THATCamp notes taken during this Session can be found at ow.ly/b1czR

Session Proposal
Yielding to the omnipresent camera phone, most museums have had to change their no-photography policy (although still enforced in special exhibitions). Museums even encourage taking photos, featuring them on their websites and social media pages.

I would like to explore how photo taking and photo sharing practices have changed the gallery experience and the experience of art online. Do these candid snapshots reveal something that official collection photographs don’t? What do we need to know about fair use and copyright infringement? How do we manage all these images?

Here are some links to spark conversation:

At Louvre, Many Stop to Snap but Few Stay to Focus

At Galleries, Cameras Find a Mixed Welcome

Google Art Project and Google Goggles

Also –
Check out any museum’s social media pages including Official Flickr Group Pool and Facebook;

And see results of online image search for any artist:
( Picasso? – About 75,600,000 results in 0.12 seconds; Gauguin? “only” about 3,510,000 results; Beuys? 1,350,000……)

While commercial applications of virtual reality explode on your mobile screen, the history potential of the smart phone valiantly struggles to catch up. The Digital Humanities team of Kathleen Hulser and Steve Bull have been experimenting with history on the hoof. They concoct augmented reality scenarios that turn the smart phone into a history translator that conjures buried archival materials into real world contexts. Two recent forays show the potential for plucking history from the scholarly realm and popping it into surprising settings. “Tecumseh” summons an image of the Shawnee leader who tried to found a Pan-Indian Nation, during the War of 1812. No, Indians aren’t erased from the history, they’ve just been waiting in your mobile to re-materialize. Bull lurked amidst classical busts in the gardens of the Villa dei Pini, Bogliasco ITALY, to install “inVisible Presence” using augmented reality to make the men of marble to mobilize their thoughts. In both cases above the visitor is given the opportunity to have a snap shot taken with the avatar and posted to a social media site.