Marvin Lipofsky's visit to the Museum of Glass hotshop in July 2007 is available for viewing at the Museum of Glass YouTube channel.
Videos of glass demos have been available on the Web for almost as long as YouTube has been around (a search for “glass demo” brings up more than 1,500 results), but it has been the Museum of Glass in the highly digital Pacific Northwest that has pioneered real-time broadcasting of the goings-on in the museum’s hot shop, which it began in 2008. With regular broadcasts from Wednesday through Saturday, 10 AM – 5 PM (PST), as well as Sundays, 12 PM – 5 PM (PST), the museum’s hot shop has truly gone digital, making it possible for this institution to reach a potentially global audience. With footage of their regular roster of visiting artists who have included such names as Marvin Lipofsky, Michael Rogers, Martin Blank, Fred Tschida, Greg Dietrich, Jeremy Lepisto, Mel George, Beverly Semmes, and Jay Macdonnel, the institution has archived many of its live broadcasts on You Tube, where the Museum of Glass has its own channel where they have been uploading footage since 2006.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=31VO2volBRg]
Now another museum hotshop is entering the live-streaming realm. This evening, the Toledo Museum of Art’s hotshop will be broadcast live on the Internet. But rather than an in-house production, this will be done through the local public television station WGTE, which will be making the stream available on its website here. The live streaming of a Friday evening performance by performance art troupe Cirque de Verre will begin at 7 PM (EST) and continue until 10 PM. The GLASS Hot Sheet recently interviewed Cirque de Verre about their work for a blog posting you can read here.
“Our hotshop only seats 50, and we have an additional 200 seats for an onsite simulcast, so we’re utilizing WGTE’s technology that we’re renting from them to make it possible,” says Jeff Mack, manager of the glass studio at the museum’s Glass Pavilion. “The live Internet streaming is a welcome by-product of that, and we may utilize WGTE again in the future.”