When I arrived at ACMI three years ago, I had a relatively naïve understanding of how much museums invest in the quality and robustness of their digital technology. Obviously, no-one wants their technology to fail, but museums — especially technology-rich ones like ACMI — face challenges of robustness, demand and scale that are unlike any other industry sector: How can we plan for no accessible cabling but easy maintainability? An artist has made a work with technology we’ve never encountered before.

Artist’s impression of technology doing its thing in our new exhibition As Lead Engineer and project CTO, I have headed up the multi-year technology design and implementation for ACMI’s $40m Re/newal. One of the guiding principles of the renewed ACMI is “curation by humans, enabled by technology” (sigh, I guess my top secret curate-o-bot AI can wait for another day). We wanted to build a system that curators can use to choose and rapidly deploy playlists of content around ACMI’s galleries, whether the media comes from ACMI’s Collection, edit suite, special exhibition videos or elsewhere.

This is just a quick post to say hello, we made an exhibition-scale internet-of-things media player, and we’ve open-sourced it so you can use it too. XOS media players playing through various kinds of demo content on various screens as part of our long-term testing — thanks to sighmon for the photo Why did we roll our own media player? As the world’s most-visited museum of the moving image, ACMI has a lot of, well, moving image to show.