We’ve just launched Getty Voices, a new social media project on The Iris led by a different member of the Getty community every week.
Each Monday we’ll have a new voice and a new topic, kicking off with a post on The Iris and continuing with more conversation throughout the week on a newly launched Getty Twitter (@thegetty) and Facebook (/thegetty), led in weekly rotation by Getty staff.
As the voices change, so will the approaches. Sometimes we’ll take you behind the scenes with our work, other times we’ll mount a weeklong web exhibition, live-cover a symposium, or stage an online app festival. And the topics? Anything and everything relating to art, culture, and the Getty’s mission—seen from a creative angle. Every week we’ll include video and audio, and as we pick up speed we’ll build in online Q&As and Hangouts, too. Your input will help us guide the project as it evolves.
We’re looking forward to introducing you to these wonderful voices over the project’s first months:
- Claudia Cancino shares her Peru field notebook (see her post here and find more updates from Claudia on Twitter and Facebook)
- Annette Leddy takes us inside the mind of the forgotten surrealist
- Anne Woollett explores Vermeer
- Bryan Keene leads us on a journey through Renaissance gardens
- Murtha Baca, Anne Helmreich, and Susan Edwards tell us what’s happening in digital humanities
- The Villa Teen Apprentices dig into the ancient world & pop culture
To launch Getty Voices, we’ve redesigned The Iris as an online magazine with a clean, colorful look and a responsive design that’s easy to read on tablet and mobile. The magazine also features new, frequently updated content from outside the Getty, including videos and posts from other cultural institutions, journalists, and critics. (We’ll talk more about the decisions that went into redesign in a follow-up post.)
In planning Getty Voices we were deeply inspired by art experiments that are truly of the web, using technology as a creative medium to engage and inspire: the generosity of SmartHistory, the editorial intelligence of Walker Art Center, the radical inclusivity of SFMOMA’s Open Space, the personal warmth of the Met’s Connections (and now its beautifully immersive series 82nd & Fifth).
Being increasingly of the web, especially the social web, is one of our major goals at the Getty. Taking all our parts together (museum, conservation institute, grant-making foundation, research institute, art publisher, and store), we have over 20 social media spaces, with eight launched in 2012 alone. So why more? Because Getty Voices sets out to do something more: to define a new voice for the Getty in the digital world, as a collective conversation between you and all of us—educators and gardeners, conservators and librarians, curators and security officers, scientists and designers. So much of what we do happens behind the scenes, and this new project aims to use the power of the web to make the whole Getty more accessible and more participatory than ever before.
Voices is a new way of working for us, a social media project that’s social from the inside out. It’s been exciting, challenging, revelatory, and full of unknowns. It’s a chance to take a risk and try something new, and we hope you’ll come and join us.
Find Getty Voices
Getty Voices posts on The Iris:
Voices blog posts
Follow #GettyVoices on Twitter:
Follow @thegetty
Join us on Facebook: