Reading list, 11 May 2019

Stagecoach South East, the bus company, was brought onboard by Turner Contemporary in Margate, host of this year's Turner Prize: the company and the gallery have parted company one day after the announcement, due to protest over Stagecoach's boss's anti-gay views.

Marc A. Thiessen's column for the Washington Post on Jenny Holzer's installation: A museum has turned itself into an instrument of anti-U.S. propaganda:

It’s no surprise that the art world is left wing. But the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao — an institution owned by an American foundation, in the heart of Spain — has turned itself into something worse: an instrument of anti-American propaganda. The museum is spreading calumnies against the men and women of the U.S. military and fueling hatred of America in a foreign land.

Linking to Rebecca Solnit's writing is so passé, and yet: When the Hero is the Problem

teamlab and Meow Wolf are taking over the world: here's Rachel Monroe on the latter for the New York Times - Can an Art Collective Become the Disney of the Experience Economy?

The papers from the 2019 Museums and the Web conference are available online

A useful history of art / artists / arts communities on the internet by Kelsey Ables for Artsy: The Rise and Fall of Internet Art Communities

Canadian Heritage has allocated $680,000 Canadian i to the Canadian Museums Association to undertake a national review of museum policies with Indigenous communities, to ensure alignment with the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous People and make recommendations for best practice.

The New York Times Magazine documented the development of its cover designs for a year

Learning from my actions

I'm working on my first project that involves a touchscreen interactive at the moment. It's got me thinking about how a person learns to work a system with their hands.

You know how people stand at street crossing repeatedly hitting the cross button, even though (a) it only needed to be triggered once (b) hitting it more doesn't make the green man show any faster and (c) it's really bloody annoying?

I'm like that with web sites and services that are slow to respond. I click - nothing happens - I click again - and again - and then something happens - and then I'm not sure which click triggered it - and then I'm lost. Image magnifiers are classic for this - the time taken to serve up the image creates too great a lag between action and consequence, and without a loading graphic, you can't be sure anything is happening. So - click - there you go again.

I had an experience like this in a gallery over the weekend with a touchscreen interactive. I turned the sound off (because I don't like intruding on other people in the gallery) and pressed things and moved things. I could successfully 'close' things and move elements round on the screen - but I couldn't tell to what end. Possibly the sound was essential, but there was a prominent 'sound off' option. In the end, I couldn't tell who was at fault - me, or the machine. Most likely it was me.

So what I've been thinking is a very simple thought. To successfully manipulate a system that's new to you, it needs to give you prompt and quite obvious responses.

Today on Pippin Barr's blog I came across the procedural drawing tool Harmony. He'd used it to draw the face of god ....





Harmony is an online drawing tool that uses algorithms and the HTML5 'canvas' attribute to contruct an image that is a bit more than - and a bit more surprising than - what you're doodling with your mouse on the screen. Or, as Barr puts it, "What that means in practice is that you draw, and it kind of fills things in in interesting ways around your drawing."

Playing with Harmony, you learn from your experiments. You learnt that fat movements draw sketchy lines, that often die out, that slow delibrate movements build darker lines, that bringing lines closer together causes them to reach out to each other. You learn (because there is no undo, only clear) not to rgret your mistakes too much. Or perhaps you learnt to be more careful, if you want results like these.

Web muster

When Janet Cardiff's The 40-Part Motet moves out of City Gallery Wellington, I want the zebra finches to move in ....

Brooklyn Museum loads heaps more items to its online collection, includes nifty ways for users to tell how well catalogued an item is

Still have to read the article, but love the lay-out: Books in the Age of the iPad

United States Postal Service does the Abstract Expressionists (HT Walker Art Blog)

Beautiful things

In the past week, I've seen a number of beautiful things, so I thought I'd share them here.



In my feedreader this morning I found Duane King writing about Japanese design company Nendo's Fade-Out Chair. The feet of the wooden chair are made of clear acrylic, confusing the distinction between the end of the chair and the beginning of the room it's placed in - look for it in a white cube near you soon.




Digging into Nendo a little I found Switch - a simple lamp, with a beautiful feature - to adjust the brightness of the light, you swivel the lampshade. I find this simple idea entrancing, and I think if I had one in my home I would never stop playing with it.

Over the weekend, I dropped into Te Papa to see the installations of Judy Millar's and Francis Upritchard's Venice Biennale works. Millar's work was a little cramped, but still physically affecting, and the huge shapes certainly make you look at painting in a different, more sculptural, way.




It was Upritchard's work that really surprised me though. I hadn't really cottoned on to it via the installation photos from Venice - too ornate, too hard to make out amidst all the flounces and peeling paint. Put into a neutral space however, the work seemed dense and heavy, in a good way - distilled. And maybe I've been reading far far too much fantasy recently, but these little dancing outcasts gripped me in a way I didn't expect. Also, the tables are beautiful. Just saying.

Next, flavors.me. This is a very simple tool that lets you build a splash page to pull together your activity across the web - I've experimented with pages for myself and for work, using the basic templates.


Unlike me, some people have done some stunning work with the available options, showing how constraints can be very productive. The beautiful thing here for me is the interface you use to create and update your page, one of the simplest and most convenient I've come across. I particularly like the way you can drag the design panel around the screen as you're working, watching the page update with each change you make.

Finally, I read Rebecca Stead's When you reach me in one gulp yesterday. It's a book about love, death, time travel, being 12, and Madeleine L'Engle's A wrinkle in time. It's a slim book, and a taut story - every action, every word counts towards the reveal at the end. Hugely recommended.

Image of Francis Upritchard's Save Yourself from the Te Papa blog, photograph by Michael Hall.

Thinking of Michael Stevenson

Reference Number: Eph-A-WAR-WII-1939-01
Reference Number: Eph-A-WAR-WII-1939-01
Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington.

Throw us a bone

So, a couple of weekends ago I went out to the Dowse with a few good friends to see Plastic Māori. I noticed two things:

One

If you say the gallery's official name (TheNewDowse) as its typographical treatment indicates you should (ie. kinda slurred) it sounds quite close to TheNudeHouse (that's 'nude' as in 'neewd', not 'nooed')

Two

Nooed or neewd, the Dowse needs more signage.

Since opening they've made efforts to help visitors find the entrance; the door eluded me on my first visit, and while I'm not great shakes on those IQ tests where you have to manipulate shapes and predict what-comes-next, it shouldn't be that hard to figure out how to get into a public building.

Once you've made it in, it's easy to find the shop or the cafe, or the reception desk, or that space where sometimes they have workshops and children's activities, and sometimes they don't. But it's helluva hard to find the galleries.

The entrance to the main gallery spaces is occluded by a glass door; once you figure out that's where you're meant to go, there's no schematic to help you see what's on where. After confirming that the big dark rooms with floors littered with open umbrellas were not Plastic Māori, we sent some scouts off to the far gallery (the main exhibition space in TheOldDowse) who, when they returned, confirmed the show wasn't there either.

So we backtracked to the reception area and went up the concrete block steps (the access way to the upstairs galleries, also not visible from the entrance to the building, and behind your back when you're at the desk). While we found the show without effort once we made it to the first floor, I didn't spot any signage saying the show was up there.

I'm not saying that the Dowse doesn't have signage. It's likely that it does. What I am saying is that 4 people came to visit a show and couldn't figure out where it was. Four people who go to galleries a lot. One of your target markets, in fact. In the world of user-testing that would be considered an epic fail, and would have you rethinking your design pretty damn quick.

Many other galleries have similar problems. It is remarkably hard to spot the Christchurch Art Gallery's temporary exhibition spaces from their massive foyer. In fact, I think it's often the foyers that create the problems. Big spaces are needed to raise money through venue hire - but during the daylight hours when the public comes to visit the gallery (the point, let's recall, of having the place) they becoming empty and often intimidating voids that prevent you from immediately seeing the whole point of you being there - the art.

I think of all the galleries in New Zealand that the Tauranga Art Gallery succeeds the best here; you move straight into the exhibition space, without even having to run the gauntlet of the reception desk. I'll be curious to see what City Gallery and Auckland Art Gallery do in this respect: Auckland promises a "bold new gallery main entrance" and City Gallery's redevelopment involves the creation of the "Russell Hancock Gallery, replacing the existing cinema [which will] connect directly to the foyer, increasing options for hosting functions and events." I'm looking forward to finding out what artworks I clap my eyes on the first time I visit.

Starry starry night

I've written before about tools that let you extract colours from images in order to create a colour palette.



Now some clever bean in the Colour Lover community has made and shared a bunch of palettes based on the works included in MoMA's forthcoming exhibition 'Van Gogh and the Colors of the Night'.

Image: Starry Starry Egg, by borderhacker

Too good not to share

Graphic designer Christoph Niemann, who has developed a style of illustration based on rendering images in pixel-like squares, has posted on the New York Times about tiling his bathroom using everything from Titian to Beuys as inspiration.



A great read, and I love the handwritten style. Thanks to Julie Caniglia at the Walker for the tip-off.

Image: A detail of the Venus of Urbino pixellated in black and white: "made the 1530s feel too much like the 1980s". From Niemann's post.

Down with the kids

Things I learnt from watching these videos from first-year Design students at Victoria:




1. People still like drawing
2. Time-delay / stop-motion photography is either (a) very cool or (b) a lot easier than the regular kind
3. The iPod does not epitomise design. It IS design.

Thanks to Timothy for the original link

Tomorrow will be the same but not as this is

UPDATE:

For those of you looking for the Colin McCahon painting, it's in the Christchurch Art Gallery collection, you can read about it here (warning, PDF) or listen to a podcast here.

...................................................

Best of 3 is taking a break: I'll be back next Thursday / Friday.

In the meantime, the Walker Art Center's design staff are blogging - check them out the behind the scenes on projects such as Kara Walker (complete with prudish American booksellers).

And to yesterday's anonymous commenter: noted, but not nice ....

The Auckland Triennial website

It seemed fair to post on this too, after yesterday's critique of the Telecom Prospect 2007 website

Auckland Triennial website

First off, the '07 Triennial site is a whole lot simpler than (a) previous Triennial websites and (b) the Prospect site.

2001 Triennial

2004 Triennial

2001 Prospect

2004 Prospect

Its got lots of white space, it fills the screen, and works with the usual expanding left-hand nav. The design may not be inspired, but it's easy to navigate and read.

The site has a print screen function, and The Supporters section has embedded links for all the sponsors (both missing from Prospect '07).

On the down side - only one image per artist (here's the Phil Collins page as an example), and some looooong pages. The Events pages, for example, might have benefited from using a table / calendar format.

Interestingly, my favourite section is the most administrative: the Visit section. Nicely laid out, pretty (and readable) maps and easy to follow.

The Triennial site doesn't have any Web 2.0 features - no interactive, no commenting, no podcasts (which I should have given City Gallery credit for, come to think of it). But it does a good job of delivering information and not pissing you off.

The Telecom Prospect 2007 website ...

is alive. And very reminiscent of the 2004 site.

Telecom Prospect 2007 website

Telecom Prospect 2004 website

Design

Site designer Megan Hosking, from alto, did the '04 version too. In '07 the design has been tweaked to encompass Len Cheeseman's branding; last time round it was the four sets of branding (one for each venue) produced by Neil Pardington.

Navigation

The '07 version retains the annoying drop-downs menus, which obscure the text and images when you're trying to navigate. there's a bug in Firefox too - in IE the colour block for the menu covers all the links in the nav, but in Firefox the last couple of links get lost.

There's also a nav double up - you get the drop-down plus a page of nav. Call me old-fashioned, but I like left-hand nav. (Having said that, HappyCog Studios have ditched trad nav, and succeeded - but they are web standard heroes.)

'Opinions'

The short opinion pieces from the past two Prospects - 'real people' in '01, slightly-less-tenuously-related-to-the-visual-arts in '04 - have been dropped, meaning that the 'Opinions' section is only filled with the opinions of the director and the curator. Possibly (?) the essays from the forthcoming catalogue will appear here, although no placeholder seems to be in place.

Images

The images have been improved by the addition of a pop-up window to get a larger version (missing last time) - but don't hit 'View all the works in the exhibition' expecting an image gallery; it's a PDF list of works. And - I know, being picky - this time round they've dropped the image captions, so if there's more than one work by the artist you can't attach name to object. It also means that if you're not in the artists A-Z, you don't know whose work you're looking at.

The inclusion of installation shots is nice - what would have been nicer was linking the photos of each gallery to the 'Gallery notes' available under the 'Opinions' section. And then - even nicer - within the Gallery notes, link from each artists' name to the page on their work. It's the web people - exploit its webbiness.

And - okay, picky picky pickety pick pick - the fact that the installation shots are posted in a section called 'Participate' indicates that maybe the Gallery should have put some more thought into the site IA.

Recycling

The Comments book is particularly interesting (not because of the content - it's currently empty, but if you 'Mail [sic] your response or comments to citygallery@wmt.org.nz' they will 'endeavour to post them back on this page'.)

What is interesting is the shot of deja vu I got reading the invitation to mail a comment:

'o7
We want to hear from you… we invite you to be humorous, whimsical, incendiary, sincere - in short, to be as idiosyncratic as the artists in the show. We want to hear your thoughts, feelings, comments, ideas and reviews.

'04
Now we want to hear from you… we invite you to be humorous, whimsical, incendiary, sincere - in short, to be as idiosyncratic as the artists in the show. You are also invited to talk about the show. We want to hear your thoughts, feelings, comments, ideas and reviews.

Again, apparently.

What shall we tell them?

We're at that point on a website redevelopment project where, after a few months of being out of the loop, we're about to present the business with the draft site. They've had the opportunity to see the site design (although it's developed from that point) but they haven't yet seen the final (read, ruthlessly edited) version of the reams and reams of text they contributed for the site.

Inevitably, there are still a number of bugs to be worked out, and some things we wanted won't happen this time round, and some things look downright odd. On the blog Creating Passionate Users, there's an interesting post about the dilemma of managing expectations with demos:

"When we show a work-in-progress (like an alpha release) to the public, press, a client, or boss... we're setting their expectations. And we can do it one of three ways: dazzle them with a polished mock-up, show them something that matches the reality of the project status, or stress them out by showing almost nothing and asking them to take it "on faith" that you're on track."

Their bottom line?

"How 'done' something looks should match how 'done' something is."

But what's really interesting is the finding that the more finished-looking the demo is, the narrower the feedback; whereas the looser the demo looks, the more likely viewers are to give you high-level feedback. And there's even a programme that will help you fake the napkin-scrawl creative feel.

It reminds me - in a opaque way - of a comment by Wellington designer Neil Pardington about presenting to clients, cited by Lara Strongman in an essay for the catalogue for the Objectspace exhibition 'Just Hold Me' (the catalogue's not online, but you can find out a bit on curator Jonty Valentine's website).

Basically, the gist of what Neil said (I don't have the text in front of me) was that you take in four options. Two are clearly unacceptable. Of the remaining two, he wants to push one. So he makes a subtly disparaging comment about the unfavoured design, so the clients magically opt for the design he's selected for them.

Which begs the question - why bother producing four mock ups, if you only believe in one?