Data Mining

When I visited the A+D Gallery, I thought the place looked a little empty, but I think that is mostly because I don't usually go to galleries and wouldn't really know what a full gallery looks like, if there is such a thing, again I wouldn't know. The first thing that I did was go to the computer that had a pdf file containing information about the gallery. I thought it was pretty cool to learn that A+D stood for Art+Design since the name of the gallery did puzzle me a bit. One part of the pdf file said “we live our lives surrounded by technology. We carry it in our pockets, our purses and our backpack.” I thought this was really cool because I had technology with me both in my pocket and my backpack. I had my cell phone in my pocket, my digital wrist watch in the other pocket, and my laptop in my backpack. Also, what I thought was cool about that part of the pdf file was that its true, we have all kinds of technology all around us pretty much all of the time.

One piece in the gallery that interested me was the Venture to the Interior. It was commissioned by the Natural History Museum in Berlin, Germany. Venture to the Interior, is a data collection of the Museum in the form of a virtual 3D world, allowing us to in a sense walk through this museum. It took me a little bit to get used to the move around and entering different rooms in the virtual museum. I’ve never been the kind of person that gets motion sickness but this thing was pushing that a little. The world is pretty disorienting at first. But after a little while I got mostly used to the way everything looks and how u move around. It was confusing sometimes when navigating the world that pretty much all the floors, ceilings, and walls were transparent and that made the experience a little frustrating for me. For example; I was exploring one level and saw something on the level below, I had to find some way to get to that level, but I never found a way to get there.

All the words in Venture to the Interior seemed to be in German, but I would love to see a version of it in English. I think this kind of virtual world would be a great way for people to see a kind of preview of other museums around the world without having to travel.