Connective Corridors, be mobile between museums and events

At least if you live in Finland, you must have noticed the “cultural city” fever that has taken Finland by storm. This year the city of Turku is one of two European capitals of culture (the other one is Tallinn just across the Gulf of Finland) and in 2012 Helsinki will be the World Design Capital.

Both “culture city” initiatives are highly events focused. With a lot of events and venues, the word “mobile” takes on a whole new meaning. Accessing the stuff by phone could be an option, but obviously you want to get to the events to really get the most out of them. Meaning you need to be “mobile”.

Even thought Finland has a very high penetration of cars, the city centers of both Turku and Helsinki are best travelled on foot or on a bus. One can only hope that public transport between events and venues is on the agendas of the two cities.

One model to provide visitor and inhabitant mobility alike are the Connective Corridor projects in the US. Personally I think the one in Syracuse, NY looks very nice as it focuses on culture and education. Great concept to copy to create personal mobility to art! And the bus looks great, doesn’t it!

And while waiting for cultural corridors: If you are in Helsinki and want to move easily between various places, the Helsinki Region Traffic has a very good mobile journey planner to find how to get from A to B using public transport. Bookmark it for your next visit to Helsinki!

Museums and mobile

Bringing mobiles into a museum is not something that only the 3 Inch Canvas does. There are  a number of museums that are active in developing services aimed at mobile devices for their visitors.

Nancy Procter, head of New Media initiatives at the Smithsonian Institute, is running an informational site about museums and mobile over at museummobile.info. This looks like an invaluable site to anyone working with issues related to spreading and deepening the relationship between art institutions of all kinds and their audiences.

Especially the site’s wiki has a wealth of information.

Nancy has also posted some of her insights as a slideshare presentation, which you can see here. If you think mobile phones are just a high tech way to give visitors an audio tour without the museum having to invest in the hardware devices, think again ;-)!

And if you want to experience mobile devices in a real museum setting in Helsinki, don’t forget to check out the Asphalt and sunflowers photo exhibition. There you can sample a much larger set of photos by accessing Aapo Rista’s mobile gallery application on a Nokia 900 while comfortably seated.

Jyväskylä, here we come

Jyväskylä by night. Photo: zache at flickr

I hope you all have noted that the next 3 Inch Canvas exhibition will be hosted by the Jyväskylä Art Museum in Jyväskylä in March 2011. Which means this time we will move into an art museum setting. That is at the same time very exciting and a little bit scary.   

I’m sure you can all understand the excitement for curating an exhibition in an art museum together with an experienced artist/curator as is Sanna Sarva. But the scary bit?   

The first 3 Inch Canvas exhibition was very much about being informal and experimental. We certainly want to maintain these aspect this year but we are also looking for ways to let visitors take a more active part in the exhibitions and even have some fun. We hope that peoples’ preconceptions of what you can do in a museum will not come in the way.  

So if you want to be experimental and interact with the audience, don’t forget that we have also a call for participation for artistic applications with a mobile twist. If you are into coding and stuff, then don’t wait but click here for the full details!