The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art has created a new service that allows people to access art via text messages with the new Send Me SFMOMA sms requests.
The Museum’s website reads “Text 572-21 with the words ‘Send Me’ followed by a keyword, a colour, or even an emoji and you’ll receive a related artwork image and caption via text message.”
The website continues on to explain the type of image you could receive through texting: “for example ‘send me the ocean’ might get you Pirkle Jones’ Breaking Wave, Golden Gate; ‘send me something blue’ could result in Éponge (SE180) by Yves Klein; and ‘send me 💐’ might return Yasumasa Morimura’s An Inner Dialogue with Frida Kahlo (Collar of Thorns).”
In total the museum has more than 34,000 pieces, but only 5 per cent of them are on display at once. The new text service hopes to make the collections more accessible to the public. On average a visitor spends just seven seconds in front of any artwork. With the artbot text back service SFMOMA hopes to deepen the public’s engagement with their collection.
So far responses online have been very positive with hundreds of thousands of texts. Twitter users have been sharing how ‘amazing’ the feature is.
SFMOMA’s creative technologist Jay Mollica says, “in a world oversaturated with information, we asked ourselves: how can we generate personal connections between a diverse cross section of people and the artworks in our collection? How can we provide a more comprehensive experience of our collection?”
He adds, “Send Me SFMOMA is an SMS service that provides an approachable, personal, and creative method of sharing the breadth of SFMOMA’s collection with the public.”
https://time.com/4852051/san-francisco-museum-of-modern-art-text-art/