09.05.08

MoMA - Olafur Eliasson: Take Your Time

Museum, Consumer

This MoMA site accompanies the exhibition of the same name.

Because exhibition sites remain on the site in perpetuity, they also act as archives, much like the print catalogs. This site not only serves as a pre- and post-visit resource but in a way that most exhibit sites aren’t, it’s an authentic means of entry for anyone unable to make it to the museum in person.

The site houses the works from the exhibition, artist interview videos, images of the artist’s studio, and interactive floor plans. But the true uniqueness of the content lies in the fact that much of it is generated by visitors to the exhibit. Selected visitors wore special cell-phone cameras that documented their journeys through the show. Images were chosen at random intervals and instantly uploaded to Flickr. After quick editing in Flickr, the results appeared immediately on the exhibition site and can be filtered by date, visitor or viewed randomly.

This addition of visitor-generated images depicting individual journeys through Olafur’s works adds an intimate, candid and experiential voice to the site—one in accordance with many of the themes explored in the artist’s practice.

• An unobtrusive nav mimics the conventions of a browser with full-screen scrolling and full-screen display of content.

• The site was developed in-house by MoMA’s Department of Digital Media and took three months to build.

• The site has roughly 140 museum-supplied images, over 750 visitor-generated images; 6 videos; and 2 interactive floor plans.

• Flickr serves as the CMS for the visitor images.

• The creative team originally used Waymarkr for Nokia Series 60 phones, but ultimately decided that higher-res photos would be necessary. After consulting Waymarkr’s developers, MoMA developed its own custom application which also allowed them to customize the application to feed photos directly to Flickr using its wifi network.

• Since launch, the site’s received over 75,000 visitors.