MEURAL FRAME
For all my talk about how the digital revolution has connected us with a world of music and books and paintings, bringing these closer and closer to us, allowing us to store everything on a hard disk or on the cloud, so that we can live in very little space and take everything with us when we travel, I realized that I wasn’t practicing what I was preaching. My Meural Frame, a large digital frame which allows me to view paintings from all over the world in a high resolution ina 13 x 23 inch format that I was boasting about, actually quit working at least six months ago or longer.
It was no longer connected with Wifi at least since I changed providers 6 months ago. I tried a number of times, following on screen directions, to connect with wifi but finally end up when the screen being frozen, not responding to anything that I tried.
This is of course one of the problems with digital devices that makes people lose patience and give up on them. But I was preaching how great they were. Finally I resorted to going on line to Meural support. I knew, as everyone knows, it would take forever to get connected and that I would be guided by a disembodied artificial intelligence voice that would misunderstand everything I wanted and would finally shunt me to waiting in a queue where I would hear endless music, repeated assurances that they were taking my call very seriously and would be right with me and lots of ads to buy more Netgear products. That was a major reason for putting off the effort to fix my problem all along. I didn’t want to devote an evening on the phone resolving my problem, which in the end I did.
I finally got a person on the end of the line. His name, I found out was Nobby, and when I asked him about the birds calls I could hear over his shoulder I found out that he was in Chennai, India, working from home and that it was 4:30 in the morning and the birds were just waking up. For an hour he had me try one thing and then another and nothing worked. Finally he said he would check with his supervisor and call me back. Late in the evening I found a text message saying he had tried calling me and I didn’t answer and that my voicemail didn’t work either. He left me a case number and said to call back. But it was too late. This afternoon I called again, expecting to be connected with another person and to spend another hour waiting to be connected. But this time I got through to a young woman, also working from home in Chennai at night. I like talking with them about India but they won’t talk long and I remember that the call may be recorded. That message comes up every time, I thought that it was to make their service better but I think it is really to catch people who are talking on the phone when they should be working. This young woman fixed my problem in ten minutes, the guy the night before was pleasant but had no idea what he was doing.
So finally after six months my Meural frame was fixed and I discovered that all I had to do was to enter the name of a painter and all of his works that the website had copies of could be put into a playlist. So I entered Johannes Vermeer and 31 paintings appeared, scattered in museums around the world. The exhibit that I didn’t see in the Rycksmuseum had at great expense and with a tremendous amount of diplomacy managed to bring together 27 of Vermeer’s paintings for the largest collection of Vermeer paintings to be exhibited at one time, an exhibit not likely to be repeated, an exhibit that it was almost impossible to get tickets for.
But here I had collected 31 paintings and could exhibit them, one after the other, in my own home at very little expense. So all day, while I sit and drink coffee I can attend an exhibit of almost all Vermeer’s paintings. I am delighted and practicing what I preach
Of course the question is whether the digital reproductions of the Vermeer paintings can come anywhere close to seeing them in the original. You decide. I photographed them on the digital frame with my little iPhone, not the best of cameras, but good enough I think.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 