At the moment, all these are unpaid internships, and therefore the number of hours required is negotiable.
1. Community Development intern: I’m starting a Museum MediaLab Meetup group. The focus of this group is to foster new types of relationships between big cultural institutions and the creative technology community. The emphasis of this group will be on DOING things; providing creative technologists with the content, access, and resources they need to get things done, and educating them about the perspectives and priorities of cultural institutions, to come up with projects that can show off the potential impact of new technology on the cultural sector.
The Community Development Intern’s job will be to facilitate these activities, helping to plan meetups, hackathons, gallery tours, curator meetings, and other activities to bring museums interests together with creative tech inspiration. If you have students that are really interested in the social aspect of coding, or who are checking out careers in community development, this might be a good fit for them. A great opportunity to meet interesting people in the museum and creative tech scene.
2. AR Development intern: we’re looking at a variety of speculative ideas in the area of Augmented Reality. Many of our roman and egyptian sculptures were originally vividly painted; can we bring that color back through digital overlays? From the roof garden of the museum, you can see a skyline filled with the history of the NY art scene. Can we reveal that history through AR? An intern with skills in AR development would have the opportunity to meet with museum experts (curators, historians, etc), and develop prototype applications to show off the possibilities of AR technology in our museum. Because the projects the MediaLab does are often speculative in nature, we are willing to entertain student’s own development ideas, and work with them to provide them the resources they need to bring them to fruition.
3. Google Glass: We’ve been presented with a variety of opportunities to develop Google Glass apps. While we don’t know exactly where this is headed yet, a Google Glass intern would have a chance at early exposure to this technology, within a museum environment.
Don Undeen
Don.Undeen@metmuseum.org
Manager of MediaLab
Metropolitan Museum of Art