Samsung is sponsoring an exhibition at Seoul Korea’s Hangaram Museum where you can see major works of art including Vincent Van Gogh’s Starry Night during their Rêve et Réalité (Dream and Reality) exhibition running from now through September.

Four 46″ LED TV’s are on the wall showing these works of art. A “Digital Smart Docent” at the beginning of the exhibition helps museum attendees learn about the paintings via videos and text on the Samsung Smart TV.

What do you think? Is this the Museum of Tomorrow? A museum cannot get the actual work of art to display so they use a High Definition television screen to display the work of art. While you’re at it, you can provide zoom-in capabilities to see the fine details.

I’m not entirely sure how I feel about it. I think many would believe there is nothing like viewing the real thing in person, but how often can you make it to Paris to see the Mona Lisa?

Story taken from:

• Samsung Smart TV Meets Van Gogh in Starry Night of Seoul
• Samsung’s press website

Ground Control
Our newly renovated elevator in the Elizabeth M. and Richard M. Ross Building houses a 30″ flat panel monitor that displays a moving piece of art. The device is powered by a computer on the Elevator that has a solid-state hard drive to avoid problems with vibration. As far as we know, nobody in Ohio has anything like this type of setup.

Love Shack
The CMA Love Shack is housed in Gallery 10 the “Love and War” Gallery. The Love Shack enables you to share your thoughts on what you think love is to a camera which records your 40-second video. Then after a short approval process, your video is uploaded to youtube.com and displayed on the monitor on the outside of the loveshack. If you’re here at the Museum come record your story and see it online.

The Wonder Room
In the wonder room, we have a couple of screens which display the welcome to the Wonder Room video and a looping video with ideas on being creative with your children.

Family Gallery
In the family gallery there are a few videos along with others dotted throughout the museum. Come check those out and see what you can learn from the content produced by our own Jeff Sims.

The Auditorium
Finally the Cardinal Health Auditorium is a technology beast!  Not only do we have a new HD projector and are capable of HD video and displays from multiple sources. We have a sophisticated sound board and lighting console to take full advantage of programming like the CMA Game Show. We also have a three-camera shoot capability to give you multiple angles and Live Streaming!  Just about anything you want to do in our Auditorium, you can do. Just ask!

The amazing improvements we’ve made to the Art Museum over the last 10 months is astounding. Come visit today!

Up until recently, the largest digital photo was a 45-gigapixel image of Dubai.  Well, now Gadling.com has an article up on their site highlighting the latest in the world record seekers for the largest digital photo in the world. 70-gigapixels!

Consider your camera, what size is it? Probably 8-Megapixels, perhaps 10?  Now consider that one Gigapixel is 1,000 Megapixels. This picture is that large! The weighs in at 200GB of space. That’s larger than most laptop hard drives.

The group used a 25-Megapixel camera with a robotic tripod over two days to complete this work. Check out the article here and follow their link to the original site. There are many “easter eggs” to see where you can zoom in super far to see amazing detail.

For those of you who don’t know about or don’t care about networks, we have  a main room where everything is kept and then we have closets in other locations to expand the network since there are limitations on how long cable can be.  The picture to the right (click to see it larger) is the top of the network racks. There is massive amounts of conduit through the building and here is the central location where these wires run. It’s a mess right now because we’re still installing, but this is exciting for any computer geek such as myself.

From here you can see the massive amounts of wire that are used throughout the building and they are collecting here. There’s Cat-6 network cabling, Fiber and Coaxial cable for television service. And yes, it’s all labeled so we know where they are going on the other end!

Lastly, you can see a closer picture of the conduit that runs into this room. Each one goes to a different location in the bulding to supply those areas. The engineering involved with this is truly amazing. I admire the men and women involved with planning all this, running conduit and pulling all these wires. In some cases doing these things while crawling through damp dark crawl spaces. Great job everyone!

All this cabling will help to supply you, the visitor, with great experiences with great art. Whether it be the people at the front desk taking your membership card, watching a video or presentation in the Cardinal Health Auditorium, or sitting in a gallery with your laptop surfing the internet. This cabling work here is like the nerve center of the museum reaching all the corners making the little things happen to make your experience that much better.  It’s all worth it.

~Thomas Deliduka
Director of Information Technology

These switches were over 8 years old but they were great. The four switches made up our 1GB fiber backbone. During the transition, we kept one of them online but two weeks ago we shut it down for good. The picture to the right is my Network Administrator pulling the fiber connection from the switch.

Now our backbone is 10GB and everything else is upgraded. We’ve also updated our Public Wifi to be more secure and are rolling out a new access point in Chihuly.

~Thomas Deliduka
Director of Information Technology

Next week is the final push with a new phone system being installed and at the end of the week staff moves over! This is a very exciting time. I know we have not added too many new photos to the Flickr Construction Gallery, but I hope to add more soon.  I look forward to serving the museum from my new office in Beaton Hall.

~Thomas Deliduka
Director of Information Technology

Check it out here.

~Thomas Deliduka
Director of Information Technology

In three weeks we’ll be moving equipment into Beaton Hall. I’m getting quite excited because this will mark the end of 10 months of planning and preparation and the beginning of a new network and phone system for the Museum.

With this new network comes a brand new server room which will house all the systems that will power the museum including our front desk, Palette, membership database, and more.  To give more details would to compromise our computer security but suffice to say, a new day is dawning for the information technology needs at the CMA. It is all very exciting for a tech-head like me.

~Thomas Deliduka
Director of Information Technology

Five Apps for the Art Lover

These apps are for the Mac and for the iPhone, so if you’re a PC user but have an iPhone, you can take advantage of these too, check them out!

~Thomas Deliduka, Director of Information Technology

In the IT Department, we manage all these computers and their software. We’re a two-man team that works hard and it’s soon all going to change. With the renovation, we’re building a new network that will be state of the art and have the ability to provide more services to you in addition to the Free Public Wifi we currently offer. If you haven’t checked that out yet, come on down, grab a meal in the Palette and surf the web. It’s free!

~Thomas Deliduka
Director of Information Technology