Not always the answer

I was just reading this piece about the renovation and extension of the Bach Museum in Leipzig, and this paragraph caught my attention:

Alongside the original sources is information on methods and techniques used in Bach research. Visitors learn about Bach's penmanship, as well as the paper and ink he used. The display even explains how to date a Bach manuscript. But what makes this museum unique is the interactive approach it takes to the teaching of its subject matter. A giant tabletop touch screen displays various documents that can be explored, dragged and manipulated, or—for younger visitors—simply broken up into puzzle pieces.

I'm working on a touchscreen interactive at the moment, and I thought hey, that's quite a nice idea - images of collection items turned into puzzles on a touchscreen, which individual visitors and maybe even groups can play with.

And then I caught myself. Why transition a perfectly sound mechanism - the jigsaw puzzle - from the physical to the digital experience?

You're not gaining anything (apart from the fact that the puzzle pieces won't get munted or lost) and it will cost you a lot more than printing cardboard puzzles, or even doing something a little fancier, like printing on Lego. And you're losing the tactile pleasure of puzzle solving.

Although I'm employed in a digital role, I often find myself arguing for non-digital ways of achieving a desired outcome. It sounds contrary, but it's the right thing to do. My advice is, when you're thinking about creating something new:

• start from what you have (collection items, stories, a theme)
• move to what you want people to get out of the experience (to learn something? to contribute something? to fix something?)
• think about the space you're putting whatever this thing is in (this might include the web)
• and then think about tools and media.

Lost in the transition

In my adult life, I have attended exactly two plays. I openly admit to this piece of philistinism. I find being acted at a little scary, and I have trouble suspending belief sufficiently to sink into the story.

That's why I found Roberta Smith's review of Red, a play about Mark Rothko currently being staged in New York, rather strange. Smith struggled with the play because although it's set in Rothko's studio, it didn't accord with her 20 years of visiting artists where they work.

As inexperienced as I am, I kind of feel that's a little bit like saying that Broadway Boogie Woogie doesn't look like a live jazz band. Theatre is artifice. That's the point.

For a comparative opinion, take a look at Stephanie Zacharek & Jerry Saltz's review-duet: a theatre and an art critic take on Red.

Teh internets: teh problem AND teh solution

In a post today Jonathan Jones comments on Tyler Green's experiment to see which artworks come up first when you type famous artists' names into Google. Jones writes:

Google, then, is populist about art, and tends to point users towards iconic masterpieces. Is there any downside to that? Actually, no. People (critics, curators, "experts") make too much of obscure knowledge and over-refined erudition. Art's greatest hits are often the greatest works, full stop; if you want the basics about Picasso, a glance at Les Demoiselles d'Avignon will tell you a lot of what you need to know.

What's more worrying is the lack of correlation between the immense online archive of art and the even more immense reality. Because so many works can be found online, there's a danger of forgetting how many cannot (not to mention the inadequacy of a picture on your screen compared with the real thing). A student can't really research a dissertation on art from digital sources alone, however tempting the illusion. And there lies the real vice of Google.

Arguably, it's the art world's job to get more (and better) information about art online. For a terrific example of how this can be done, see the IMA's blog post on their project to encourage documentation of Indianapolis's public artworks, Wikipedia Saves Public Art.

Easy on the eyes

One of the questions I love to ask in interviews is "What's your favourite website and why?".

It's a slightly less daunting question than "What's your favourite book" because somehow, websites don't divide into high and low (or "so bad it's good") categories.

When people are talking about their favourite sites, I'm listening to what they're saying about the freshness of the writers' voices, or the perfection of the information architecture, or how the search seems to have better results than any other site they use, or the way the design makes them feel.

When I think about this question myself though, I often get a little stumped. I spend much of my time on Twitter (where I get flicked out to specific pages on websites, but rarely move further through them) or immersed in my feedreader, where the content is stripped of all design and UX consideration, and is just about the information and the voice.

So asking the question of others made me ask it of myself. Here's where I got to.

The Guardian website (before they changed the homepage, creating four-column, uncategorised mayhem - why, Guardian, why?) always makes me feel like a saner and more intelligent human being. Their arts & books coverage is great, I'm forever being tempted into Comment Is Free, and the information architecture sets my mind at ease.

ArtsJournal is consistently the fifth thing I review in the morning (5th, you ask? The list looks like this: Twitter, work email, personal email, feedreader). It's not about the design (in fact, I always flick to the diehard view) it's about the curation. It's like every day someone smarter and more worldly than I is pointing me in the right direction.

Thinking for a Living gives me that clenched-chest feeling of love. I don't care that it's actually a little hard to navigate, I just think it's beautiful. Especially this. I also subscribe to this awesome feed.

Hoefler and Frere-Jones. Inside every web and every art person I know, there seems to be a little font-head trying to get out. Sure, I like H&FJ's fonts just fine, but to be honest, if you put them in a line-up, I dunno if I'd be able to pick them out. What I love though is the way they talk about type. And the grey.

Drawing conclusions

Sometimes it's nice just to go see a simple, solid show. Drawing Conclusions at the Dowse is one of these - significant works from the collection by Hotere, Peebles, McCahon and Walters are paired with preparatory and related works.

I'm a bit of a sucker for these before-and-after exhibitions, and the 1947 McCahon painting of a Hutt Valley landscape The caterpillar landscape is a good example of this (I'm too damn scared to use images from that website, so go have a look for yourself). A related work shows a land/sea-scape hovering in a lozenge above the caterpillar hills; in the oil the lozenge is whited out in thick pigment, making you want to grab an x-ray machine and see what went wrong under there.

The oil was gifted by McCahon in 1980; it had been shown in 1948 at the Wellington City Public Library in an exhibition organised by Ron O'Reilly. The accompanying watercolours were donated in 2000 by Nan Stubbs, a colleague of O'Reilly's at the Library: she purchased them from another late 1940s show at the Lower Hutt Municipal Library.

The show as a whole has a double purpose. On the face of it, it's a show about how artists work. On a more pervasive level, it's a show about how public collections grow over the years, nurtured by relationships between staff, artists and patrons. The wall labels avoid hammering this message home, but the story's there if you're looking for it.

On the same day I saw the rather wonderful architecture show Long Live The Modern, toured by the Gus Fisher Gallery, but it's since closed. I can't find out if it's touring further, but if it pops up in your neck of the woods, go see it.

Web Muster

The IMA releases TAP (its exhibition interpretation tool for mobile devices) as open source software, and explains why you should use it

The MIA has a glorious Flickr set you should check out; portraits of its staff, with short & interesting interviews. A simple, cheap, and engaging idea.

The Smithsonian is running an 'online conference' called Problem Solving with Smithsonian Experts that you can take part in for free. Twelve 50-minute sessions are being run over 4 days; I'm wondering if I can motivate myself into getting up at 6am to take part in How do we grasp the vastness of the universe?

Drawn

For your Friday viewing pleasure, via Duane King on the lovely Thinking for a Living, Christoph Niemann's Abstract City, a series of illustrations in the style of Google maps




Something about these drawings - the pleasure of the visual mash-up, perhaps - resonates with my growing fondness for Pippin Barr's drawings and cartoon strips on stimulus/response

So Eric Gill, Ernest Rutherford, and a Soviet physicist walk into a bar ....

I'm currently joyfully immersed in Mark Oliphant's Rutherford: Recollections of the Cambridge Days. Apparently I have turned into the kind of person who reads about particle accelerators over breakfast. I'm okay with that.

Having knocked off a bio of Marie Curie, Brian Cathcart's The Fly in the Cathedral (about the 1932 splitting of the atom under Rutherford's direction at Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge) and Richard Reeves' short bio of Rutherford in recent weeks, I've now got sufficient grounding that I either recognise and at least semi-understand the scientific bits of the book, or can choose to let bits like this wash over me and then return to the story

Ratcliff was a Fellow of Sidney Sussex College, where he had rooms. ... He was as fascinated as I was by questions of generation of a e.m.f in a circuit when either there was no change in flux through the circuit, or there was no cutting of lines of magnetic flux by a moving conductor, and invented a number of models to illustrate the duality of the problem.

Anyway. The seventh chapter of Oliphant's memoir is titled 'The Crocodile', and it's about a fascinating little slice of Rutherfordia that's touched on in the above books.

Pyotr Kapitsa (or Peter Kapitza, as he was known in Britain) was a Russian physicist who went to work under Rutherford at Cavendish Lab in 1921. Rutherford took a paternal interest in 'his boys', as he called his research students (Oliphant beautifully describes his use of the term as fond, with a touch of arrogance - Rutherford was well aware he spearheaded one of the most talented and productive groups of research scientists in the world) and he and Kapitsa appear to have been especially close.

As with many of his boys, Rutherford assisted Kapitsa by securing funding for his research*, and in the early 1930s a grant was obtained for a new building to house Kapitsa's work on magnetic fields, the Mond Laboratory.

Kapitsa designed the new building, and in recognition of Rutherford's patronage he commissioned Eric Gill (he tossed up between Gill and Jacob Epstein, who he considered to be "the leading sculptors in the modern school" in England) to produce a low-relief plaque featuring Rutherford's profile, and an engraving of a crocodile - Kapitsa's nickname for Rutherford - on the exterior of the building.

Gill rocked up in a brown monk's habit and completed the works under the cover of a tarpaulin. And then, as often happens with a public commission by a modern artist, uproar ensued. The crocodile seems to have been well received, but the plaque was seized upon by some members of the College, who felt the nose was too "Jewish".

Rutherford declined to take part in the following debates, wisely disavowing any ability to make judgements on modern art. Kapitsa wrote numerous letters to Gill, describing how he had had to "fight hard and give lectures on Modern Art and its meaning and explain such elementary things as the difference between a photographer and an artist" - to which Gill replied:

We had a visit from Hughes last week and he told us about the fracas over the Rutherford portrait. I am extremely sorry about it - especially, indeed practically only, because it has been such a nuisance for you. I am very grateful indeed for your championship. Hughes told me that it was all because some people, infected by the Hitler anti-Jew stunt, thought I'd given Rutherford a Jew's nose. Of course that's all nonsense. As I told Hughes, the striking feature of the Jew nose is not its bridge but its beak. A prominent bridge is rather Roman than Jewish, and these classical people ought to have been pleased. What a lot of frightful balls it is.

In the end, Rutherford advised Kapitsa to go to his colleague and friend, the Danish physicist Niels Bohr and 'lover of modern art' for a deciding opinion. While Bohr had reservations about making a judgement based on photographs rather than an in-person viewing, his statement that the carving "looks to me most excellent, being at the same time thoughtful and powerful" helped Kapitsa win over the Building Syndicate (and, presumably, the gang of young men who'd threatened to hack the plaque off the building).

I can't find a copy of the plaque in question online, which makes me wonder if it has disappeared (I'd love to know). But the Crocodile is still flourishing




I think the thing I find so fascinating about this story is that I found it in a physicist's memoir; and not just a mention, but 13 pages, stuffed full of primary material. I love the idea that someone who hasn't really looked at art since high school (as I haven't really thought about physics since nearly flunking it in 6th form) could get accidentally immersed in a case study of British anti-Semitic feelings in 1930s Britain and disputes in modern art, when they thought they were meant to be reading about early work in nuclear physics. It's accidents like this - or fortuitous, marvellous overlaps - that delight me.

To finish off the story. In 1934 Kapitsa went to Russia to attend a conference, amongst other things; he had returned to Russia several times since 1926. However, on this 1934 visit his passport was confiscated, and he was told he must stay and work in Russia. Rutherford wrote, appealing 'in the interests of science' that Kapitsa be allowed to return to England; according to Rutherford's early biographer A.S. Eve "To this the Soviet Government made the sagacious and fair retort that of course England would like to have Kapitza, and that they, for their part, would equally like to have Rutherford in Russia!".

Eventually is was decided that the Russian government would purchase Kapitsa's experimental equipment from Cambridge, and that the Cavendish Laboratory would not compete with Kapitsa's new Institute for Physical Problems. Kapitsa wrote to Rutherford in 1936 (again, quoting from Eve):

After all we are only small particles of floating matter in a stream which we call Fate. All that we can manage is to deflect slightly our track and keep afloat - the stream governs us!

*Only ever modest amounts. Rutherford seems to have a horror of asking for or receiving large amounts of money, fearing that discharging the obligations incurred would begin to direct the research undertaken, rather than the problems themselves. In addition, he seemed to be attached to the rapidly becoming obsolete practice of table-top physics, roaring that he could do experiments in the Arctic if he had too.

The case against Flash

In her article Why can't the world's best architects build better websites Alissa Walker picks up on one of my pet peeves about 'creative' websites (this goes for you too, certain major art institutions)

Architects are the original interactive designers. They're skilled at creating navigable structures. They specialize in designing rich experiences for their users. But if architects designed their buildings the way they designed their Web sites, they'd all fall apart.

...

Most architects' sites rely on an animated technology like Flash. While this is perfectly appropriate for some interactive experiences, is not what you want to be using if your site is--like most architecture firms' sites--a long list of projects that you want to be easily searchable. Flash sites often rely on gimmicky navigation using images and rollovers instead of simple, clickable text. And in general, a Flash-based site can't generate a URL for each separate page. So say you do end up finding the project you were looking for--you're not able to index or email it. This is when you find yourself saying things like, "Click on projects, then roll over the little museum icon, then click Michigan, then click on the floating image in the white square..." Can you imagine giving the same kind of directions inside, say, a building?

It's a great piece. Go read it.

Phew

Art lovers will be relieved to know that Shane Cotton is "not a member of a criminal gang".

My So-Called Life*

My Life as an Object is one of the more interesting social media/museum outings I've seen in a while.

Each week, a collection item from Nottingham City Museums and Galleries is 'brought to life' through a social media channel. First up was a Raleigh Chopper with its own Twitter stream; this week it's Tea at Englefield Green, a painting by Paul Sandby, which has been opened up for collective story-telling on Flickr.





The project has been commissioned by Renaissance East Midlands (an organisation that supports museums in the East Midlands region of England) and is delivered by Rattle, with the redoubtable Frankie Roberto at the helm. (You can see his write-ups on the Chopper and the painting on his blog)

What I like about the project is its focus: time-bound explorations of single items. It's a canny project-based approach which could be continued, but could equally be abandoned.

People might object that the Chopper only had 53 followers, or that the painting only collected X comments and Y notes, and does that all seem worth the effort? To which I'd respond - how much effort went into that floortalk that only 12 people attended? And was that a waste? Genuine enjoyment on the behalf of the people taking part in the activity, and genuine enjoyment and learning on the behalf of staff seem more important to me than raw numbers.

This leads me to a few concerns I have when I look at the project so far. Staff from Nottingham City don't seem very involved in what's going on. The Chopper was voiced (really well) by a hired writer; there aren't comments from identified staff members in the Flickr stream (although admittedly it's early days). Nor can I find any trace of the project on the Nottingham City website, and the online activities aren't linked to from the collection items (although god knows I know what an easy request that sounds like, and how hard it can be in practice).

In fact, when you start picking things apart, there's still some work to do in tying all this back to Nottingham itself - for example, putting the name of the work and the artist, and a link to the collection record, on each image on the Flickr stream - or noting whether it can be seen in real life.

But perhaps I'm being too literal and a little premature. As Roberto notes

this project is all a bit of an experiment. You could consider it a small-scale prototype. It’s not being widely promoted or marketed, instead the aim is to test some ideas, and see what works.

This is one of those few projects where it’s okay if things fail. Which is liberating and exciting in equal measures.

And how refreshing is that?


*Please don't take the post title as a slight on the project. It's just that it made me think of the short-lived TV show which I loved, but am too scared to revisit in case it doesn't live up to my memories.

Ada Lovelace Day - three scientists

March 24th is Ada Lovelace Day - "an international day of blogging to celebrate the achievements of women in technology and science".

Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace (1815-1852), the daughter of Lord Byron and a prominent figure in English society, has over the past few decades become known colloquially as the 'first computer programmer', by virtue of a group of notes she wrote on Charles Babbage's analytical engine, the last of which included an algorithm for the computation of Bernoulli numbers.

I have to admit, I read a biography of Lovelace earlier this year which brought down my uninformed, but very high, opinion of her. In fact, I found her kind of irritating (I know, I know, I'm an awful person).

So for Ada Lovelace day, I'm going to pull out three women who I've greatly enjoyed learning about this year, and recommend a couple of books if you're interested in finding out more yourself.

Caroline Herschel (1750-1848)

German-born astronomer who worked alongside her brother William in England, first as an assistant and increasingly in her own right. She identified numerous comets and celestial bodies, and worked on several important astronomical catalogues. The Royal Astronomical Society presented her with their Gold Medal in 1828 for her work on a catalogue of nebulae; the next woman to be presented with this award was Vera Rubin in 1996.

Richard Holmes' The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science is a fantastic book and contains a very good chapter on the Herschels' work; Michael Lemoick's The Georgian Star: How William and Caroline Herschel Revolutionized Our Understanding of the Cosmos expands nicely on this.

Marie Curie (1867-1934)

Polish-born physicist whose painstaking work in France lead to the identification of radium and polonium, the coining of the word 'radioactivity' (and articulation of what that meant), and contributed to the use of radiation in medical therapies.

Curie was the first woman to be awarded a Nobel Prize, and the first person to be awarded two Nobels (despite the committee's prevarications).

Barbara Goldsmith's Obsessive Genius: The Inner World of Marie Curie is an interesting and well-written introduction to Curie's life and work.

Lise Meitner (1878-1968)

Austrian-born physicist who worked on radioactivity and nuclear fission, initially at the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institut in Berlin and later - as one of the numerous scientists who were forced to flee Germany with the rise of Nazism - in Sweden.

Despite working closely with Otto Hahn and others on the development of the theory and experimental proof of nuclear fission, she did not share in Hahn's 1944 Nobel Prize for this work.

I'm in search of a good bio on Meitner at the moment - suggestions are welcome.

UPDATE: Since posting this, I've had several recommendations for Ruth Lewin Sime's Lise Meitner: A Life in Physics.