Well Told Story: Minneapolis Museum of Art
I was taken with the storytelling of the Minneapolis Museum of Arts’ digital exhibition. Upon entering the site, there’s a transparent overlay that establishes the site’s goals, and presents its contents as a labyrinth of treasures to explore, which makes you intrigued about the content, and appeals to me because it appeals to my agency as a spectator instead of trying to attract to academic information with strategies typical to commercial advertising.
It opens in a gallery of images that’s randomized each time to avoid making claims about associations or importance, which is really nice. I also enjoy that there is no text accompanying each image, as there would be walking through a museum, so the user can develop their own ideas about a work before deciding to read about it. That seeing the information is an additional step that you must make the decision to access contributes to the peaceful, exploratory feeling of the site, and makes me more interested in pursuing more information because I feel that I’m the one in control of what I see.
Clicking on a painting reveals a super hi-res image (with zoom!) and typical information about the work.
Clicking on “Details” points out notable facets of the image and allows you to explore them.
And even links to areas of further exploration, going into extreme peripheral depth in the discussion of each image.
As a whole experience, it provides multiple layers of content to appeal to various audiences, enables self-guided exploration, presents each image as a story that each user must actively click and choose to move through, and is accessible to a wide range of ages, cultures, education levels, etc.
Though we don’t nearly have complicated enough technology (or bandwith!) in this class to achieve anything near to this level of mastery, I do think the principle of isolating images, being really thoughtful about when and how you incorporate text, and creating a self-guided learning process can be applicable to the work of our class.