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By Steve Benoff Let me tell you about my trip to the Palm Springs Art Museum. If you haven't visited this gem, you owe it to yourself to do so. It's a beautiful building right in the heart of the city – a mere 25 miles away from Four Seasons. Not only that, the museum is open for free on the second Sunday of every month and from 4 to 8pm on Thursdays. Why would the museum choose Thursday evening to offer free admission you might ask? Thursday evening is another good reason to visit Palm Springs. From 6 to 10 pm (7 to 10 pm in the summer) every Thursday, Palm Canyon Dr. is closed for a street fair. So why not start your evening at the art museum and then go to the fair? Okay, okay. I can hear you now. What does this have to do with an app? I'll get to it, but not before I set the scene. I was walking through the museum after having visited the art museum's Architecture and Design Center in a wonderful mid- century modern converted bank building on Palm Canyon Dr. The main museum has a terrific exhibit that runs through April. It's called Unsettled – Art on the New Frontier. The museum describes the exhibit as "a sweeping presentation of contemporary art by more than 75 artists living or working in the Greater West." The artists run from the famous to the not so famous. The show includes a breathtaking work I'll try to describe. Six hundred twenty five identical roughly five-inch long models of a submarine fill a room hanging on wires of various lengths suspended from the ceiling. On one wall there is a list of every submarine in the US Navy from the first through the mid 1980s. There's also a notebook filled with the description of each vessel. It's worth a trip to the museum for this work alone. Take a look at the photos above — notice anything peculiar? You will no doubt remember my mentioning QR apps. Using such an app you can scan a QR (quick response) code and be taken to an associated site. Well right in the center of these two works of wool and natural dyes are woven QR codes. The description accompanying these works tells you what to do. "Use your smartphone to uncover stories and poems related to the preservation of indigenous languages. To scan the QR code in Guillermo Bert's weavings, download a QR code reader application onto your smartphone. The application will prompt you to scan the code, and then will automatically link to a video to access the stories." I used QR Reader, but there are countless others. I've mentioned apps associated with art museums like the Metropolitan in New York and the Barnes in Philadelphia, but this is the first piece of art I've seen that incorporates an app into its very being. Go to the Palm Springs Art Museum before the show ends April 30 and give it a try. Even if it turns out not to excite you, something in this museum will. If you use an app you'd like to share with other, let me know at steve.benoff@verizon.net. 16 FOUR SEASONS BREEZE | FEBRUARY 2019 THERE'S AN APP FOR THAT! Palm Springs Art Museum: A Hidden Gem Contemporary art from "Unsettled - Art on the New Frontier"

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