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By Scott Rosenberg
You can't walk into a museum these days without tripping over a multimedia installation. Anxious that the art objects they house may be too static for the hopped-up youth of today to appreciate, galleries are installing kiosks and computer rooms that allow instant! interactive! multimedia! access to information about their collections.
There's only one problem: every minute you stare at a screen is time you're not looking at the paintings or sculptures whose physical presence was presumably what drew you to the museum in the first place.
Digital multimedia is ubiquitous at the new San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, too, but in a more dynamic way. In any room of the museum's second-floor permanent collection you're likely to find people walking around with headphones over their ears and square, Walkman-like boxes dangling from their shoulders.
They're not listening to Prokofiev or Pearl Jam. Tuned in to a new kind of CD-ROM-based gallery guide created by Antenna Theater, they're strolling through their own private art documentaries.
Standing before Georgia O'Keeffe's "The Black Place I," for instance, they'll hear the artist's own voice: "It's as if my mind creates shapes that I don't know about." Atmospheric music and gently suggestive sound canvases accompany comments by curators. There are dry observations -- "Perspective is ambiguous in this canvas" is the understated comment on Jackson Pollock's anarchically disintegrating "Guardians of the Secret" -- and evocative similes (Robert Rauschenberg's collage-like "Collection" "seems like a refrigerator door plastered with notes").
Historical context, like a description of the scandalized reception accorded Matisse's "Woman with a Hat," mixes with piquant trivia -- like the fact that Bruce Conner's sculptural collage of nude pin-ups, "Looking Glass," was once owned by Dennis Hopper.
Docent-led tours are a fine thing, but too often they turn into exercises in neck-craning and crowd control. Reading wall-tags next to paintings means looking at the type rather than the art. Here, the CD technology isn't stealing visitors' senses from the works around them. It's complementing the experience of gallery-grazing -- adding a personalized soundtrack to the silent images on display.
The Sausalito-based Antenna Theater, led by Chris Hardman, has been designing audio tours for years. If you've been to Alcatraz and were smart enough to rent the cassette tour there, you know how effective the group's sonic wizardry can be.
What's new about the CD Gallery Guides -- which Antenna has now created for New York's Museum of Natural History, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Seattle Art Museum as well as SFMOMA -- is the possibility of random access. The CD stores hundreds of hours of audio, and as you wander the museum, you simply punch in a number posted by an artwork to hear the relevant material. A sequential highlights tour is available for the more linear-minded; other visitors will have more fun browsing.
"Some people are independent travellers, others prefer the tour bus," says Chris Tellis, who directs Antenna's audio tour program.
Producing a CD-ROM is a lot cheaper than publishing a high-quality illustrated book full of color plates. But at this stage in the CD industry's history, the CD-ROM still costs $30 to $60, as much as or more than the equivalent book -- yet it usually offers poorer reproduction.
A more interesting approach is emerging in the online world. Many museums now have home pages on the Internet's World Wide Web; the Louvre's site has long served as a pioneering example of the Web's global reach and graphic appeal.
Now, though, a new generation of online art galleries is arriving. Instead of digitally repackaging the collections of existing museums, they're creating virtual spaces for the display and viewing of artworks that are available exclusively over the Net.
You can find such material in Web publications like Urban Desires or HotWired, which has three sections devoted to original art: Kino for video, Retina for visual art and Soundz for music and audio works. You can also visit galleries that exist only in cyberspace, like Photo Perspectives, which offers regularly changing full-scale photography exhibitions. Right now you'll find an eye-opening show titled "Faces of Sorrow: Agony in the Former Yugoslavia."
The drawback to online museum-hopping is the time it takes for complex graphics files to download. It's as if you had to stand before each painting in a room while it slowly unrolled, top to bottom, like a window shade. The good thing about a virtual gallery is that there's no end to the wall space.