Aura is the personal art notebook app. The excellent, thought-leading Toledo Museum of Art (TMA) has been our closest major museum collaborator as we’ve been developing Aura for the last year+, and they were generous enough to host our first “sneak peek” event introducing Aura last Thursday evening to museum goers. We had a capacity crowd of about 100 people and almost all of them downloaded and used Aura throughout TMA that night while enjoying cocktails and nibbles. Many have continued to use Aura and give us feedback in the days since, and a few have been making social media posts from Aura tagged #TMAmoment and #AURAverse.
We are introducing Aura live in places where there’s art, including, of course, museums, because there is no point in downloading an app to record art memories where there isn’t any art around. Aura is about experiencing life through #artIRL, not couchsurfing.
I’m sharing my introductory remarks from the evening here at @deeje’s suggestion. It’s probably a good overview for anyone trying to understand what Aura is, where we are, and where we are going. Enjoy.
Aura @ TMA Welcome
Welcome to the Aura Sneak Peek!
I am Christina Noren, Aura CEO. I am here with three of my cofounders tonight - Peter Fox - president, Deeje Cooley - Director of Mobile and our technology lead, and a number of our other teammembers - Karen Sun - Director of Data Science, Emma Dannin - Director of Product Management, and Kate Rockhold and Kenneth Smith - our art evangelists.
We are all incredibly grateful that you have come to the event tonight to be amongst the first to use and give feedback to Aura in a museum setting.
We are also very grateful to the Toledo Museum of Art, Brian Kennedy, Adam Levine, Anne Bennett, Jeanne Rudski and all of their wonderful teams for their support in being Aura’s closest guide museum partner and hosting this event tonight. Toledo is blessed with not just one of the most beautiful museums and richest collections in the world, but one of the most forward-thinking leadership teams and vibrant and supportive local communities. It has been an absolute pleasure for our team to visit Toledo half a dozen times in the last year and collaborate closely with everyone in and around the museum.
Aura is a San Francisco based startup technology company that is just over a year old. We are applying state of the art mobile, social, location and big data technology to art in the service of a mission to increase everyone’s engagement with art everywhere.
That probably sounds great, and also like about a dozen other art tech projects you as engaged art lovers and museum patrons have heard about, right? So what does it actually mean? What’s different about us?
Well, first, unlike most techies doing stuff in the art world, we do not believe in replacing real world art experiences with digital ones. We’re not super enamored of turning paintings into pixels on a screen. It’s good and important work for people like Google to build databases in collaboration with museums of digital images of the world’s masterpieces - but it really doesn’t have much to do with the experience of seeing art in the round.
We love wonderful places like this one, where you can walk around works like these here in Classic Court, sit in their presence, enjoy overhearing snippets of other people’s reactions, see how they play off of other works around them, approach them from afar and feel how entering their presence affects you - in short, we love art IRL - digital native speak for “in real life.”
We do think that mobile devices have a role to play in enriching experiences of art, however. We’ve closely observed how people of all stripes have started using their phone cameras to remember what they saw.
How many of you have taken a photo of an artwork in the last year on your smartphone? How many of you have taken a picture of a wall label next to an artwork? If you haven’t, have you wanted to but worried about whether photos were allowed?
<note: Almost everyone in attendance raised their hand here!>
There’s also been a lot of press around apps, usually for specific museums, that bring you information about artworks on your mobile devices. Some of these apps are being designed to help you plan your visit. Some of them try to be useful while in presence of the art. The truth is, there’s been a lot more hype than reality, since, as wonderful as museums are, it’s not their core competency to develop technology. We also question whether you, the museumgoer, wants an app for every museum you visit, and whether you want your art knowledge limited to a few featured works at major museums.
That’s why Aura has a different vision for mobile technology and art. We’re building an app that is meant to be universal - meaning it’s useful for all art everywhere, not just specific museums who have preloaded specific artworks. It begins with and leads to more real-world experiences of art - rather than encouraging couchsurfing. And most importantly, we’re for our users, not for institutions or art dealers. And our knowledge is the accumulation of all of our users’ encounters, reactions and contributions - casual museum visitor and curator alike.
TMA has been our most forward looking thought partner on this vision. As you all know, TMA distinguishes itself amongst the country’s leading museums not just through its fine collection but through the sophistication and clear mission to serve the public of its leadership and staff. While bigger museums are out raising funds to build apps whose main purpose is to polish the museums’ brands and image of their creators in the elite world of museum professionals, TMA has instead embraced us as having a common mission of truly serving the public and increasing every individual’s engagement with art. We are deeply grateful for this support from Brian Kennedy and the TMA staff. We are also immensely grateful for all of you that have chosen to spend tonight with us as we begin to share this vision with the world.
So let’s get into some specifics.
Aura’s vision is very big, but in the tradition of the best and most successful user-centered technology companies - think Google, Facebook, Apple - we are starting simple, with something we hope is useful and compelling to everyone and easy to start using right away.
Aura today, in its first incarnation, is a personal art notebook. It’s an app for iOS - iPhone and iPad - that you download from the App Store. (Android will be here soon…)
It lets you remember all of your art experiences in one place. You do this by taking photos with your phone camera through Aura of the art and labels that you see. Aura reads the labels and makes them easy to search so you can find specific art memories later. You can add your own notes.
Aura may also recognize artworks that you or others have remembered before, and/or the name of artists or other topics. When it does, it will add what it knows to your memories.
Making memories also builds the Aura of the museums, galleries and other art venues that you visit so that others who follow in your footsteps benefit from what you capture and the notes you make.Of course we also make it easy to share your memories with quick links to email, Tweet, Facebook, and SMS.
We built this as our first version app because in talking with art lovers like you what we heard over and over was that they struggled with remembering what art they saw. Many more people are using their mobile devices in museums to take photos, and museums are encouraging this more and more, but these photos end up mixed in with family snapshots and impossible to find. Then they have a hard time reading labels in their photos to remember the name of the artist or details like the title, date, or label writeup from the curators.
People who have been using this app so far are finding that reliving memories in the app with the notes that Aura makes from labels is a fun new activity that is helping them see more, learn more, retain more, and feel a lot more confident in talking about their art experiences. I know that’s been my experience. Aura’s given me as a lifelong art lover, artist, and collector a whole new set of eyes and almost every one of my social experiences with friends now involves exchanging recent art experiences.
Over time, Aura will add more features. We expect to make it so you can do things like share your own profile and art experiences and follow other users, museums, artists and art topics. We’ll help you identify and share your reactions and understand your own taste and sensibility. You’ll see a lot more stories, video, images and associations for artworks, people, places, movements and other topics. Aura will be able to notify you of nearby works and exhibits and guide you to and within art venues to find specific works and follow others’ tours and highlights.
Eventually, if you’re interested, you’ll be able to get our help finding art and artists to collect. But what we add, and what we add first, is going to be driven by what you tell us is most valuable to increase your engagement with art and get more fun, confidence and fulfillment from art experiences.
Tonight’s event is a test. While people have been using Aura in various settings for a few months, we haven’t before tried to get hundreds of users to use Aura in a single museum at one time. We expect to learn lots of new things from all of you tonight. The goal is to learn what we need to do in terms of communication and features so that we can eventually promote the app at the ticket desk of this and other museums and have all visitors have a great experience throughout their museum visit and beyond. We’re deeply appreciative of all of you being here. We hope that you find it fun to use Aura as a new set of eyes in your beloved TMA as well as providing input to us to make Aura better.
What we’d like to invite you to do tonight is wander around with Aura installed and open on your personal iPhone or iPad. As you go, we’d encourage you to create as many memories as you can. Take photos of both the art and the labels. Take your own notes. Share memories on your favorite social network either tonight while you’re here, or later. The Aura and TMA team members here tonight are all standing by to help you download, install, and start using the app.
And for those without an ios device: www.aura.com/nearby will give you a flavor of what others are capturing.
We’d also like to invite you to take a survey about your experience, your art activities, and where you’d like to see the app go next. Emma and Kate will be over at that table to sign you up to a mailing list to get the survey after the event tonight.
If you like the app tonight, keep using it, both at TMA and anywhere else you see art you want to remember.
As I mentioned, we are moving toward promoting Aura at the ticket desk here at TMA and other museums. We’d also like to get your feedback on the best way to do that. Kate and Emma also have some different promo posters and cards for you to take a look at over at our table. We’d like to get your reactions to these ideas. You can also take some of the postcards and business size handout cards home to spread the news about Aura with your family and friends.
If you do keep using Aura, we’re very interested in hearing from you with any ideas or other feedback to make Aura better. In the app you’ll find a menu behind the Aura logo that has a link to “send feedback.” Anything you write in will be reviewed by Emma and the rest of the product team and will directly influence our development. We’ll also write back if you need help.
OK, I’m almost done and ready to let you all go see some art with Aura. Last thing I want to say before you go is remember this is a sneak peek and our first large scale museum test. Things are likely to go wrong. The wifi may get overloaded. Recognition may be off. We’re together at the cutting edge. We are here to help and learn. Grab one of us if anything seems wrong, and tell us how we can do better. We’re also going to be wandering around and checking in with you as you go, offering suggestions, and observing you using the app. We’re really excited to see what happens!
Go now, have a cocktail, have a bite, see friends, meet some new people, and make some art memories!
<note: The attendees from that evening are into 1000+ individual art memories a few days later, and counting… thanks, Toledo art lovers!>
