Rated
Oct 18 2010
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16 reviews
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museum, adobe, digital
• adobemuseum.com
I went to see the "incredible, inspiring, creative, revolutionary, and stunning creation", "impressive, weird, awesome and totally mind numbing" as others have described it. Sounds so exciting!
The site starts with some nice sound and background - 3D model of a futuristic "organic building"- virtual home of the digital museum - the loading screen is promising and I patiently wait and wait. What I am about to see must be worth it. I am eager to see the incredible part, where you can walk inside that virtual building, and look at great, inspiring digital art.
100% done. I am in!
Hmmm... First impression is a bit confusing. The 3 welcome panels look pretty bad on high resolution monitor because all graphics are obviously overstretched. That gives me right away the feeling of a cheap and unfinished site patched up by a digital enthusiast. I must be patient though and give it a chance, after all, all these other people are so amazed, the wonders of the digital world must be just behind those panels!
The first thing that draws the attention is an eyeball over the right side panel. I try to stay away from it as it is a bit disgusting. So I try to find the way in for the great virtual exhibit halls I expect.
Skipping the curator in the middle (I don't care much about what they say, I want to see what they have done) I go for the 3D building model on the left which is nicely rotating 360 degrees, oops, not so nicely - there is a hiccup in the animation on every round. Hmmm... that really doesn't look like an intended effect.
Loud voice tells me what to expect when I mouse over something. First intuitive reaction is to look for the sound control to lower the volume a bit and I see it right away at the bottom - great! Click... oops the sound control is just for on and off, no volume slider or anything of the like. I can live with that, after all I can lower the volume from my system controls, good thing that I didn't try the full screen version.
I watch the building tour and the cytyscapes video - nice! Low res, but nice. I could imagine it looks great on better video resolution, but hey this is a web site, one can't do much about this. My confidence is back. This is starting to look pretty good!
Hmmm, is something wrong with my eyes? I admit is very late already, but... that bottom navigation effect (replicating a defect) seems neither helpful, nor innovative, just blurry.
I try here an there, click around to explore as I don't want to miss anything creative and revolutionary. Also I click around to figure out how the navigation actually works. Maybe there is some logic behind it that I just can't grasp yet. After a while I just start clicking randomly, since when I click on "directory" I get the current video to play, when I click on museum I see the additional navigation screen that flickers and blurs and looks digitally displaced again, like an old monitor in the middle of a calibration test... I guess some folks could find that creative. Although it doesn't have much to do with it, for some reason reminds me of Star Wars and the hologram of princess Leia asking for help produced by R2-D2 - now that was revolutionary, inspiring and futuristic... 33 years ago...
Finally I get to explore around the eyeball and get to an exhibit of Tony Oursler. Now I see where the yucky eyeball comes from - more of the sort stuffed in here. When I've seen enough I start looking for another exhibition. I found a map - cool. Clicking on "archive" leads me back to the beginning with the 3 panels. Going round and round to find some other exhibitions, only to find out this is the first and apparently the only one... So much for the museum of digital art. For now this is a museum of Tony Oursler's eyemouts.
So disappointing...