On this occasion, the intertwining of art and technology occurs through the dissemination of content. The Mart Museum in Rovereto presents a project in collaboration with Alexa, the small robotic extension of the world’s largest online shopping network, Amazon. You can ask Alexa to play music, tell you the time, read the news, create a memo and much more. Mart, raccontami una storia [Mart, tell me a story] is a channel for conversation designed to extend the contents of the museum beyond its physical walls and right into the home. Alexa’s voice explores the museum’s material and immaterial collection in small chunks, fun facts, some of which are taken from rarely-seen archive documents.
Mart, raccontami una storia joins a number of other projects developed in recent years by Mart and focusing on digital communication, which make the Rovereto museum a leading centre for innovation.
These range from the digitalisation of artworks, books and archive materials – as in the projects developed on Google Arts & Culture and Wikipedia – to the production of content for the leading social networks: Facebook and Twitter, through which the Mart shared updates about its offer to the public; Instagram and Pinterest, on which the museum curates genuine visual collections associated with its activities and the heritage it preserves; and lastly YouTube, with a channel devoted to more detailed content such as teasers for exhibitions and talks by curators. The Alexa project was created by MART in collaboration with Dimension, the company that previously developed the MartMuseumBot: a chatbot available on the Telegram and Messenger apps to propose a new way of visiting and connecting with the museum.
These are today’s systems for the promotion and valorisation of the museum, and they may involve the use of commercial channels to convey knowledge. It will undoubtedly be extremely important to understand where they should be published in order to reach their target audiences. Certainly many aspects need to be fine-tuned. However, this is a step forward which enters the business network and filters certain content-related operations besides consumption. Accessing the content is simple! Just say: “Alexa, open Mart Rovereto”.
