[-empyre-] galleries & establishments

["Marek Walczak" <wonderwalker@hotmail.com>]

Sorry you had such a bad technical experience. Except for one minor flaw 
we've so far managed ok, thankfully. I do have a bunch of things I do:

Make friends with the technicians, or at least have some interesting 
relationship with them. In every case I've found them wonderful.

Offer help to anyone else you are with, technical issues are a pain and its 
a godsend when someone has a quick answer.

Assume that everything will go wrong, and have backup plans for any 
contingency you can imagine. For example, if you give them a CD, make sure 
you also have an ftp site where they can download.

Assume that no one will do anything. In museums the support staff is almost 
always overworked and badly paid, most of the issues are inintended. If 
things dont get done, scream. Email everyone, bother everyone.(this as a 
last resort)

Make simple instructions. I've found this really hard to do, now I create 
two sets of instructions, one sealed in an envelope. This way you give them 
something easy to follow, but if things dont work, you have a list of issues 
they can check in the envelope.

Is it plugged in? As any computer repairperson will tell you, most of the 
time the issues are trivial, a plug in the wrong place, etc. In our case, 
someone pushed the server keyboard under the monitor, which held down the 
'Esc' key and so no one could print.
Marek


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Recently i had a hideous experience where the Museum in Hobart let my
immersive VRML installation remain "broken" for the whole exhibition period
because their technical person did not install the specified pluggin which
was included with all the and installation instructions i sent them , and
they didnt contact me to ask how to do it. Even worse was that when another
artist who i know , who worked in the same media as me, who was at the
location,  offered to do it  - the museum refused her, saying thier
technical people would deal with it..(which of course they didn't) i didnt
know this till after the show had finished.. the really simple soultion that
would have taken 5minutes to fix caused my work to look liek its crap.. and
it puts off audiences for new media becasue the work can't be seen..


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