More than a century separates the Degas era from the digital age. Yet they’re a perfect artistic fit in the eyes of the Denver Art Museum.
Visitors to the museum increasingly are finding interactive technology interspersed with works of fine art.
On the “touch table” in the American and European painting galleries, a patron’s fingertip touch on a Plexiglas screen will produce a magnified image of a masterpiece, showing every brushstroke.
At the “Psychedelic Experience” exhibit, visitors enter a 1960s- style phone booth, dial a couple of numbers on the old, rotary-style pay phone, then record remembrances of their hippie days with a tiny video camera hidden in the phone’s 25-cent coin slot.
The recollections — sometimes hazy, often vividly electric — then can be uploaded to YouTube for viewing by other museum patrons.
“We’re trying to find ways to make the visitor a part of the museum experience,” said Bruce Wyman, the facility’s director of technology.
The technology is not super-sophisticated; many of the exhibits use relatively simple software applications on personal computers to create what Wyman calls “interactive experiments.”
What’s innovative is the museum’s approach in melding art and technology — and its willingness to share its achievements with other facilities across the nation.
“The Denver Art Museum is a leader in the art-museum world for incorporating innovative technology into its exhibition interpretation,” said Eric Siegel, director of the New York Hall of Science. “While science-based museums have pursued these approaches, the art-museum world has been more conservative in its incorporation of technology.”
Wyman, a former marine biologist, shares credit for the museum’s accolades with lead technical developer Aubrey Francois and a team of three information-technology specialists.
“The combination of skills we have here is unusual,” Wyman said. “We have smart people with eclectic backgrounds.”
The museum won’t disclose its budget for technical displays, saying it is a relatively small part of the facility’s overall $19 million budget.
Devising the technical interfaces is a creative challenge. Keeping them operating as thousands of visitors manipulate them presents an additional hurdle, as evidenced this week when two of the “Psychedelic Experience” telephones were inoperable and the touch-table projection failed to show a full array of colors.
“Our attitude is, ‘Let’s try stuff,’ ” Wyman said. “We realize not everything’s going to work all the time.”
Technical glitches didn’t dampen the enthusiasm of Mandi Jefferson, who used a display screen on one of the working psychedelic telephones to view a vintage video of Jefferson Airplane playing “White Rabbit.”
“I’ve heard my parents listen to this,” said the 22-year-old resident of Sacramento, Calif. “But seeing it this way is pretty cool.”
Steve Raabe: 303-954-1948 or sraabe@denverpost.com
