In this episode of the Artmatcher podcast, Jay Mollica speaks with Michael Goodman about his unique position at the intersection of art and technology. They dive into technology’s role in making the art world more accessible, and how tech-forward curation is revolutionizing the industry. Jay goes into more detail regarding how museums can begin to embrace digitization.
About Jay Mollica
Jay Mollica is the director of digital engagement at the Pérez Art Museum Miami. Before joining PAMM in 2020, he worked as the creative technologist at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art where he lead experiments in art and technology and modernized the museum’s digital platforms. His work has been featured in the New York Times, The Today Show, and Fast Company. In 2018 he won the Webby Award for best app from a cultural institution for his project Send Me SFMOMA. Jay regularly writes about his work in museums, technology, design, and architecture. He holds a master’s degree in Interactive Media Art from NYU and is currently a visiting fellow at the University of Miami’s Institute for Data Science and Computing.
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Key Moments
- 00::36 Getting to know Jay
- 7:40 How technology can shape accessibility in the art world
- 13:15 Tech-forward curation
- 20:45 Should we be creating digital spaces for art?
- 25:50 More on tech and accessibility
- 29:30 How Jay found himself at the intersection of the digital world and the art world
- 34:15 How museums can successfully embrace the digital
Episode Transcript
0:00:00.7 Michael Goodman: Hi everybody, I’m Michael Goodman with Artmatcher, the mobile app which will bring innovation to the art industry and is coming to you soon. While we work hard to build and release this app, we’ll be talking art with some of the industry’s most interesting and knowledgeable people. Whether you’re an art aficionado or this is all new to you, we’ll be here to provide valuable insight and hilarious good stories. Hope you enjoy our chat today. Welcome to another episode of Artmatcher, the podcast. Joining us today in the studio, special guest Jay Malika. Did I butcher that? No, nailed it. It’s actually Malika, but Malika is also acceptable.
0:00:48.9 Jay Mollica: It’s acceptable. Can you tell the audience a little bit about yourself?
0:00:52.8 Jay Mollica: Yeah, so my name is Jay Malika. I’ve been working in museums and technology for over 10 years now. First as at the California Academy of Sciences, the Natural History Museum in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco. And then as the creative technologist at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Last December, I made the move to the Perez Art Museum Miami to become the director of digital engagement. And I’m kind of the first director of digital museum has had. So I’m originating the department. What does it mean to build a digital department in sort of the current context of the world? Right. So originating a strategy team and sort of starting to orchestrate these sort of complex public facing projects. Yeah. Have you always been in the digital kind of domain space? Yeah, I’ve been in, you know, digital and museums for pretty much my entire career. I haven’t I’ve had like a little forays into startups and more traditional sort of engineering technology shops. But my the great greater part of my career has been spent in digital and museums. And working in these kind of institutions. I mean, how can you tell us a little bit about like, how did you get there?
0:02:19.3 Jay Mollica: Like, was that like the goal to end up?
0:02:22.9 Jay Mollica: No, I never imagine I always tend to have jobs that didn’t exist like two years ago. So I never intended to work in museums. What had happened is when I mean, the long story is in high school, right around the turn of the century, ninety nine, two thousand two thousand one and became really interested in web development and building things for the Internet because I really liked graphic design. But I saw them I saw the things I was making is interactive. And so in order to to make them sort of interactive galleries or art experiences, I’ve learned how to, you know, program. And I kind of just happy kind of making this sort of art alone. And I thought I was going to go to medical school. And so I went to do all the premed and I decided against it actually. And the only kind of job skills I have that was this web development. And I eventually got the job as a web developer at the California Academy of Sciences. And that’s kind of what reignited my interest in the expressive nature of programming and engineering and the ability to democratize access to knowledge.
0:03:36.6 Michael Goodman: And so I’ve kind of been pursuing that in the museum world ever since when when I arrived in museums and still even so the museum digital and kind of encompasses, you know, mainly the website is what you think of it as and mostly it’s also just seen as a tool of marketing, a way to sell tickets, which is a museum’s primary way of making money or in one of the primaries, make money selling access to physical space. And so trying to advocate for more initiatives that are digital first and online only became the sort of through line to my entire career.
0:04:17.6 Jay Mollica: Having seen kind of the inception of kind of like the dot com era, as you were referencing to where we are now with apps, NFT, does this seem like familiar from when we kind of got started in the web domain? Because I’m under the impression and correct me if I’m wrong, I feel like the web domain now is I mean, I know there’s obviously people online using this stuff, but I feel like now with the usage of smartphones and mobile, we engage with the web very differently.
0:04:57.0 Jay Mollica: Oh, absolutely. I think, you know, yeah, coming that kind of kind of I I kind of grew up with the medium, you could say, in that I I kind of saw it come through all these iterations and I was learning how to use it and set the same while it was being built, essentially. And, you know, there’s a lot of people talk almost kind of nostalgically about the the early days of the web, right? The more expressive thing, like everybody had a GeoCities and was learning HTML. And and now you instead of learning HTML, you just get an Instagram account and that’s where you post everything. And so the kind of the breadth of experience has sort of been sculpted and kind of windowed down to just a couple of apps that people engage with every day. And there is, of course, utility in all of that. But, you know, I think there’s this sort of my interest is in sort of reigniting interest in the really expressive nature of the truly expressive nature of kind of networked software. And democratized access to things. It’s not just it’s it doesn’t just happen on these certain app platforms.
0:06:09.0 Jay Mollica: Then another thing like you spoke to is like we went from websites to apps to NFTs. And, you know, when I started in museums, it was the sort of dawn of the age of the app. Right. Everybody had was building an app. It’s like if you you had to have an app. It was like 2011 ish. Apple had just released like the iPhone three and the app store that came with it. And so every museum had an app. And but it’s it’s kind of like any trend. If you kind of just wait it out, you’ll kind of see whether or not that was a truth or not. And so, you know, as it turns out, like you don’t really need an app if you’re a museum. It’s like you need an app if you need an app. You don’t need an app if you’re you know, if you’re if you’re just kind of serving up stuff that you would get on the Web anyway. And same thing can be seen as NFTs. It’s, you know, the important thing about, you know, museums work on entirely different cadences than other organizations. And and, you know, more, you know, larger organizations that are software driven.
0:07:16.0 Michael Goodman: So just having a plan and sticking to it and, you know, not being not feeling like you should be reactive to a trend and is very important. And just being able to sort of unfold a vision for the how you want to meet your community is much more important than being like, hey, NFTs, we got to do something with NFTs now because it’s in the news. Well, I feel and this I’ve been going to museums ever since I’ve been young and my experience, I know I’m kind of an anomaly in terms of I was having a visual artist already had the interest.
0:07:57.7 Jay Mollica: And I realized that there is kind of a lack of accessibility to museums in general, just like like whether it’s your interest or getting there or knowing that exists. And so today, I think about like the way the news travels is a lot quicker. I feel museums were always kind of like behind in some way, at least on the technological side of things. Have you I mean, now that you are the head of this department, you find that that the museum programming programs are a little bit catch up to the market. I’m not saying that meets the NFTs, but just generally the presence of accessibility to kind of a larger. Yeah, I mean, due to the sort of disparity in resources that museums have and, you know, compared to your typical sort of, you know, you know, other companies and technology shops, there’s always going to be like this sort of, oh, should we.
0:09:11.1 Jay Mollica: We need to be doing what they’re doing. And like, you know, this kind of comparison that goes on. But to me, that’s sort of a like a red herring or a false equivalency. It’s like because, you know, Facebook has VR and museums should have VR. That doesn’t really quite sit right. And what what I’m more interested in is kind of doing more with less and kind of showing people that the ambient technology, the technology that they use every day around them has these capabilities that they are far more broad than what they’re actually using them for. One of the the project that I’m best known for was something I made in at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. It was called Send me SF MoMA. And it was a quick little project they made where you could text the museum and it would text you back with a piece of art. So you could say send me sunshine and it would send you back a picture of the from the collection that had sunshine in it or send me ocean or send me the moon. And, you know, it was just texting. You know, it was 2017.
0:10:21.1 Michael Goodman: Nothing special about texting. And but it ignited cultural interest. And in the summer of 2017, we got five million people texting the museum. We were doing more text than Uber at one point, according to our texting provider Twilio. And that project is still going on. Unfortunately, I left that in 2019 and they sunsetted the project in early 2020. But by the time that left, I think I’d have gotten over six million, almost seven million texts is what I’ve heard.
0:11:00.4 Jay Mollica: Wow. That’s that’s that’s an interesting concept of that’s like an art piece itself, interactive, because I think about we just had Basel and me participating in terms of engaging with most of the years that I’ve been going. I was on the inhibitor side, but it was nice to see kind of being able to walk the show. I kind of noticed for the first time it’s like kind of how institutionalized, how kind of rigid the industry is in that sense. I think the technology, the digital space is one of those spaces where it can potentially be a breakthrough. I know we were talking a little bit about some curatorial stuff prior to this. Can you tell me a little bit more about that?
0:12:01.4 Michael Goodman: Yeah. Yeah, I’d be happy to talk about that. Part of the you know, I got here about a year ago. And so this first year has been all about laying foundations and groundwork for kind of orchestrating public facing things on top of that. And part of it is creating a digital exhibition spaces. So, you know, the Perez Art Museum, Miami, PAM is concerned with, you know, its major purview is modern contemporary art. I think most of the artists in our collection are living and being a contemporary modern art museum, you know, digital is a huge part of how artists are creating work these days. It’s not just one medium, it’s a variety of mediums. So one of the things that I’m interested in doing with the digital engagement department is creating new digital first exhibition spaces. So what does it look like to have a curatorial space for augmented reality? What does it look like to have a curatorial space for streaming on demand? These sort of more modern ways that people expect to engage with digital. So that’s all.
0:13:13.2 Michael Goodman: Is it only going to be in the digital medium, meaning like stuff that are within that medium or is there going to be traditional mediums as well? Like painting, sculpture? Painting and sculpture is already handled fabulously by curators and our curators have also done curation in digital too. But these spaces are more about creating opportunity for further engagement and ongoing commissions. I think one of the, or maybe possibly my favorite ongoing exhibition by a museum is by the Whitney. It’s called Sunrise Sunset and it’s a beautiful sort of like poetic exhibition where every day at the moment of sunrise and again at the moment of sunset, an artist takes over their homepage of Whitney.org or whatever. And it’s just a brief moment and it’s synchronous. You have to know to tune in for it. And they’re able to sort of rotate in new artists every so often. And so it just creates this ongoing commission space for digital engagement, digital art, and a way to, you know, get the word out and, you know, develop, you know, new programming. You know, aside from the building.
0:14:34.0 Jay Mollica: Yeah, one of the things we’re doing at Artmatcher is with our machine matching and learning, we’re kind of curating the parties that should be together. So when we’re matching gallerists with collectors, collectors with artists, artists with gallerists, it’s creating this kind of community. One of the things that I love kind of about the institutions is they kind of create this like programming for just people to learn and getting involved with the arts, which is nice. Do you find yourself collaborating with other digital departments at other places and brainstorming ideas? Does that happen? Well, you know, Digital and Museums is kind of a tight knit group.
0:15:25.9 Jay Mollica: Yeah. So if you’ve been working in digital museums for a while, you tend to know a lot of the other people around the organizations, you know, around the country, if not the world. In fact, just yesterday, I had a quick little meetup with the heads of digital at, you know, Miami institutions like the Wolfsonian and Vizcaya and the Lowe. And so it’s a tight knit group and every organization is very different than the others. So the goals don’t usually kind of come to the point where of collaboration, but there’s always like shared interest in just the democratization of whatever they’re doing at the museum and making it more accessible to people and making it interesting in ways that are kind of unexpected or novel. And so there’s always a tight community of museum technologists that are always discussing things. One of the more popular kind of museum sort of groups is called Museum Computer Network. And that’s been going on for like 50 years or more. And it’s a very, you know, supportive community of, you know, museum technology people who are always kind of sharing information and, you know, talking about the latest trends. Going into closing out the year, going into 2022, are there any fun projects on the horizon that you can share?
0:17:02.3 Jay Mollica: There is so much that we are working on right now at PAM that I’m just practically bursting at the seams. I’ve been here for about a year, but it’s all been foundational work and not so much stuff we can share with the public quite yet. But hopefully in the beginning of 2022, you’ll start to see what we’ve been working on as a digital department, but also as an entire museum because just one department can’t do all this work. One of the most exciting things that we’re working on is just digitizing the collection for the first time. PAM’s collection, you know, is not browsable on the Internet yet, like many other museums. And so we’re making it possible. And I think that’s really important for a lot of reasons. Like I mentioned earlier, PAM’s collection is largely living artists, modern contemporary, but also artists, you know, from the African diaspora, Latin America, the Caribbean and, you know, South Florida as well. And to sort of enter the conversation of how museums can collect with this collection, I think is very important because we’re especially considering what we’re seeing, you know, kind of the sort of reconsideration of museum collections that we’ve been seeing over the last few years.
0:18:28.1 Michael Goodman: And so this is probably one of the more meaningful things that are worked out in my career is like making sure that more people know about the incredible artists that we have in our collection who are still alive, who you can support right now. And then other things we’re working on, as we talked about earlier, is the digital exhibition spaces. And we talked about earlier about museums having, you know, a main source of revenue for them is selling access to physical space. But, you know, as the years have gone by, people’s physical space has become less and less important to how they conduct their lives and their business. And so, you know, if we can open up more democratic spaces for art and exhibitions to teach people about PAM’s purview and South Florida and, you know, the Afro-Caribbean and Latin American sort of artists and where we’re situated, then, you know, we’re getting people from all around the world. Like our next donor might not be in London, our next donor might be in London or in Buenos Aires or something like that.
0:19:40.9 Michael Goodman: When you say digitalizing the collection, is that like taking a photo of the work and putting it online, essentially? Yes, it’s providing an image, usually an image, but sometimes not. And then the metadata for the artwork, including the artist, the year it was made, the title and the medium. Yeah, and then kind of making it browsable and forming connections across here. Like, do you want to see everything in our collection that is a painting or a sculpture and making it sort of digestible in those ways? And that’s really important because that sort of work leads to further scholarship, right? It leads to, you know, more awareness and more use in, you know, academic or scholastic texts or something like that.
0:20:28.9 Jay Mollica: And so the process of that, do you have like a team of people? Because I’m familiar with a little bit of that being in the gallery space where I’ll have my artists, they’ll bring their works. We have a photographer, they take a high resolution image. We’re trying to best capture whether it’s a painting or a sculpture and then kind of showing that experience. Is there any kind of front on getting into the kind of these virtual spaces for Perez? Is that on the horizon or is that existing already?
0:21:05.0 Michael Goodman: What do you mean by virtual spaces?
0:21:07.4 Jay Mollica: So when, at the height of the pandemic last year before Basel took place, I think there was actually a virtual fair that took place. Oh yeah, the virtual gallery. Yeah, that’s what we’re talking about. There’s, you know, philosophically, if I can get philosophical for a second, there’s always been to me to create a virtual gallery because, like, you know, you can walk around this space in VR and like, oh, so we can recreate like slogging around like a giant warehouse. Like, you know, that’s not like the fun part is the discovery. It’s not like, you know, going to buy groceries in VR isn’t like, you know, recreating like stuff that doesn’t need to be recreated. Like the concept of distance and crossing the distance is not foregrounding the art, I think, or the act of exploration. It’s more foregrounding the technology. And what we want to do is create digital experiences, things that we would call a virtual gallery, but wouldn’t be like sitting in VR walking through PAM. But, you know, things that foreground the art, I think a lot of ways, a lot of times, especially, you know, museums, I’ve seen as often in museums is that they start with the technology and look for an application of it rather than things like, you know, how do we, you know, honor the art and respect the intent of the artist more than that.
0:22:37.8 Jay Mollica: And so creating a gallery in VR is not usually like the way that the artist, you know, if you made a painting was expecting to have their work shown or something like that. And so how do we foreground this with technology rather than diminish the artist’s intent? Well, the way I see it, I think with the world, it’s I’ve had I’ve thought about a little bit different with the whole kind of metaverse coming into play. And I thought about it about peers and friends of mine who couldn’t make it to Miami this year. And would they have been OK with kind of almost experiencing it? Because technology is just it’s growing like I could see a world where they could have a virtual space where it’s exactly to the T and feel like it. I mean, the things that I think we used to dream about or imagine, they’re kind of coming true. And it’s just it’s so fast moving just in the last, I feel, 10 years. It’s even hard to catch up like that. This is happening. Oh, absolutely. And there’s always with technology, it’s never usually never what you think it’s going to be, too, because, like, you know, something like you could we could have said, like for the last 10 years, you know, everybody’s been saying like artificial intelligence.
0:24:01.7 Jay Mollica: You know, and it’s, you know, there’s been some applications of that. But then what happened this year? Like NFTs, like that’s what everybody’s talking about. It’s like, you know, VR has been, you know, talked about for so long. And then NFTs like NFTs is what the conversation was about. It wasn’t necessarily about VR like everybody’s been trying to sort of kind of make happen for many years. And with these things is also like where do these movements come from? I mean, VR is something that’s primarily been pushed by large companies, right? Facebook pushes on VR, but NFTs and the sort of culture around it and the cryptocurrency that it’s built upon. It’s a social movement, right? It’s not it was not, you know, pushed by as necessarily it’s like large centralized entities. And that makes it it was kind of like this sort of dark horse moment of hard to anticipate what those things are happening. But with technology, you just have to kind of remain nimble because you can’t really imagine what the what will take over things next often. Would you say most because I think on a global scale, I think most people don’t even have access to any of like I was thinking about who has access to even like crypto yet alone digital.
0:25:28.5 Jay Mollica: Like, I don’t really think day to day how many people have access like we’re doing this podcast virtually and I’m wondering how many people have a laptop or desktop where they could even access. Absolutely. You’re building. We’re talking about right now. Do they have access to listen to this podcast? You know, the distribution distribution pipelines. Absolutely. Museum look into those numbers and stuff.
0:25:55.6 Jay Mollica: Well, yeah, I mean, there’s a lot to unpack with that statement. But it’s also something that I think a lot about doing digital museums for so long is, you know, who are you trying to reach for your audiences? And so back, you know, I mentioned VR a few times. So in twenty seventeen, twenty sixteen, there was a big flare up of like interest in VR and museums were, you know, kind of figuring out what they want to do with VR and to philosophically to me, that didn’t make any sense. Right. Because when you’re making VR, you know, you need a headset. That’s eight hundred dollars. You need a computer. That’s like three thousand dollars to like even like, you know, run the software. And so and then you put it in a museum and you have a line to use a VR headset in a museum that is already a zone of exclusion. So the zone of exclusion inside a zone of exclusion. And so it’s compounding. And so that’s when, you know, that is, you know, that’s why I turned to text messages. Right. That was twenty seventeen is it was a deliberate choice of mine to lean to turn away from the sort of like high cost, you know, inaccessible technologies towards something that everybody already knew how to use.
0:27:16.4 Michael Goodman: And that was exploring just the sort of durability of these things. And so, yeah, absolutely. And like I already talked about apps a little bit. Apps are another great example is when you’re making an app, you choose a platform. Are you going to make it for Apple or are you going to make it for Android? And that dictates a lot of how you your audience, you know, will engage. Right. So places like San Francisco and Miami, very centered around like Apple and iPhone use. Right. The rest of the world uses Android. Right. Android is 80% of the market or something like that. And so, yeah, we’re doing that with Artmatcher.
0:27:56.6 Jay Mollica: I mean, yeah, we’re on the Google Play list now and building that was a whole nother aspect to it for the rest of the world, because all the European collectors and artists weren’t it wasn’t accessible until we released that. Exactly.
0:28:15.4 Michael Goodman: And so as a museum, it’s like, you know, you kind of. To sort of maintain two different platforms is like costly. Right. You know, and when I was at SF MoMA, I was the only person on staff that really had engineering experience. So like I can’t be expected to do like two apps, a website, digital projects, other initiatives, support this and run meetings and this and that. It was like so being sort of aware of this sort of constricted resources that that museums have. And what how do we kind of reach the more people with these with the sort of resources that we do have? And so that’s why we turn to things that are open access and already used by many. And so maybe not an app, maybe a website can do what your app does and you can read, you know, you can reach a million people. Like, like I always say, like you can fit a couple thousand people in pan or any museum. You can reach a couple of million people in a day. The URL.
0:29:21.0 Jay Mollica: And yeah. Were you. So coming from this kind of like tech side, were you an artist at any point? Or are you like you practice because it’s so interesting myself working with kind of now like a tech team, a building an app and the most of the guys, they’re not into art. So how did you get into this kind of fine art world?
0:29:50.5 Jay Mollica: Yeah, I mean, I grew up with, you know, parents who are in the humanities. And and so I always had this artistic kind of upbringing. And, you know, like I said, coming of age with the Internet was another part of it. It was like learning that the Web page was a medium, just like, you know, a paint canvas or something like that was kind of eye opening to me. And I would never consider myself an artist, but I have always been in love with the expressive possibilities of, you know, of software engineering and networked art. And yeah, and I think we’re starting to see more programs around that are marriage marriages of like digital and humanities. But for a while, you know, they were kept separate. Right. You know, you were a software engineer or you were an art student. You know, is the there was sort of this kind of estrangement between these two things. But there is a vibrant community of art and technology and it’s kind of getting more and more, you know, blurred and overlapping every year. But yeah, like my if I, you know, if I had like a secret power of being a museum technologist is that I can speak to both the very technical and the humanities and the fine art side of things.
0:31:15.3 Michael Goodman: So, yeah, because I feel like that’s the marriage today, at least 20 as we close out this year.
0:31:23.3 Jay Mollica: I think the technology, a lot of I mean, people who were in this kind of separate world or at the center of the art world, that that being kind of like digital art and working with a lot of people who are like it’s it’s involving coding and all sorts of stuff. It’s like that’s at the center of the art world right now. I mean, I’m looking at art pieces that I need to learn like another language, whether like I’ve seen some art where someone’s making something and like Java C++ and. Yeah, I mean, forms speak on that art really well, I mean that pain and canvas and some more traditional mediums.
0:32:08.2 Jay Mollica: Well, that’s I think that’s one of the reasons why museums have been so slow to adapt or embrace the digital mediums is the figure out conservation for digital is entirely bonkers. It is nuts. Like, you know, conserving a painting is hard enough, but it’s something that we’ve largely like there’s a corpus. There’s like we figured it out, right? Like, you know, oil oil painting. It’s like five, six by six feet, five feet by six feet. And it’s like, you know, it’s you know, we we’ve got that we’ve got the chemicals, we’ve got the expertise for that. But conserving digital is entirely different because it’s, you know, the field has there aren’t standards and the software is coming and going. Often the software is an even open source, but it’s proprietary. You know, one of the things that we faced at S of MoMA was when the museum reopened in 2016. There was an exhibition to feature the original iPhone and this was in 2016 and they had an original iPhone in the box that they had just kept in the box and never turned. Never been open. Never been ever turned on. Original iPhone. It’s like, perfect.
0:33:22.4 Michael Goodman: We’ll just put that in exhibition. So they go to turn it on and the phone doesn’t turn off. And it’s because Apple had turned off the software that the phone needed to check in, you know, had to check in with the mothership when it turned on for the first time. So Apple took that offline some years ago. So the phone wouldn’t even turn on anymore. So what they had to do was go to eBay and find the phone that had already been turned on and then bring that to the gallery. So even there, like the software that runs on these things is so unstable that you and you have no insight into it, into like what the plans are for or when it will be turned off that it makes it really hard to conserve. And yeah, one of the things I would find fascinating and I’m not sure if you’ve had this experience yourself in galleries is a lot of projects in museums when they would show something that needed to be on a TV or screen.
0:34:26.0 Jay Mollica: They’d always use these archaic monitors like these cubes. I’ve always wondered is that to play on the kind of visual nostalgia of what people think like technology is? Yeah, I still do it today. It seems very dated. Yeah, it’s always kind of cringey to see screens in galleries. Like it’s like hard to do that. Right. And if you even if you ask like artists, you know, who make stuff for screens are always like worried about what it’s going to look like in the gallery or what screens. And one of the things that, you know, when you want to engage with the medium, it’s important to not ignore its constraints or not to try to work around its constraints, but to really accept and appreciate those constraints. And one of the things about digital art that defines that medium is that you often have no idea how you’re going to find your audience. You might find them, you know, in a gallery on a screen. You might find them in the browser late at night, you know, trying to do research for a project. You might find somebody like dead tired on their phone during a layover in a busy airport.
0:35:41.4 Michael Goodman: You have no idea how this person is going to find a piece of digital art. And so just accepting that is very freeing. And so to not to the less you try to control for that, I think the more interesting your applications and your exhibition spaces can get.
0:35:57.9 Jay Mollica: And essentially, you’re a digital. You’re like the digital curator for the gallery. No, I’m not. I’m definitely not a curator. I my job mostly, I would say, digital engagement. And what I do is I help share what the museum is already doing. You know, the museum has a fantastic curatorial department. How do we give them more space to curate the museum? And in the end, because if you’re responsible of how people are receiving it, isn’t that part of the curatorial process in some shape and some form? Yeah. In a way, so like when the way that would work is like I mentioned earlier, is like we’re building a space for curating AR projects. Right. So we had at that point, I would kind of approach the curator. I would have this idea. It’s like we could be curating augmented reality and we can this would be how we might do it. And then they would be like, that sounds great. Or no, that’s not for us. And so when we get the green light and their wheels are turning all of a sudden, then we can start to sculpt it. It’s like, well, we you know, we’re doing augmented reality, but we don’t want an app because we don’t want our audiences to be limited like that.
0:37:13.5 Michael Goodman: So we want it to be web based. And then what does that mean? Who are the artists that are working in web based augmented reality? And how are we going to control for that? Like, we know that we’re not going to do the screens and gallery because we accept that we can’t. We won’t know how people are finding this. So how do we then find artists for that who will engage with web based augmented reality across a variety of devices?
0:37:42.2 Jay Mollica: And so are you predominantly then coding all this stuff or like I’m trying to figure out like in the terms of like when you’re working with the artists and trying to visualize this.
0:37:55.1 Jay Mollica: Yeah. So a lot of the artists are technologists themselves and will code something. And then what we would do is provide the platform. And so you have a chunk of code that’s for an augmented reality object or exhibition and you can plop it into our platform and then you can then go to the exhibition on our website and then see your work in augmented reality over your phone. And that’s kind of how it works. And like there are times like, you know, some artists, a lot of I don’t know what the split is actually, but some artists are also very capable technologists. Other artists work with technologists to realize what they want to do. I think to me personally, it’s always more interesting to work with the artists who are also technologists because they know the boundaries and the capabilities and the quirks of the technology. Yeah. And they probably have an understanding of the landscape a little bit better as well. Yeah. Well, we’re about out of time. It’s been a pleasure. Likewise. Where can the audience check out some of the stuff you’re responsible for? Good question. Maybe check back with me in March or so and then we’ll have some exciting news for you then.
0:39:13.1 Michael Goodman: But I’ll be sure to tell the Artmatcher people so they can, so you can tell, you know, tell your share. Share it with the world. So for now, they can just check out the Perez’s website. Yeah, we have a lot of great stuff going on all the time. Fantastic educational and program. And we just got done with a slew of great programs for Art Week that was put on by our education department. And you can find links to all them like augmented reality exhibition called Brianna’s Garden. A talk with Marco Brambia about his landmark or Kevin’s Gate that you can find on display in in Pam and a few other things.
0:39:54.6 Jay Mollica: Guys, so if you guys are in Miami, check out Pam. If not, check out their website and check out all the great work they’re doing. Thanks so much, Jay, for joining us today. Until next time.
0:40:06.7 Michael Goodman: Thank you so much. Thank you so much for tuning into the Artmatcher podcast.
0:40:12.8 Jay Mollica: We had an interesting discussion, a great time, and we hope you did too. Please tune in for next week’s episode and like, share and follow. For more information about the app, you can check out our website at Artmatcher.com or look us up on social. Stay safe and be artful.
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