At the beginning of July 2010 – exactly six years from the day they opened – we closed the doors at TAK! Towers to explore new ideas & ventures. It’s been fun, thanks for having us!

Recently, Tak had been responsible for the Home of Metal website, the branding for British Dance Edition and had picked up a run of awards for their work on BMAG’s Pre-Raphaelite website.

Meanwhile, I’ve just heard (via Dave Allen) that Script, the West Mids agency for dramatic writers, are shutting up shop:

It is with great regret and reluctance that the Board of Script has taken the decision to dissolve the company as of the end of August 2010.

The loss of RFO status in March 2008 has had a serious impact on the company’s resources, and the reliance on ever-decreasing pots of project funding has made its future existence unsustainable.

See Script’s August newsletter for further info and to see a slew of opportunities for writers.

I’ve often wondered why museums and galleries aren’t using their web presence in more innovative and useful ways.  I worked within a gallery for a number of years, and this gave me the unsurprising insight that many factors contributed to this: underpaid overworked staff, simply no capacity (in terms of time) to explore new avenues, gallery staff restricted to working within strictly defined roles with little room for experimentation, and those who do maintain the web side of things being under supported and in need of upskilling.  Plus above all, there are many challenges facing gallery collections (from conservation to valuation to interpretation and beyond) that the additional pressure of creating new ways of accessing that information sits at the bottom of anyone’s agenda, particularly when it could just end up as a copyright/intellectual property/Digital Rights Management nightmare.

Finally, Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery have been brave enough to tackle these issues head on with the decision to publicly release their world-class Pre-Raphaelite collection, the largest in Europe, becoming the focal point for this work.  With assistance from JISC, BMAG appointed Birmingham-based digital agency TAK! after a five way pitch to design and develop a website application to achieve their goal.  And the resulting site is a beautiful, delicate and sensitive piece of design.  Visitors will be able to access high quality content which will enable schools, universities, and the general public to have a greater understanding of the collection in their own time, and in their own space – which in turn could encourage new visitors and raise the profile of the museum.

“TAK! have helped us create the largest online Pre-Raphaelite collection in the world” concludes Linda Suprdle, Project Manager at BMAG. “It’s a fantastic resource and provides an unparalleled level of access and quality to the works on display. Anyone with an interest in art should visit the site and discover the importance of the Pre-Raphaelites.”

I hope that this project will encourage other museums and galleries to consider making their collections accessible online.  They have the opportunity to create such valuable learning resources which could cross so many diversity and access barriers, and it seems a shame that the majority of artworks only ever see the light of day if and when a curator deems them relevant enough. Using online technology, all collections could eventually be available to view regardless of current exhibition theme!

If and when that does happen, I will be interested to see how the role of ‘the curator’ responds to that change.  The Pre-Raphaelite collection site already encourages users to create their own personal collections, so how far a leap would it be for people to share those collections and reasons for their choices with other users?  Imagine an itunes playlist or an amazon reading list – but for art, complete with personal interpretations, anecdotal thoughts, factual evidence and academic input.  THAT would be something I could become obsessive about!

He also has a blog here and is on MySpace and Facebook too in case you want to pledge your allegiance.

David is a photographer at Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery and also lectures, consults and does bits of art design and graphic design.

The website was put together by Tak! and has a soundtrack provided by Chris Herbert which is remarkable because it’s interactive (try moving the three lines about) and didn’t have me reaching for the mute button like most autostart music on websites.

(Via Surely?, Tak! and CMYKern)

Chris says:

some of the best Lithuanian hip hop acts in attendance, such as 3 times Lithuanian DMC champion DJ Mamania and the Baltic States acclaimed beatboxer Def One

Here’s the flyer: