Like several of my fellow classmates, I visited the Hammer Museum and observed an instillation by the artist Simon Denny. The instillation fills a small room on the courtyard level of the museum and outside there is a video screen that displays graphics and loudly describes applications of blockchain technology. I observed several museum visitors watching the video and noticed that most visitors only lingered for about thirty seconds before entering the gallery. Because the video is on a loop, and there is no way for the visitor to restart the video, there is always a sense that you are coming in halfway through the explanation. The voiceover of the video explains relatively complex technology, networks of information, and “digital flows of knowledge” so it is easy to get lost in the explanation and come away feeling confused (as I did the first time I viewed the instillation). Personally, I find that the lack of possibility of interaction with the video and booming voice-over frankly make the outside of the exhibit somewhat uninviting. Large panels of text explaining blockchain are also displayed in lightboxes outside of the gallery. I noticed very few people taking the time to read or examine these texts.
Once the visitors enter the small gallery, they are visually overwhelmed by text, game pieces, graphics, and tradeshow-like display booths. It was challenging to spend 20 minutes inside of the small gallery because it quickly started to feel claustrophobic. I think this is largely the intent of the artist who is trying to replicate tradeshow booths that people walk by quickly, gathering some easily accessible information or understanding of a product, and then move to the next booth. There is A LOT of text in the small room and I observed that visitors mostly read the introductory text and spent less time with the texts at each booth. I would estimate that visitors spend at least twice as much time looking at the displays as they do reading the text. Within several of the booths there are elements of the displays that move and these aspects of the booths definitely caught the attention of the visitors and held their gaze.
In observing now much of the text in the instillation went unread, it made me think about how we need to be sure we do not overwhelm the visitors in Special Collections with too much text throughout the exhibit. A concise summary and contextualization at the beginning will be essential in framing the objects from the George P. Johnson collection because we really cannot count on visitors to read explanatory texts throughout.