Blog

(Please excuse me if I sound angry; these types of arguments just annoy me.)

They move through galleries fast and with a new purpose — cellphones in hand, they’re on Instagram treks and selfie hunts — and with a new viewing rhythm: Stop, point, pose, snap.

I’ll just start by saying I hate this article. I hate the wording. I hate the attitude. I hate the way of thinking. I hate that the article sounds like another “them-versus-us” argument about the detrements of social media and those young people are on those darn smartphones too much. 

Although yes, there are people who are just that vain and do go to museums just to take “selfies,” generalizing an entire demographic as attending museums for such reason is… stupid.

Like libraries, they were places where the volume was low, the energy slow, the technology unobtrusive. You came to them to look, to think and, in the days before museums became the prime social spaces they are now, to be alone in a small, like-minded crowd.

Yes, and you also used to pay gas that didn’t make your wallet cry, used to refer to a paper map for driving directions, and used to dial an industrial-grade plastic telephone with a corded handset. So what? What point are you trying to make? That museums are no longer the same environment back in “the good ol’ days?”

 

My own introduction to art was remote and virtual, at home as a kid, looking through books, flipping pages, stopping when something caught my attention. But what got me hooked were visits to museums, notably the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and seeing crucial features of art that didn’t come through in reproduction.

The attitude this author has is preventing him from realizing this: the same way books motivated him to go out to the museums to experience the real thing, social media is serving for the present generation. He speaks of everything books lacked–scale, experience, texture–without realizing that the “digital photographs” he speaks of are not seen as a holy grail that our generation is using to substitute a live experience. He sites a survey that states the obvious–that people prefer to see museums in person. He ends his argument with, again, the obvious–that photos do not suffice in terms of experiencing art. What he completely fails to see is that us, as “young people,” agree with him as well. I can attest to this firsthand, as my list of must-visit-when-I-have-free-time museums were generated from a friend’s Instagram. Without him, I probably would not have known about the more obscure, local museums outside of the LACMA and the recent Broad-buzz. Furthermore, museums own social media accounts do not supplement a substitute for a real life visit, but rather encourages it, seen below in the Pasadena Museum of California Art’s Instagram.

Obviously there is the same motivative quality in social media as the author found in books. Just because we are now in an age of “digital natives” does not mean that all museum goers today lack substance. In fact, the fact that the author has a discouraging tone towards those who do manage to visit a museum in person, assuming and brushing off their motive as vain, only weakens his already ill-focused argument to me. He’s not satisfied with millennial culture making museums accessible online, nor is he satisfied with the reasons that make them want to go in person… What is he trying to achieve?

The only thing this article achieves is perpetuating an unnecessary “us-versus-them” mentality over a subject that is (somewhat) universally agreed upon.  How can you call this good journalism?

 

 

I found this article, on using interpretive technology at the fine arts museums in San Francisco, was particularly interesting especially since I have visited the deYoung multiple times in the past (I have not yet had the chance to visit the Legion of Honor). This article goes over what Voices:FAMSF is, as well as its aim to combine the visitor’s experience with the art piece with sound to enhance their experience. (On a side note, I thought it was amusing that they decided to use the outdoor sculptures at the deYoung so they could get a better GPS read, since the deYoung has notoriously horrible cellphone reception.)

It’s interesting how these fine arts museums, the ones who are usually less flexible and more resistant to change, are trying to embrace technology and integrate it into the user experience. Maybe this is just the spirit of San Francisco, the city with such a tight-knit relationship with technology and the industry. As someone who grew up the county over, it has always been a given that the (big) museums have always embraced and accepted technology. SFMOMA, before it closed for reconstruction, had large digital displays in the entryway. There are two museums, the California Academy of Sciences and the Exploratorium, dedicated to  technology (although not from an artistic standpoint).

In its beta phase, Voices:FAMSF noted that through the usage of their application, user engagement did increase, and that people actually felt like they were having a more holistic, stronger engagement with the art. Since the application takes visitor comments and uses them to generate a platform for discussion, both from the museum and the community, they hope to increase user engagement and understanding of the art at both of the institutions. While the app may not be ready for the public, their early beta testings are showing that embracing technology can be a good thing for museums.

Okay, maybe I’m looking at this in a sort of biased way given that I myself am a millennial, but was anyone else getting a “I’m against the digitization of art because these kids nowadays don’t understand MY non-digital experience with it” vibe from Holland Cotter’s article, “Tuning Out Digital Buzz, for an Intimate Communion with Art?”

I feel that the argument of baby boomers vs. millennials is pretty prominent in pop culture, especially when we’re talking about how things were back in the good ol’ days without Facebook or Twitter, or Skype or the Chase Mobile app. This argument goes further into the museum world; that is, the ever-so talked about critiques of this generation being so obsessed with digital technology, that we supposedly overlook the significance of artwork and digitally-independent museum experiences. Cotter herself explains, “Like libraries, they were places where the volume was low, the energy slow, the technology unobtrusive. You came to them to look, to think and, in the days before museums became the prime social spaces they are now, to be alone in a small, like-minded crowd.” She recalls moments of true resonance from her experience of museums, stating that “the only way you would retain most of what you saw was by spending time in the galleries and imprinting things on your brain.” But then Cotter goes on to explain the downfalls of technology in museum spaces, particularly, when people rely on digital supplements as the only way to even experience a museum.

But Cotter also brings up examples that work in favor of #TeamDigital. And I quote, “The basic idea is simple: More people should be able to see more art. Who would argue?” It goes without saying that every human being reserves the right of accessibility. Though there may be some parts of the museum experience that can be “missing,” isn’t the fact that making such well-known, generally agreed upon, and culturally significant works open to viewing and learning to all a huge leap for museums? With the reputation of being historically exclusive to those of higher class, or the ones who have the privilege of calling themselves true art appreciators or experts, it’s definitely a plus. Cotter describes the Museum of Modern Art’s direction into encouraging photographs of the objects, as “in general, MoMA is encouraging the picture-taking impulse” for means of sharing and reproducing on the Internet. The museum’s Instagram account is reflective of this culture of having museum-goers either post about their experiences, or allow for followers both around the world and in that sort of interest field to see these experiences and compare it to their own; or rather, even inspire an experience for those who cannot attend the physical space. Reproduction through this Instagram account makes pieces from the museum accessible in another digital delivery method, which can lead to people wanting to visit the MoMA’s website, or search up artists and objects online for their own interests. Reproduction is just that: a representation of an object that is otherwise remote or unable to be physically experienced by everyone, so Cotter’s point of digital accessibility being inaccurate of a work is somewhat skewed.

(The MoMA’s Instagram account encourages patrons to take photos and tag them to be featured.)

In a previous post, I mentioned that scale is usually hard to decipher in digital reproductions. Yet sometimes, aspects of art such as scale or texture is still relatively easy to replicate with today’s technology, even though Cotter disagrees. But ince technology is still improving, who’s to say that we’re missing out on details if we’ve yet to discover or create a method to completely capture them? It’s like how human beings have only explored 2% of the earth’s oceans; anything is possible, and with further digital advancements, we’re getting closer to more possibilities and opportunities of engagement and recording. So why make things less accessible, just because a few minor things might be missing? Accessibility via internet and digital means is such an improvement from the once closed-off space of musuems, so Cotter having to say negative things about not being able to physically experience exhibits and objects is just a little contradictory to her approval of accessibility.

And the further we distance ourselves from art itself, from being in front of it with all filters gone, life is what we lose — art’s and ours.

Anyway, maybe I’m just a bit insulted at Cotter’s viewpoint on accessibility. I mean, admittedly, I do love my digital gadgets, and can see why Cotter would assume this generation of being utterly sucked into them. But at the same time, here’s what I have to say to her: have some faith! It’s a different time and a different meaning of museums that this generation lives in. Art is and can be everywhere, and through digital means, art is not only preserved and reproduced, but even transformed and interpreted in many, many ways. Good or bad, that depends on the eye of the patron. But what matters in the grand scheme of things, is that we can look at works old and new, physical or digital, and think to ourselves, wow, this is art, this is culture, this is what x means to y, this is us, and not have to worry about if our experiences are accurate or need to be validated by a traditional way of thinking.

For this week, I read about the Love and Sorrow exhibit in Australia about the psychological and emotional damage of World War I. The exhibit focuses on the story of eight families and utilized a phone app to guide a visitor through the museum. The app is expected to be downloaded prior to entry into the museum. I must wonder at how they accomplish this and how one might view the exhibit without a phone app. As I understand it, the exhibit is highly dependent upon having the app to guide you through the exhibit.

Upon entering, the visitor must select a single family to follow and download the package about them. They are guided by location on Bluetooth promoting numerous stories and content pop ups. ALthough this whole process seems cool and innovative, it is rather selective in terms  of its viewership. What if people do not have a smart phone? What if their phone does not have a particular program needed to work the app? What if they are small children who do not yet have a phone? This exhibit would seem to exclude poorer classes of society from getting the full experience of the exhibit. It would be nice if the museum could somehow provide people with the technology rather than expecting them to own it. This process seems to put too much pressure on the visitor to go through numerous digital acts in order to learn.

Also, by limiting the visitor to one families story, they are kept from learning the story of the other seven families. In order to hear both stories in full, this app process forces the visitor to go back through the exhibit eight times in order to get the full content. The visitor also cannot go back and experience the app after leaving the museum or before entering the museum since the app is location activated. The location aspect of the app I think goes against the purpose of the museum; to spread knowledge to all levels of society. In this case, technology in the museum only seems to exclude rather than include and supplement the learning of the visitor.

http://mw2015.museumsandtheweb.com/paper/storyteller-world-war-one-love-and-sorrow-a-hybrid-exhibition-mobile-experience/

“The school as the crowd: Adventures in crowdsourcing with schools” by Ally Davies is a study on the Tag London website, a project which asked students to catalogue art pieces. The creators of Tag London worked with primary and secondary school teachers to ensure the project benefitted students as a supplement to their history education, while the museum used the student-generated data to better the searchability of the Museum of London website.

I wondered to myself about the ethics of crowdsourcing while reading this piece. While it seemed that students were engaged by the website, thus learning about art and artifacts from different time periods, teachers explained that the project needed to be more interactive and customizable to their curriculum to be truly beneficial. Explaining that this would require costly adjustments to the site, the teachers and museum were unable to reach a compromise and the project was abandoned.

There are four issues that critics of crowdsourcing argue. First, that businesses should support their communities by employing locally, which was the case in this particular project. Second, that people should be paid for their contributions. It can be said that the English grade schoolers were getting paid through education.

However, critics also say that it is exploitative to pay people in very low amounts. Therefore if their contributions were to be inconsequential to their grades (which was often the case in this project as the site was not customizable to different curriculums) the simple act of becoming more educated about the world was not incentive enough, and was therefore exploiting the students. For the museum, the cost of redesigning the website that students used outweighed the price of the work that the students were doing.

Finally, critics also say that professionals should not do unpaid work. The study by Davies emphasized that both parties needed to achieve mutual benefit from participating in the Tag London project, schools needed “an engaging learning experience, and the museum (reaching large numbers and improving collections data) “ Though the students were the ones doing the nitty gritty work (and they were not professionals) there is a third party at play in this particular case. Teachers logged many hours out of the classroom testing the museum software and designing appropriate lesson plans. Some declined to use the software because they did not feel like they had enough of a handle on the site to make it useful. These professionals were not getting paid for their work and input on the site, when they provided insight on how the first time user would interact, or by lending their classroom time to Tag London.

Overall, this project can be considered unethical because it valued the student input over the teachers. Though the students were the ones directly working and benefitting, the teachers who facilitated the entire project would have received the same, or greater benefit through sticking to their own lesson plans and curriculum.

This week I looked at an article that centered around augmented reality as a technology that solves a problem that digital humanists have been challenged with in the museum space. The question of how technology is changing the way we interact with objects in a museum brings further questions such as it impedes or enhances our experiences. I think that this is subjective based on what the person wants to take away from an art exhibit. That being said, augmented reality is a solution in that is an option for people to have digital information/curation if they want it without disturbing the more traditional technology free movie goers. This is part of what De angeli means by “effortless engagement” where digital experience is not hindered by other forms of technology dependent on things like GPS or even internet in the article.

Augmented reality has distinct uses and different from virtual reality. Where virtual reality puts you in a completely virtual world for one to explore, augmented reality just adds some digital environment features to the real word you are in. What this paper brilliantly describes is a headset that uses Plexiglas make your headset, which uses cellphones as its display and processing source, unobtrusive when not in use.

Dark colors won’t reflect on Plexiglas and hence your phone will know (using nfc) when to show you something. The benefits to this technology in the museum is that an nfc chip is small and nearly unnoticeable meaning that if a person choses to not use this tool, they do not have to but it makes it available for anyone with a smartphone in a museum.

 

What this means is that people will have the option to have digital curation available to them if they so choose it. Whether technology impedes or enhances the way we interact with does not have to have a definitive answer. Instead, I think that technologies like this that provide an augemented reality option showcases the role of technology in relation to the humanities. Technology offers flexibility and the opportunity to make more of our experiences with humanities based objects and works.

 

This paper continues to talk about some of the realistic difficulties with logistics of implementing the technology in museums such as the costs. While the discussion of implementation is not particularly relevant to the question of whether we should or should not integrate more technology in museums, it does show that if we are to embrace more kinds of cutting edge and seamless technology, it requires ease of use and support from the audience. From an economic approach, I believe that if there is a greater demand for technologies like these to be implemented in museums, that they will change the way we interact with museums. One day, augmented reality headsets might be part of the process of buying an entrance ticket just like 3D glasses at the movie theatre. For scholars and others worried about the authenticity of a museum, technologies like augmented reality will satisfy both those who do not want the museums changed and those who want more technological tools to change their museum experience.

The article that I chose to read was “Do-It-Yourself DSLR: Take Your Organization’s Visual Destiny into Your Own Hands.” The article basically laid out the basics things to remember for beginners using a DSLR camera for photography or videography. This article was interesting for me because I’m fairly adept at using a DSLR and often hold trainings for Daily Bruin’s video department interns.

The article puts DSLR use in context of improving museum documentation through digital media. I think visual digital documentation is a very important tool for museums, with some museums doing a better job of this than others. For example while working on my dh101 project on the Turner collection at the Tate I looked through youtube for museum videos about the collection that may enhance our website. The Tate had several videos around the collection that were very well done and had a lot of views. However, the Getty’s video on the collection was long and of poor quality, making the information on Turner harder to attain than the well done video by the Tate.

Besides the valuable context that this article provides, I think it does a sufficient job at briefly explaining how to use a DSLR camera. To improve the article I think some visual representation should be  made available for people unfamiliar to aperture, ISO, and shutter speed to fully understand the concepts. My one other critique on this article is that it is hard to tell who the audience is. Is this article meant for people completely unfamiliar with DSLR’s or just unfamiliar with manual settings? For the most part it seems targeted for complete beginners, and in that case I think jumping into completely manual shooting may be too much to grasp at first. Specifically the piece of advice of shooting in RAW. I would say I have a good amount of experience and do not shoot in RAW because color correcting in post-production in very difficult for me. Other than that I would say that this was a very useful guide for beginners.

The Infinite Museum is a responsive website that was designed and written for the David Owsley Museum of Art at Ball State University in Indiana. The “responsive website” acts like a native application on a smart phone. Within the application/website is a collection of 1,500 short prompts that will help direct museum guests to a gallery or work of art that would interest them. Once they are paired with a piece, the prompt suggests a specific experience for the guest to have. They are then able to share the experience with others via social media, or they can save the prompt to revisit at another time. In addition, they can also share some ideas for new prompts for the application designers to add into the website.

I had an idea to produce a Web application that would help visitors to art museums experience the art in new and unusual ways: to treat the museum experience as a kind of performance art.

This was an extremely interesting piece of technology that I thought would be very helpful in the museum context. I also really enjoyed the amount of creativity that went into creating and executing the prompts—being able to think of personal and engaging ways to capture the museum audience is a difficult task in itself.

This actually reminded me of the Tate Ball that we had learned about earlier in the quarter. The way that the Tate Ball took different factors into play when generating a piece of art for the user is very similar to the way that this Infinite Museum works. The only difference is that the Infinite Museum has a much more thought-provoking aspect to it. The prompts range from silly and funny to a much more personal context, which is beneficial since it will appeal to users who are each looking for something different in a piece of art.

Check out the Tate Ball here!

Overall, this is definitely something that I’d love to try if I were ever given the opportunity to—the use of technology is innovative, creative and personal. It is so much more than an audio tour and that makes it really engaging to an audience that knows little.

 

” Museums, like churches and libraries, are designed to enhance specific activities — praying, reading, looking — through the manipulation of architecture, lighting, object placement and ritualized behavior.”

In the article, “Tuning Out Digital Buzz, for an Intimate Communication with Art,” written by Holland Cotter, Cotter makes a ton of points in the argument of illustrating the benefits with artworks in physical spaces rather than technological representations as “sufficient” replacement. She mentions the understanding of scale; the beauty of massive art works surrounding you. Also, to see the work in real life has the power to create physical inclinations, such as this humanistic need to reach out to the art piece or feeling the anxiety and gravity in a “Christ in Majesty With Symbols of the Four Evangelists” due to the way Christ is positioned on the wall. However, the quote that I have pasted above is something that stood out to me — this comparison to a museum with a church.

Over the summer, I was able to take the class “Jerusalem, the Holy City,” where we discuss the idea of sacred space in Jerusalem. The term “sacred space” can be defined as a physical realm that is not homogenous, something set apart, in a religious sense, from the profane world. A sacred space has the capacity to change one’s behavior as well. For example, for a believer, the church is a sacred place that is set apart from the street on which it stands. The sacred space of church the changes the person as he or she walks through the doors.

With this understanding and Cotter’s article, the physical implementation of a museum can immediately change the perceptions of a viewer — as not many people would take selfies with a page in an art book, yet would act differently if in the MoMA where the walls and lighting are staged perfectly for photo-taking. In a way, for art-lovers (much akin to religious believers) may find that the museum is a sacred space that is set apart from the rest of the world, and thus, the work within the confined spaces are just as sacred. When a piece is in a book page, it not only takes away from the details of the pieces, but the overall experience of separating the person you are when you walk on the street to the person you become when you walk past the double doors that enter into a gallery.

The readings this week take on the essential topic that we have been talking about for many weeks now in class.  The article “Museums see different virtues in virtual worlds” looks at how the Met and The Brooklyn Museum have had two different approaches to their digital efforts.  The Met reflecting its encyclopedic perspective reflected in its online presence, the Brooklyn Museum, by comparison, is a more local museum by nature, its online presence attempts to engage its local community.

“The Museum Interface” is a direct conversation with two museum site designers who discuss the complications with the museums and their content online.  A large part of their conversation centers on Kara Walker’s installation of, A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby, a mega installation.  The problem presented but the conversation was that many people were deterred from going and experiencing the work in person because of the installation’s proliferation in social media.

This removal or distancing from the object is one that I personally, am most concerned about.  Images and other online engagement would preferably incite wonder and a desire to see the works in person.  I think we forget that we miss part of the experience of the object when we only see it on a 2D screen.  With the Walker exhibit, we are missing a personal sense of scale since we cannot be in the same room with it; in addition to missing the we miss things like our sense of smell.  With the Walker show we miss the scent and atmosphere of the sugar factory of her works are installed in.

I had the opposite reaction that the commentator’s friends had to the proliferation of the exhibit on social media.  Instead of seeing images or video and being satisfied, I would love to see it that much more.

This link describes the process that Walker went through for the exhibit. This video shows the Walker’s process and the final product.