Day Three
Wed, Dec 7, 2016The day started in a very structured and disciplined way. I went for a run around the area not far from Foxrock, had quick breakfast and hopped into the bus 145 to get to the city center. At 10:00 we had coffee and cake with Jenny and Justyna at the Silk Road Cafe which is located in the Chester Beatty Library building. We reviewed the general plan and discussed changes.
During the first part of the day I went to the reference library to look for images that I could use for the upcoming projection mapping workshops this weekend. I am going to run an introductory projection mapping workshop for teenagers on Saturday and for adults on Sunday. For the workshop to fit the context of the Chester Beatty Library, I decided to search for images in the digitized artifact database. I found some nice fashion illustrations from the western collection.
At 12:30 we went to the Silk Road Cafe again to have lunch with the trustees of the Chester Beatty Library. I was introduced to the director Ms Fionnuala Croke, it was nice to exchange a couple of kind phrases with her.
The rest of the day I spent at the reference library, iterating on the projection mapping installation visual solution and creating visuals for the workshop at the TOG Hackerspace next Monday 12 Dec 2016. Jenny was updating me occasionally about changes. She sent a kind email to the Latvian embassy in Dublin (since my nationality is Latvian) inviting the local Latvian community to join the opening of the projection mapping installation next Friday 16 Dec 2016.
In addition to the scheduled part of the day I had discussions and thoughts about the creative process in museums and creative spaces such as makerspaces, hackerspaces and fab labs. Jenny told me about her experience at the Museomix open museum workshop where people with different backgrounds came together for a three-day workshop to explore and create something new for a museum in France. From what Jenny told me I extracted that people involved with museums tend to think in a linear way. They make a plan and try to execute it from beginning to end without accepting the possibility for something to change in the middle of the process. It is different with makers–they accept and expect change in every step they make. In terms of creating prototypes for anything in an efficient way, in limited amount of time, the latter works if the involved stakeholders have a flexible mindset.
Another thought that sneaked into my mind today was equipment related. Working with projection mapping always involves use of projectors, which for the most part are expensive. I have succeeded in cutting down the computer hardware costs by developing open source projection mapping software that runs on the Raspberry Pi mini-computer. It is not that easy to cut down projector costs. There is another interesting fact. Chester Beatty Library is located next to the Dublin Castle. They are not aware of what kind of equipment each of the institutions have. In case Dublin Castle has a free projector lying around, it is problematic to get information about that. If the museums share any kind of funding, why couldn’t they share information about what kind of equipment they have? It would open doors for a lot of interesting new media projects.