Last week, I chaired the “All in hand: Working with handheld devices conference”, which took place at the Royal College of Surgeon in London. It included various presentations from small- to large-scale UK museums discussing their experience with mobile interpretation.

Last week before the Volcano overshadowed any events, Joe Baskerville and I headed over to Denver for Museums and the Web 2010- a major international conference for Museums in the digital space. The conference is a hub of information from the sector with a series of lectures, workshops, conferences, and presentations all exploring the issues of museums online.

So, as John said, the question at hand is: how do you wow the un-wow-able without alienating the familiar? It's a tough question, and here at Cogapp it's our job to try and answer just that question. We understand better than most the phrase "appropriate technology" - when to hide technology, and when to show it; how technology can be used to enhance an exhibition without overwhelming it. Ever since we developed the first museum interactive almost twenty years ago (in the form of the National Gallery's Microgallery) we've been creating new technology and developing new ways of implementing it; advanced hardware and software deployed behind an intuitive user experience is what we do. We're constantly trying to find new and exciting ways to do it. From creating award-winning vivid and instinctive installations for the Great North Museum, to bringing Prudential's corporate archive and stories to life with expansive sheets of Holopro glass, pushing the envelope is never off our radar.

Museums, by their very nature, are often thought of as being places where people go to discover, reflect on and learn more about things of the past. Even museums that are focussed on modern times or even the future tend to impart knowledge of the way things are through the use of artifacts. So onlookers tend not to think of them as places of technological innovation. But in their bid to attract ever-greater audiences to their exhibitions, museums are constantly striving to create ever-greater installations for said exhibitions to instigate the 'wow' factor that will get visitors talking about (and, equally as importantly, recommending) what they've seen. Given that one of the central remits of a museum is to educate and inform the masses, bringing in the audiences is vital to their mission statement. And so it is that in their drive to create more revolutionary exhibits, museums often become incubation units for rapid changes in technology. The irony of this is that visitors having an enjoyable, easy and relaxing experience is so integral to museums that the technology needs to be implemented in a smooth and efficient way. So much so in fact that it mostly goes unnoticed. It's such a fluid experience that the technological innovation happening under a visitor's very nose is more often than not completely under-appreciated.

“And the award for the best Offline: Kiosk, Installation or On-Site Application goes to” …you could cut the tension with a knife… “Cogapp and their interactives for the Great North Museum!” Cue cries of joy, surges of adrenalin, and all round jubilation.

On Thursday 19 November we were proud to take home a British Interactive Media Association Award from the ceremony at Camden’s KOKO. Having started way back in the digital olden days of 1984, the BIMAs are one of the oldest and most renowned awards of their kind - so it goes without saying that our shiny new trophy is standing with pride amidst its brethren in the office. Its also by far the most dangerous trophy we’ve received - made of stainless steel and slightly reminiscent of a Klingon bat'leth.

'Une Semaine de Bonté' or 'A week of kindness' was the third collage-novel by Dada artist Max Ernst, made and published in 1933. The original collages that form this novel currently make up an excellent exhibition in Paris at the Musée D'Orsay, which I had the pleasure of visiting on a recent break.

Ernst was born in Germany in 1891. He began painting after abandoning his philosophy studies at Bonn University, but after 5 years he was enlisted to serve in World War I. This caused a big interruption to his career as an artist, but nonetheless fueled his imagination ready to resume his work once his service was over.

After the war Ernst founded a prominent Dada group in Cologne, Germany with several other artists, and began his experiments with collage. In 1922, Ernst moved to Paris to join another Dadaist group. Rather than transporting masses of paintings from Germany to France as a German ex-soldier, Ernst was able to post an exhibition's worth of collages to himself in Paris.  At this time the Parisians were just beginning to come to terms with the Dadaist movement, where existing standards in art were rejected and replaced with more chaotic and nonconformist ideas, which many referred to as 'anti-art'. Ernst's new collages made a big impression, giving him a new found notoriety on the art scene. These collages marked the first of a series of three collage-novels that Ernst would make over the following decade.

It is the final novel in this series, 'Une Semaine de Bonté', that is currently displayed at the Musée D'Orsay, and is made up of 184 collages. As you might expect, the themes running throughout the images are rather sombre, and the images strange, uncanny and unsettling, but also exciting.

Here are a few images from the series.