually, because the machines disappear and they change and they break. For things like painting and sculpture or photography, you do think on those horizons of a few hundred years. And that's for a modern contemporary institution. A colleague and a friend works at the Met, he sent me this. So this is going back to 6000 BC. So their sense of time is really different to ours. But it's also very different to digital. How do you do digital projects in the context of something that is literally 6000 years old, older than Australia, older than the version of Australia that we know. So that's what I think about when I think about object time, another view of that awesome chair. And I'm guessing you probably don't let kids sit on this dental chair if it needs to survive for 200 years into the future. Like how do you even touch it? How do you touch this fragile wooden object when you're thinking about it in the future? And the project that's even I worked really closely on is this piece by Julia Cher. This is the third iteration of this piece. It's based around surveillance. And the nature of surveillance has changed over the course of the life of this work, which is about a 20 year span. So we presented it with her as a museum opened in 2017. And this is the sort of multi skilled multi multi departmental team that worked on bringing this 1993 version of an interactive, immersive, ephemeral project brought that into something that was really legible to a 2017 audience where our notions of surveillance and ownership are really different than they were at the time in 1993. surveillance cameras were really new. And right now it's actually digital surveillance, data surveillance, which is the thing that is confronting to people in the community. And it took, you know, an archivist curators, digital media specialists, whatever my job title is, theorists, researchers, practitioners to try and make this work present. But also, you know, Julia Cher is, you know, she's older now, and she may not be around for the next time the work is shown. So how can we gather from her ways that we're going to think about this work for the future? How can we record that digitally so that the generations after us can make something that's timely again, something I think about a lot. Right. I'm going to press forward and there's gonna be another video, a colleague of mine, Bosco, and I will talk over him if he can't talk for himself. No, he can't. Okay. Just pressing up. No, that doesn't do anything. Yeah. Yeah, do you want to change this? Do you guys want to hear Bosco? Yeah, let's change the settings. I mean, you're coming out. Nice. No pressure, but they are all watching you. I'm sorry, that was mean. While that's happening. The thing that I'm going to sort of get into a bit more deeply is how we experiment with different versions of time inside SF MoMA. And I wanted to not do the thing that I often do, which is present a vision of the museum that I work for as if it's mine. I think there's something about white men, especially in the home of entitled white men in Silicon Valley, where we essentially present what is a community effort as if we're the kind of tip of the spear. And I was trying to be intentional about sort of democratizing that voice, because actually the majority of the things that I'm famous for are the people who have contributed most of the work and a huge amount of the thought to. And I think as our sector grows in maturity, we should be confident enough to say, I didn't think of that. This person did and call them out by name. I think there's a sort of fetishism over the sort of hero digital character. And I know it's been applied to me. And I think it's not helpful. I don't think it makes it better. And I think it's up to the people who do get to stand up on stage at the end and beginning of conferences to call out the amazing people that make our work possible. Just want to say that out loud. All right, let's try. So Bosco is Mexican born. He moved to San Francisco. He moved to the US when he was incredibly young. He joined SF MoMA about six years ago. And he's the new design director at SF MoMA. And I asked him when you're planning an exhibition, how far in advance do you plan? And he said, mostly it's nine to 18 months. But we also do the full design project for any exhibition or any event. So sometimes an event will change shape. The person we wanted to take part disappears or a new person is added. And suddenly the design studio has to pivot really quickly. So sometimes we get a week, but often it's in the sort of two year range. So then I'm thinking about exhibition time. We've got object time. We've got exhibition time. It's sort of coming in. And whether that's a shiny exhibition of sculpture, of practice, a beautiful exhibition of things that are kind of immobile. You'll notice the guy on the right is actually one of the architects from Snow Head at behind SF MoMA. Or it's event time. And we really think about event time kind of like mini exhibitions. We really focus on them as primary to our practice as an organization. And so if you think of the prep, it's almost the same for an exhibition as it is for one of these key events. But the moment after is so short. An exhibition might be five years in the planning and on the up for three months. An event might be 18 months in the planning, but only on for one night. And we see sort of what we call a dead cat bounce. There's that moment where it goes from zero interest the moment that thing starts. There's a little bounce as it ends as people want to know what they just missed. And then it's flat lines. There's the long tail. So when we think about event time we're kind of thinking about, you know, this little bit there. That exhibition time is that little bit there. So it's gone from really broad to a little band. Okay. I'm just going to straight talk over Erin. This is Erin Fleming. She developed our podcast Raw Material, which is a podcast about art and culture that happens to be produced by a museum. It's not about the museum. And Erin is answering a question I have about how long in advance she prepares a podcast episode. And she says, it's about two months of prep and about 40 hours of work goes into every 20 minute podcast episode. So it's a really labor intensive sort of thing. And I wanted to ask her about museum time. In a way museum time, which is actually museum strategic initiative time for the most part, is something that I guess we're all familiar with. And it involves post-it notes. In this case it involves sharing out, which is really important as you're doing strategic initiative. And it's often like strategic plan is the way this is manifest in some cases in some institutions. It's actually museum renewal time is a kind of metaphor, something that a number of institutions, including the one we now stand in, is looking actively at. And so when I think about museum strategic initiative time, this is the sort of two models, if you will. That's that we're all running in the same direction and we're all excited and joyful. That's not so common. That's not so common. I would say actually for a good period of time at SF moment we really understood where we were going. We were closing a building and we were going to open at three times as large. We really had a very strong sense of where we're going. We had a shared narrative. The organization and the staff within it had really, I would say, like confidently bought into. And it meant that although perhaps in times it wasn't joyful, we were running in the same direction. And we're now in a place that's quite different. We're now learning how to wear the skin that we have created. We're learning how to walk in this way. And that is something that we're like not so good at yet. Just museum didn't exist before we built it. And so we're now into the strategic initiative time that I think most people are familiar with, which is there is a guardrail. We're moving incredibly slowly. Some people are slightly ahead of others. Some people are clumped together with fear. And we all kind of feel like children learning again. So this is the most common version of museum strategic initiative time, which is to move slowly, hopefully in the right direction. So let's talk about digital time. So this is Katie Booth. Katie Booth is the social media manager at SFMOMA. And I'm asking her how phone events she prepares a social post. And she says sometimes literally we plan a single post nine months in advance. And other times when something goes bad, we have to respond in real time. So it's this blended thing, but it's in particular that mix of very long planned and very responsive that I think is interesting and is what she is so good at. So digital time is actually digital tempo. It's not it's much less about time. And it's more about how fast you respond to the needs that you have. So in our broad object time, we now have when was the internet invented, when was the first smartphone invented, still very contemporary moments in time slices. And so why do I think about this? And why am I talking about this? I'm talking about this because in San Francisco where SF MOMA is and the SF in SF MOMA is San Francisco Museum of what not. So for us to be contemporary with our audience, for us to be relevant to the people of San Francisco, we have to be in time with them. And that means we have to take digital seriously. And that means we have to move incredibly fast to be able to take advantage of the community we're in, but also to be responsive to that. So something that a grip of us with inside the museum came up with as a way of trying to be in time is SF MOMA Lab. Now SF MOMA Lab, more than anything, is an excuse to work on different temporalities than the ones that have already expressed. It's an excuse to do projects that are only a week long, only a month long. Some things that have planning, some things that don't. It's our opportunity, our room to experiment. And it's not people and it's not specifically a place. There's no lab you can attend and try things out. It's more of an idea. And the foundation myth actually for SF MOMA Lab, which I've now been told I'm allowed to talk about, but at the time was kind of embarrassing, is a notebook. I'll explain that. So I needed a new notebook. The only ones you could get from the sort of bulk ordering place had really big lines. And I wanted one with cross hatched lines so that I could sketch and I could do plans for apps and plans for websites that I was imagining. It turns out it was just the same price to get one with lines embossed with something on it as it was without. And so I asked for one embossed with SF MOMA R&D written on it. And so when I received it, I decided taking it to meetings and saying, oh, no, I'm in the R&D lab. And people are like, oh, cool, great. Then a little bit later, we printed more of them and a few other people had them. They became fetish objects and the curators were like, I do like that. What is that? And like it's from the R&D lab, you know, because we're in Silicon Valley, we have to have an R&D lab and they're like, oh, yeah, I heard about that. Someone's talking about that. Although they were talking about the notebook and they were showing me the notebook. And then so I after about a year of that, I printed ones that say SF MOMA lab because we'd said it a number of times and I was taking it to meetings with companies like Adobe and Google and others. And they were like, oh, I really like that notebook. What's the what's the notebook? And I'm like, oh, I work at SF MOMA, but I'm part of the SF MOMA R&D lab and they're like, oh, we have an R&D lab. And we're like, oh, that's great, we should partner, you know, our R&D lab should partner with your own. This is great. This is an opportunity. And so we spoke in the language of Silicon Valley and we spoke at the time, you know, we tried to get in time with them. But really, like it's vaporware, there's not a there there. And I know because I invented the vaporware. So the and the other reason we did that, I think is to allow space for people who already work in a really innovative way, but aren't celebrated for it. And so a lot of the things that SF MOMA lab has produced is really a mixture of practical things and then thought experiments that we reflect back because it's no point doing the work and not telling anyone about it. And it's absolutely no point telling everyone about it if you're not doing the work. And so the SF MOMA lab is actually a really loose confederacy of people who want to work using contemporary iterative practice. They're not necessarily even in the digital team. The majority of the people who are in SF MOMA lab are not in the digital team. There's people in interpretive media, there's people in IT, there's people in conservation and curatorial and collections. And it's really actually an excuse to have a different sort of tempo in their practice and an outcome that they can say this is an outcome of my work. This is legitimate. So for us, it's a sort of megaphone for a different way of working. The museums are traditionally able to do or traditionally encouraged to do. So we rolled out different tools for people to use. So SF MOMA lab is where the use of Slack and project management tools like Asana began. And it's absolutely a collaborative space, but it's really more than anything about tempo. So I will take you through a few SF MOMA lab projects. I'll go pretty quickly. The first one was in 2014, not long after we started it. And we called it Art and Data Day. And because it's San Francisco and it's a lab, you have to have post notes. And actually, this is good timing because I was going to turn the sound down and talk over this video. And so now I can just talk over this video. It's really great. So what we did and we invited a bunch of people who are creative technologists and designers who are working in the Bay Area to join us at a kind of a converted theater space. And because it's not a hackathon because hackathons I see as extractive, we wanted to do something that was generative and positive. So we selected, we didn't curate, we selected the group of people who would be there and we paid them to be there. We gave them a really nice lunch and we gave them access to an API that was the entire collection metadata we have for SF MOMA. And they were the first people to see it because our intuition is to lean on the creative people in San Francisco to learn how to do what we can do and learn how to do it better. And so we paid these creative technologists and artists and designers to be in the room with us and not to make something that was operationalized, not to make something that was productized, but to push on the API in a way that we wouldn't ourselves choose naturally to do, but it also meant that we had a time that the API needed to be ready for. So we just simply said in three months from now we're going to do an event where we invite creative technologists and designers and artists to play with the collection metadata of SF MOMA and in between now when we don't have an API and then we'll need an API. And that's an SF MOMA lab project and that's the time we do it. And it's only getting ready for this moment and we will learn from that what it becomes afterwards. But we knew we needed it. It's the sort of plumbing that we knew we needed going into the new building until we tried to make it sort of more playful and more open, but also have someone else who's not us interrogated because I think there's this intuition that we have for this incredible data and we can't wait to see what people do with it. I call bullshit on that. Pay people to do something interesting with it if you want to see what people are going to do with it. Simply putting it out into the open is not enough. That is an openness. That's open in the sense of opening a door. That's not open in the sense of welcoming someone in. And I think just dumping your collection metadata out into the world is the sort of digital equivalent of taking all your files and pouring them out into the street and taking your polaroids and flicking them around. Sure, someone might find them. I mean they're open, I guess. But it doesn't mean that people know how to use them and it doesn't mean that the people who actually need them have the agency to then engage with them. So I think beyond openness is actually about communicating value. And so we tried to communicate value by asking people what they're looking for. And so we added a whole bunch of features to the API based on what the artists and creative technologists needed. And so they made a whole bunch of things but a lot of the things they made were they didn't even finish. They just gave us a direction we needed to go. And this is my boss that you're kind of an SF member who made room for the lab to flourish underneath without him. This wouldn't be possible. So I'm going to skip to the next project we did, which is art support. And I don't have any pictures for this because it didn't work. We had this idea that sure, there's tech support but what people really need is art support. They need to be able to text us and we'll text them back the answer to their question like a messenger app for like the curiosity, like an interpretive emergency. You have an interpretive emergency? We're there for you. So we time boxed it again. We didn't want it to build something we needed to maintain for everyone to see if it would work. We gave ourselves a week. We bought an account on a programmable SMS. We gave ourselves a week. We tried it and it kind of didn't work. Like the overhead to do it really well seemed incredibly high. And while we shelved that, we sort of learned what we could learn from it. A little bit later, Brooklyn's Ask project came out with deep pockets and a huge investment and like a sort of root and branch opposed to what we were piloting and we're like, well, we don't need to do this anymore. They're doing that and they're going to do it way better than we would because they're investing in it from root and branch. And so their telephones are handed out and something you can do within the within the building. And in a funny way, watching it now, we've realized that we were right maybe to step away because they're really questioning the the success and the efficacy of the project themselves. They're really questioning in the open in a way that isn't a lab but it has many lab like qualities. And I think we can we can definitely learn from what's happening in Brooklyn. So our support's a good idea. Turns out, didn't work. So the next thing that we we've tried is something called PlaySFMomo. So this is championed by a colleague of mine, Erica Gangsy. She's been looking at the questions of games and gameplay as an artistic medium for over a decade and in particular ways that could manifest in the museum context. So a lot of a lot of game testing, a lot of play testing and a lot of really interesting development. And because she's been doing this and because we have an R&D lab, Google gave us a bunch of tangos before they were released, which is this depth sensing Lexus, sorry, depth-sensing camera phone that allows you to do augmented reality before the AR and our core that's come out most recently from Apple and Google. And so we're able to experiment with these technologies before they're ready for market and try them in the gallery context. But we weren't trying to make an app that we could then ship. We were trying to learn better about what it means in a museum context. Eric has this great great sort of phrase for the sort of work that we were doing at the time. She calls it working hard to find tougher and more confusing problems. I think that's really good. It's like we're not trying to solve problems, we're trying more interesting and deeper problems. And so that kind of led us to, OK, so we're learning about AR and I'm really interested in VR. Some of my PhD was about VR. So I started thinking about, OK, Placer film is like this rubric that Erica and her team has developed. And they're going to do a pop-up arcade during the Game Developers Conference. So once a year, all of the game developers, the big ones, come to San Francisco to show off their new shoot-em-ups. And we want to do something that was a sort of avant-garde response to that. And so sort of under Erica's direction, we had this one day pop-up arcade a mixed reality pop-up arcade with lots of different facets. And me and my team wanted to contribute something where we could do some experiments with destination VR at a museum. We're kind of interested in that. Like, is there a there there? Not convinced. Really not convinced. So this is the mixed reality pop-up arcade. So there was sort of props and there was games and there was games that were like dice-based. There were games that were augmented reality. There was games that were sort of performances, games that were consoles. And the one that we did was this destination VR experience. And I've been thinking a lot about VR in the museum context. And the thing we wanted to test out was which of these models actually work? But again, we time-boxed it. We worked on this for three months amongst everything else. We had a finish line where we were not going to take it forward. It's prepping for one day and what can we learn? What are the problems we can learn more about and do better? So first of all, there's VR as buffet. This is pretty common. You're at a salon. You're at a conference and there's a bunch of, you know, Samsung gear sitting on chairs you don't know what you're going to get. Doesn't taste very good for the most part. It's kind of lukewarm. The content's confusing and it's not obvious what you can like. You can't tell what's good for you. So this is VR as buffet. SF moment isn't never going to do this. Then there's VR as nightclub. So there's like a velvet rope and at the end of the velvet rope is a door and you get to try something. You can kind of see some people come out and they look like having a good time one in, one out. Must be a cool nightclub. But I'm going to wait here with another bunch of white guys. A bunch of white guys going into a nightclub. So that was one of the options we thought about that. We also thought about the restaurant. You know, that really cool restaurant where you book in advance and everyone's talking about even people who haven't eaten there because that chef has really killed in it. So this is Kanii Arena at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and it is just an exceptional piece of work. It's an incredible piece of work. Incredibly expensive but an incredible piece of work. And you do have to book it like a Michelin star restaurant. They put up the tickets the first day of the month and that month sells out straight away every single session because people want to have this experience and it's kind of time box. And so I've been talking about it and I've never got a ticket. I've never seen it but I'm still like that's a really good model. Damn you. So we wanted to introduce another model to destination VR in a museum context which we're calling the lottery. So the way this worked that this place with Mama Popup was big screen, this big projection. Anyone who came in and was interested in doing the VR experience would get a little token and then every now and then 13 and a half minutes to be exact a token would appear up on the screen and if you had the right token if they matched a performer who was roaming the space would pick you up and another person and take you into that little door you can see in the bottom right hand corner and we took you into a room that we'd covered in black velvet, soft carpeting and then inside that was two VR headsets and so this performer was using the language of like an alternate adjacent reality preparing you for VR using words like the experience will begin momentarily. Getting you ready to think differently in a museum context opening your mind to the possibilities of this experience and when you put the headsets on it was essentially the same but just in VR it was dark slightly purple deep with edges and then in VR with you was the person you came in with who may be a friend or maybe a stranger but there's also a VR docent the museum extends into the museum that's a pop-up within the museum pop-up. Is that right? I think that's right. So there was a pop-up and we did a pop-up inside the pop-up and inside that we re-injected the museum with a VR docent which would take you through this born digital VR only possible experience. We didn't bring the museum into VR that is not interesting taking the analog into the digital for me is not interesting. We had artists who were only working in this medium create native VR experiences VR artworks that you could then inhabit and play with and share and as you came out because VR in a museum is kind of shit and also a little bit gross we washed your hands we washed your face we gave you a little amulet there was a 3D print of this thing that was inside the space that you're in and it was kind of sublime like it was kind of transporting and people were blown away like it changed their perception of what was possible around this sort of work in a museum context which is kind of exciting. With that in mind one word of caution do not do VR just don't do VR. If you want to take like most of my slides are just me talking over words if you do want to take a photo and tweet it it's this one. I've been given the don't build an app talk for a long time I'm now in the don't do VR talk time because it's actually really hard to not do it badly and it's really hard and expensive to do it in a way that's meaningful and will take your audience with you somewhere that they can't already go in another way and so for us we've taken very much the queue of performance art and performance live performance the project we did in most waves inherits from things like then she fell and sleep no more where the VR is part of a 15 minute performance and it's one part that could only happen that way and it's social and I think that's really key. There is this moment right now where media companies are worried that people will have terrible first experience with VR and will step away and will say that's not for me in the same way that avatar blew up 3D in the cinema because it was something you couldn't do another way and you couldn't do a year before that, five years before that we're now at a place with VR where we're not quite ready for it not to suck and so the companies that are betting big on this are looking to museums and are looking to museums in a really strong way because we have trust they wanna take that trust and spend it on our audiences so that they trust that VR can be genuinely transporting and genuinely good because most of the VR content out there is not very good because we're still learning the medium. We know how to go to the cinema, we're good at going to the cinema. We know how to read a book, we're good at reading a book. We still don't know how to do VR well and we certainly don't know how to consume VR well and if there's gonna be a place to pilot it I think museums are a really excellent place to pilot it both history and art museums are all types I think it's a really exciting moment but only when all of those perfect things line up and someone's willing to pay for it and you're really confident about the experience and you can staff it effectively and you can make the full narrative work then sure. Otherwise do it in a lab model do it in an iterative way but only for staff to get them ready for the wave that's coming. So the last project, four and four years on to show you is send me SF MoMA so there was a mention before by Fiona so my colleague Jay Malika came up with this idea at the end of an argument that we had about egalitarian access to the collection. I was saying that our collection website is pretty good search on our mobile is pretty good and he was saying it's still a barrier it's still kind of couched in the traditional way that we think about museums and so I wanted to test him on that so I looked at the most common search terms on our website and it was surnames of dead famous white male artists and Frida Kahlo that was the top 10 in terms of our collection and so he wanted to make something where if you search for one of those surnames you didn't get anything back you got a prompt to try something different and so when people send send me Rauschenberg or send me Richter this is what you'll get back you'll get try semi cats or cactus and then people do that they try all sorts of things and it means they discover work and artists that they've never heard of in a way that there is kind of sublime so Jay and I had an argument on a Monday on Tuesday he said I want to do something with SMS and I've got an idea and I was like well we did this thing art support before you started it wasn't very good but I've got a programmable SMS client and it's you know we've got all of the tools we use at the times you want that he's like yep that's great thanks very much on Wednesday he's like I'm halfway there I think I've got a good shape for it on Thursday we had a pilot the staff loved it on Friday we launched it so from the argument on Monday to Jay coming up with the idea on Tuesday he was ready to go by the end of the week and I think it's because we had the infrastructure in place and we practiced innovation we'd piloted innovation over a number of years and in the process of doing that we had this incredible baseline that you could then pop things on top of and make this possible and it went viral people absolutely loved it it went viral the same week that Donald Trump Jr. tweeted his email conversation with the Russian lawyers we trended art in your text message next to bachelorette news season and Donald Trump Jr. blowing up the American political system it was like yes thank you you can clap actually I was like what so I want to tell you four quick things about Semi-SFOMA the first one is like actually how does it work and what is it based on I talked about it a little bit not only is it Jay's work but sort of almost more importantly Marla and Margaret two of our two of the team in the Collections Information Access team and their kind of director Lena have been manually adding really vernacular tags to our collection for ten years with no specific goal in mind so as the work was coming in and being acquired and being digitized they would look at it and be like I see a heart I see red I see and off they went and they got this incredible language and so we lent on that language to make this beautiful you can send me the heart shaped emoji and we'll find a heart in our collection because someone has done that work already done that work not knowing how it will be used but doing it because of that opportunity cost was low as the work was coming into the collection and the work was becoming and being digitized and because we build this great infrastructure through a series of experiments that allows us to quickly line things up in a matter of days so it's to them that this is possible and it's to the archivists and the librarians that this is all possible so what's popular you know it is America under Trump so people looking for positivity you know it's the internet so looking for cats and dogs the you know the sunshine friendship flowers hope family like words like that are really common and amazingly because we end up getting about four million text messages this summer very few words that you would be worried about getting very few words that we had on our band list hardly any but what did we don't have and this is what we would catch grief for on social media is we don't have really subjective terms so people would say send me tragedy and it's my tragedy and your tragedy might not be the same send me on an adventure well I'd you know I can tell you about San Francisco but I can't tell you what is and isn't an adventure and so that's something we're thinking about when I when we realized this thing was going to be popular because our original phone number got blacklisted by the carriers it was so popular they thought we were spamming people with art so we had to register an official shortcode which meant which is one of the reasons it only works in the US and in the act of registering we had to tell all the telcos what it was and all of the rest and I was sort of thinking about how much that's going to cost and what is the per text cost and we were sort of thinking what's the scale of this thing and for me I was thinking like if we can do 100,000, 150,000 text messages over the course of the summer the investment in this project is absolutely worth it because we're going to learn the words that people want to use when they look for art that we don't have an answer for we're going to have a gap analysis between where our audience wants us to be and where we actually are and so with that in mind we did the project we didn't expect it to go viral and all of a sudden everyone's asking us not only go viral but also go global the shortcode that we needed in order to be able to send those SMSes at that rate only works in the US and there's different shortcodes and different structures and different parts of the world and so we got question after question and actually the tweet that we sent which was we're working on international version which Katie who you would have met but would have heard earlier came over and said are you working on international version and we're like yes and she ran back tweeted is the most retweeted, the most engaged tweet in the history of SFMOMA was the we're working on it we weren't actually working on it so that's a problem but what we're working on and this is actually something that both Jay and I came up with separately and I tried to pitch him we should not go global we should give the code away we should give the IP away we should find people who want to do a version of this themselves but with their collection relevant to their communities on whatever the platform their local communities actually use and Jay was like of course we should do that have been working on the blog post about it and so he's already there and it means that we can be really generous and so the Auckland Art Museum has a pilot already working at Facebook Messenger and they're looking to roll that out in the future other museums in New Zealand are looking at it they were kind of the first to ask which is why I'm so excited to be here we're working with institutions in Singapore and Hong Kong the Tate is working on one there's a couple of smaller institutions in the US are doing it and we just wanted to be we wanted to follow that sense of generosity and I remember being interviewed I remember it was ABC I remember being interviewed and the person asking me is like this is like the kind of off camera like what a great campaign and I was like no no it's not a campaign this is a gift to our community like this is a straight up gift we're not asking for anything back and they're like you're not harvesting phone numbers surely like this is a membership campaign and like this is off camera like I'm like no no no this is about a museum being present in people's lives in our mission statement it says to mean more to more people and I kind of saw that as a sentence that sort of it's hard to grasp it doesn't mean a lot like yes it's the thing you should do but it doesn't mean a lot and then this this is absolutely that this is us being in people's lives this is us making art meaningful allowing them to find artists and artworks that they'd never heard of and would have never considered texting us and then their parents and then a friend and then us again and so from that point of view I'm really happy with the approach we've taken but I'm also happy to be able to say that we don't actually know what people's phone numbers are we've anonymized them as they've come in so we can tell if people are using it a lot turns out on average 20 times mental but we don't know who they are because we don't want to even ourselves our future selves we want to like protect our current selves of protecting our future selves from their worst selves where we go and ask everyone to become a member so what does it mean for a museum to go viral? it's something we're not very good at and it's something that I had no practice in even though I'd worked in a broadcaster previously but something that I'm interested in understanding better so that line is when HyperLogic wrote a story about our story so we published the phone number and we wrote a story, J wrote a story about how it came together and what the thinking behind it is and a couple of us worked on the kind of language you wanted to use to best present this idea and we put it in social and so about four or five days later a news organization picked it up themselves and just wrote about it and it started going crazy on Facebook on the night they went really busy on Facebook and then Twitter and then one of those sort of feeder aggregator sites wrote about it and so that's Sunday night and then J is like we've added two extra servers Sunday night this thing's going crazy we're sending like 10,000, 20,000 text messages an hour and then and then the most popular TV show in America did a story on it and that day we went up to 70,000 text messages an hour and ended up sending three quarters of a million receiving and sending three quarters of a million text messages in a day which is kind of crazy then CNN and Time did stories on it and then unfortunately right when we were like really peaking and we'd taken two servers down so we could replicate them so we had more machines to service the load Neil Patrick Harris tweeted about us to his 36 million followers in our machines fell over they just cooked and died there's like a graph, graph, graph red line and so for about an hour we were trying to get the machines back on but every time the head all this like Twilio had all this pent up demand so we put a machine back on and just get clobbered and die again and so we had to turn the product off for long enough for the traffic to disappear and then we could turn it back on and then the New York Times wrote about it and I appeared in NPR, National Public Radio and so you can see the different sorts of bounces there's sort of bounce the discovery bounce and there's also the news media bounce but what I think is kind of beautiful is that gap here between the first and second lines no one was writing about it that moment it only been featured by one small arts journal it hadn't made it into mass media but people were sharing it because they found something in it that they were looking for in a pretty tough political moment in America's history so I think from that point of view sometimes you do just want to send me robots and get robots so we did all this happen it happened at SF moment what did we learn from it? We learned that there's actually a really big appetite for this 10 seconds of the light from museum to be sublime where other arts institutions are making better collection filters and better search engines we went and made a delight engine and we made it because we practiced innovation over five years and got good enough at it that we could move quickly on good ideas as they came up so this is a really hard thing to read and you don't need to read and consume it but this is the content grid at SF moment this is all of the things that we do and the places that we do them either in building or online or distributed and it's the thing that two of my colleagues Chad and Maggie put together so that we get a sense of the space and the breadth of the work that we do as an organization and we split it according to sort of deep and shallow and by that I mean like investment of time so you know like a tweet is a shallow investment of time but reading a book is a serious investment in time and then from novice to expert in terms of how you think about and understand modern contemporary art and so the place that it says SF moment content grid so like that's empty not because we wanted to write the title in there that's empty because we don't do short touch but deep rich content and so we've been thinking sure send me SF moment sort of up the other end it's sort of novice or not novice and it's definitely shallow you can use it as much as little as you want and we've got stuff in the top right where we're doing online scholarly research or we're doing you know putting out books about exhibitions or monographs and that sort of the top right but we're thinking like where are the gaps where are the audiences that we're not aware of and where are the audiences that want to be reached with something that is bite sized but actually meaningful actually meaty so for us what have we learned from send me SF moment is not only that there's an appetite for 10 seconds of delight and people do want art in a meaningful way in their lives that's separate to an institution and a visit but we're hopeful that people also want to go further there is like a straight jump in the use of our online collection from the moment that send me went viral it went from like a quarter of our traffic to almost all of our traffic and then started to taper down so people weren't just getting that moment they were taking that putting in search engine and finding that artwork and finding that artist and doing their own research so we didn't put links in the texts that we sent because across browsers they display in really diverse ways and some of them look terrible and some of them look great but you can never tell what it's gonna be so we want it to be a single user interface for all but we're interested in this space so coming back to museum strategic initiative time and coming back to that lovely photo so what I didn't show you at the time and enhance enhance so right up the end there that's digital right there and the problem with being right out there out in front is that you're leaving people behind and it might sound cool to be like doing the new thing and doing it faster and whatever they say and disrupt as they say in Silicon Valley but if you're out there and you're that far in front then you've left the organization behind and you're not helping but if you're an organization that's moving so slowly that digital is that far in front then you're not doing a service to your staff and you're not doing a service to your audiences and you're not ready for now let alone the future so I think bringing digital back into the fold or bringing the fold forward to a digital already is really important and I've heard a lot of language over the last couple of years both inside New Zealand, inside Australia and in the US about this sort of bifurcation of innovation or this bifurcation of change this idea that something as important as renewal is different from a strategic plan is different from the work people are doing every day those things are not different and when they're brought together when these temporalities are brought together and that they work in sync when you can think about an exhibition scale of time and think about an event scale of time and still do the strategic work and the digital work all in a line that is when you do your best work I think the thing I've learned the most at SF MOMA is by using digital time to try and pilot an experiment knowing that we're intentionally spinning out the outcomes of those experiments into those other temporalities that we're trying things with media artworks that help us then preserve them for 200 years better but we're trying things time boxed two weeks, two months to do that it makes a huge difference and that we frame everything within a wider strategy there's nothing around renewal there's nothing around a new building there's nothing around a new collection that is separate from the overall strategy of the organization and working in all these different tempos at the same time means that the staff have to buy into them they have to understand the story you're telling and why this little bit of work that you're doing for one week and then putting it down is important to that overall direction that you're going this pilot is preparing you for the future that none of us are actually ready for even us in San Francisco with the deep pockets that we have so when I think about the future when I think about where museums are going and I know I need to wrap up pretty soon when I think about the future where I think about museums going I think about how you prepare a museum for this uncertain future already transformed we're not preparing for digital transformation we're breathing that we are in it our audiences have already transformed the tools we use have already transformed they're already there we're talking about the present and the past a little bit especially in San Francisco but no more or less so here in New Zealand I don't think the born digital future the very contemporary future of how people are going to experience and understand museums is going to happen in institutions like yours or mine I think new institutions are needed I don't know what they look like I don't know how much they cost and I don't know how they're going to work but I think the work that we're doing now is preparing for that future where it is kind of bled and diverse where it doesn't have a fixed placement this is all of the artists in SFMO's collection and all of the artwork in SFMO's collection as denoted by what age the artist was when they made that work so most of the work was made in people's middle age it turns out but that's not necessarily useful it's just a way for us to look at that thing that was right in front of us slightly differently and so it's kind of why we do the visualization work it's kind of why we do this experimental work because we didn't know what we'd find and we didn't know if it would be useful but we wanted to try it anyway so when I think about when I think about what we can do as practitioners now it's about preparing our institutions for an uncertain financial and a potentially uncertain audience-based future but I think it's also about piloting new sorts of institutions ones that don't yet exist and for me that's the most exciting work that we could possibly do that's a place where I want to be and that's why I want to say thank you very much for having me the last thing I want to show you is just in the ethos could you throw the slides back up in the ethos of oh let me mirror in the ethos of this sort of practice of experimentation Phil and I, right after the data visualization talk earlier today said oh you know what we should visualise everyone who's in the room so they can see how they reflect on each other so since then and in other sessions and when I wasn't on the panel we've created a quick visualisation of who's here and how they're affiliated it's not perfect, it gives you a sense of scale it gives you a sense of density and we'll make it a little bit cleaner and we'll share it out to everyone to look at because part of understanding where we can go is understanding who we are and how we're grouped together right now so I just want to give that a little gift and a thank you