This is a “BlogBack” first! The Walker Art Center has responded to my blog on its blog.
Regarding CultureGrrl‘s critique of “Art on Call,” the Walker’s New Media Initiatives blogger, Nate Schroeder, offered these updates:
We’ve just recently installed a nifty cellphone signal repeater in the space deepest in the galleries that previously got terrible reception—right next to the Burnet gallery. It’s possible her [CultureGrrl’s] carrier simply doesn’t benefit from the frequencies we’re repeating (it doesn’t cover them all) but I’m hopeful it was just a matter of timing and the repeater hadn’t kicked on.
As for her other comments, I think some of them will be addressed in the near(ish) future as we start incorporating feedback into the menu prompts. For instance, many people don’t realize you can interrupt the initial prompt by typing in the 4-digit code, effectively skipping right to the artwork you’re looking at. Hopefully that will take some of the hassle out of repeated calls if you can just hit redial, wait for the answer, and then just punch in the code. Much faster.
One thing I didn’t mention in my previous post: Since I’m habitually audioguide-averse, I’m more apt to do a spur-of-the-moment dial-up on my cell phone than I am to pick up and carry around a museum-provided device.