Biophilia – Björk

Björk’s app album Biophilia is pretty well the coolest thing I’ve come across in ages. I downloaded the app this afternoon, and promptly lost myself exploring music and music-making, games and visuals. Have a listen to David Attenborough’s introduction to the app/album below:

This is everything that an app should be. It just spills over with creativity, and invites participation and creativity from its users in kind. Through experiments with science, and essays enclosed within, the app promotes learning too. Mind you, if this is the start of a new wave of creativity in apps then museums and other institutions who pride themselves on making knowledge and education accessible could be left fighting for relevancy. Or maybe we should just be looking for awesome and creative new partnerships to explore.

A very quick post on practising what you preach

The Australia Council has just reached their new research report called Connecting:// art audiences online. I haven’t had a chance to have a full read of the report in depth just yet, but one thing leaped out at me this morning when I started looking through the website… The website, which contains pieces of advice like this:

The internet – and in particular, mobile technology, provides a range of opportunities for arts organisations to make it easy. Already, there’s strong adoption of mobile apps in relation to arts events, with strong interest in apps to support ticket purchases, program customisation, interaction and content sharing, to name just a few.

cannot be read fully on my iPad. I was flicking through the site first thing this morning, and was pretty frustrated to find that the text on the site would not scroll so that it could be read in its entirety. I could see the start of bar graphs, but not the important information at the other end of them. I thought the report was relevant enough that I would actually try to access it again from my laptop… but very easily I could have just dismissed it as inconvenient and not looked again.

If you are going to talk about the importance of mobile technology, then please consider how mobile audiences will access your information when designing your site.

FOLLOW UP: But here’s the nice thing about social media, and a demonstration of how to use it well…  OZCO responding to the problems mentioned above.