This month, Wikipedia turned 15. Pew looks at some key stats in the current site/s and major events in its history.
Also interesting from Pew: an analysis of print and online newspaper readers in three American cities shows print-only readership is still strong, and that print-only consumption is more strongly linked to consumption of local television news.
On Quartz - an exhaustive, fascinating, but I believe flawed in many ways piece titled Museums are keeping a ton of the world’s most famous art locked away in storage. I'd like to have the opportunity to really thrash this topic out (rather than pick it apart in a one-sided blog post) as I have *many* points, including about the artists they used in their data collection (predominantly white, male, and Western); the balance between collection shows and temporary exhibitions, and the connection to audience demand; and the alternatives to 'locking the art up in the vaults' (such as building more exhibition space, or selling the works, at which point they would .... enter private collections belonging to wealthy individuals and organisations, and risk truly disappearing from public access?).
In 1929 the Field Museum commissioned a series of portrait busts and full-figure sculptures to document the 'races of mankind'. Kept largely in storage since the end of the 1960s, the museum has just placed 50 of the sculptures produced by Malvina Hoffman back on display in an exhibition that squarely faces the difficult history of these objects.
A good complement to the above piece: Tusk has been publishing some strong pieces, but this essay by Matariki Williams on the Jono Rotman show at City Gallery last year is a stand-out.
Saturday, 23 January 2016
Wednesday, 20 January 2016
On the radio
Today on the radio I'm going to be talking about tax and tax havens for American art collectors, and the social media kerfuffle over artist Ellie Harrison's Creative Scotland grant to spend a year within the Glasgow city confines.
Tuesday, 19 January 2016
Board position open - National Digital Forum
Hooking up with the National Digital Forum has probably been the single most transformative act of my professional. As a conference convenor and a Board member, my connections and confidence grew exponentially, and the friends I made and the things I learned have helped me so much. Nearly ten years on, we're still going strong.
I ended up on the Board because Penny Carnaby, who was the CE of National Library when I was working there, shoved me into a board meeting she wasn't able to attend. I felt totally out of my depth, but Penny trusted me, and after a while I trusted myself. One thing turned into another and eventually I became a board member in my own right. Now I really appreciate her faith in me, and the way that her belief in me pushed me to prove myself.
NDF is currently calling for nominations to replace one member of the Board, due to someone standing down. I would really like to encourage people who are early in their careers but excited and knowledgable about the work NDF stands for to go for this opportunity.
To stand for the Board, as I understand it, you must be an individual member yourself and be nominated by an Institutional member. The Dowse is an Institutional member, and I have previously nominated people. I'd be delighted to support someone to have the same kind of experience I've had, so please get in touch if you'd like to talk it over.
ONE CAVEAT
This is a working board. You need to be ready to get stuck in with the myriad projects the Board supports and runs. It's okay if you're not sure exactly what you can contribute to the digital GLAMs sector yet, apart from enthusiasm and commitment and your time. But you do need to have the confidence to stick up your hand and offer to do something - even if you think you're "not quite ready for it" yet. I personally think the GLAMs sector has a bit of a problem with people hanging back and waiting to be asked to take on responsibility - or feeling like you need to serve your time before you can take on management or governance roles. So, you could sit down and read Sheryl Sandberg's book if you haven't already and learn why this is daft, or you can put on your big kid pants and go for it now.
I ended up on the Board because Penny Carnaby, who was the CE of National Library when I was working there, shoved me into a board meeting she wasn't able to attend. I felt totally out of my depth, but Penny trusted me, and after a while I trusted myself. One thing turned into another and eventually I became a board member in my own right. Now I really appreciate her faith in me, and the way that her belief in me pushed me to prove myself.
NDF is currently calling for nominations to replace one member of the Board, due to someone standing down. I would really like to encourage people who are early in their careers but excited and knowledgable about the work NDF stands for to go for this opportunity.
To stand for the Board, as I understand it, you must be an individual member yourself and be nominated by an Institutional member. The Dowse is an Institutional member, and I have previously nominated people. I'd be delighted to support someone to have the same kind of experience I've had, so please get in touch if you'd like to talk it over.
ONE CAVEAT
This is a working board. You need to be ready to get stuck in with the myriad projects the Board supports and runs. It's okay if you're not sure exactly what you can contribute to the digital GLAMs sector yet, apart from enthusiasm and commitment and your time. But you do need to have the confidence to stick up your hand and offer to do something - even if you think you're "not quite ready for it" yet. I personally think the GLAMs sector has a bit of a problem with people hanging back and waiting to be asked to take on responsibility - or feeling like you need to serve your time before you can take on management or governance roles. So, you could sit down and read Sheryl Sandberg's book if you haven't already and learn why this is daft, or you can put on your big kid pants and go for it now.
Monday, 18 January 2016
WCMT Acquittal Draft: Visible Storage
I'm currently attacking, chunk by chunk, my acquittal for the funding I received from the Winston Churchill Memorial Trust for my research trip around American museums last year. It struck me that rather than release it all as one big fat PDF I might try posting drafts of sections here, for any feedback that might be forthcoming. This first posting looks at one of my four research areas, visible storage.
I should emphasise that this really is a *draft* and changes to the final document are inevitable.
Open collections, or visible storage, is a general term used to describe public displays within museums where the emphasis is placed upon access and serendipitous discovery rather than a curated, white-wall experience. Visible storage is a way of giving museum visitors a feeling of being 'behind the scenes' in the normally off-limits art collection store, and addresses the oft-heard complaint that museums only display a tiny fraction of their permanent holdings at any given time.
Visible storage displays began being introduced in the mid 1970s, as museums moved towards a more educational and audience-focused mission. In these space, objects are usually displayed in fairly functional cases and shelving, closely grouped. Objects may be minimally labelled, or described through numbering, and handbooks or database access is provided to assist the visitor to learn more: lengthy descriptive labels are rare. Objects do not tend to be moved or exchanged often, although items may be withdrawn for exhibition or loan. Small temporary display spaces may be built into the larger space, offering the opportunity to create 'focus' exhibitions on certain groups of objects with more interpretation.
Sculpture, ceramics, glass, design objects, furniture and paintings are well suited to this form of long term display. Light-sensitive materials such as textiles and watercolours are rarely displayed in this manner, as the conservation risk is too high.
In American museums, visible storage ranges from small galleries, almost like nooks (such as that at the Dallas Museum of Art displaying ceramics and glass) to large purpose-built spaces that may include space for researchers to work. It is worth noting that while these study centres are presented as 'uncurated' spaces (suggesting that the objects on display have not been selected with the same level of curatorial decision-making as objects in a normal gallery exhibition, and that the display has not been designed with the same level of aesthetic attention) there is a strong shared visual language and interpretation approach to visible storage. A virtue is made of providing only minimal labelling or interpretation, meant to encourage browsing and a visual, rather than textual, engagement with the objects. Objects are grouped by medium, size, type, or place of origin (carved wooden toys / furniture / large sculpture / metalwork) as opposed to chronologically, thematically, or by artist, as a visitor would expect in a normal exhibition. Display cases and racks are functional (glass and metal cases, or large heavy drawers) or old-fashioned (small, wooden): white plinths of the sort used in collection or temporary galleries are rarely employed. The overarching narrative is that visible storage encourages unmediated access where visitors are free to make their own observations and engage in slow, close looking: this is, of course, as conscious a curatorial and design choice as any other arrangement of objects into a gallery display.
Between 1985 and 2001 the Henry Luce Foundation, through its American Art Program, gave significant amounts of funding to four museums to create visible storage spaces.
Metropolitan Museum of Art
http://www.metmuseum.org/visit/museum-map/galleries/the-american-wing/774
In 1985 the Met received the first Luce Foundation grant to create a visible storage center. The 16,000 square foot facility named the Henry R. Luce Center for the Study of American Art, opened in 1988 and displays a significant portion of their American fine art and decorative art collection (over 10,000 objects). Items are grouped by material (painting, sculpture, furniture and woodwork, glass, ceramics, silver and metalwork) and within those categories by date. Light-sensitive works such as textiles and watercolours are not on view but can be seen by appointment.
New York Historical Society
http://www.nyhistory.org/exhibits/all/about/0/table/paged/title
The NYHS was the second recipient of a Luce Foundation grant for visible storage. In this instance, rather than fitting out a display space, the grant was used to create views into actual storage spaces, giving visual access to approximately 40,000 objects. This facility, the Henry Luce III Center for the Study of American Culture, opened in 2000. The Center is currently undergoing an extensive renovation.
Brooklyn Museum
https://www.brooklynmuseum.org/exhibitions/luce
https://www.brooklynmuseum.org/exhibitions/small_wonders
The Brooklyn Museum received a $10 million grant in 2001 towards a reinstallation of their permanent collection galleries displaying their American Art collection, and a visible storage center. The Luce Center for American Art is a 5,000 square foot space displaying approximately 2000 objects, from Tiffany glass to contemporary furniture, and with nearly 600 paintings on rolling racks. Space is set aside for small feature exhibitions and representative selections of Native American and Spanish colonial objects are included. Database access points are built into the space.
Smithsonian American Art Museum
http://americanart.si.edu/luce/index.cfm
SAAM received a $10 million grant to create the Luce Foundation Center in 2001; $7 million towards the development of the Center and $3 million towards an endowment to support ongoing staffing and programmes. A library within the museum's 19th century building - previously the National Patents Office - was renovated to create the Center. Approximately 3,3000 objects are spread over three levels: large sculptures on the bottom floor, and then paintings and objects in cases cases and pneumatic drawers on two mezzanine levels. Objects on display vary from portrait miniatures to Roman glass vessels to folk art paintings. The drawers make it possible to display some light sensitive materials, as they are climate controlled and only lit when opened.
The Luce Conservation Center is adjacent to the space, allowing behind-the-scenes view of conservation procedures. Study tables and some database access points are built into the space.
Smithsonian American Art Museum
I first visited the Luce Foundation at SAAM in mid 2013. At the time I found the experience engaging; the eclectic mixing of objects, the lack of overt supervision which created a more intimate sense as a visitor - like browsing in someone's house while they were in another room. There was no-one to discourage photography on either visit, and the setting - wooden balustrades, large chandeliers, small staircases between floors - lends to the old-fashioned, romantic atmosphere - almost like a very good antique store.
The experience is however becoming tired. I did not notice any changes having taken place in the two years between my visits, and in fact a set of the pneumatic drawers that had were not functioning in 2013 were still out of order in 2015.
The database stations are becoming outmoded and the research space is basic. The Center was unstaffed on the weekend that I visited. While the bones are in place for a rich experience, my second visit to the space was curiously unengaging; this was a surprise to me, because my own tendencies as a visitor incline me towards galleries like this.
Brooklyn Museum The Brooklyn Museum's Luce Center for American Art is entered off the permanent galleries displaying the American Art collection - being redesigned in early 2016, these galleries displayed American art, design and craft along with Native American and Spanish colonial-era art in eight thematic displays that were highly designed, richly coloured, and mixed objects from different genres in each display.
The Luce Center had a strikingly different aesthetic. The back of the space - behind a glass wall - is devoted to painting racks, of which only the first row is visible. The rest of the space is full of tall, multi-level glass and steel cases, giving a warehouse-like atmosphere. Lighting is kept dim, and many cases have a flashlight attached to them to allow for better inspection. The objects vary greatly in size, from jewellery in drawers to large statues in their own cases. Database access is provided through screens affixed to the sides of cases with a metal chair provided. The overall effect was more dramatic and contemporary than SAAM, but the space also felt dim, cool, and not conducive to lingering, compared, for example, to recent work done at the Museum to make the foyer a more hospitable space, with comfortable seating with inbuilt device chargers.
I met with the exhibition designer who had originally worked on the construction of the space. The industrial materials were chosen to be cost-effective, but also to contrast to the curated galleries. The brief sought to communicate the sense of the wealth and diversity of the collections, and this is achieved. The lighting is in need of renewal, but this is not a priority, and hence the space is darker than intended - with the spartan furnishings, the overall effect is a space rich for exploration, but not comfortable to spend time in.
While at the Brooklyn Museum I also visited Double Take: African Innovations, a temporary display of objects from the museum's African Art collection. This is the second shorter term exhibition of this collection, undertaken during a longer term renovation of the museum's first floor galleries.
The main gallery displays nearly 40 collection items arranged in 15 pairs or small groups, each exploring subjects, themes and artistic techniques that recur throughout African history: the emphasis is on continuity and innovation. Each display encourages viewers to draw connections between the artworks they are looking at. In an adjacent gallery, a further 150 items are displayed in what the curator describes as an 'unstructured sampling': the display method is more closely packed and presented with less interpretation than the next door gallery, but is still displayed in more a a 'gallery' aesthetic than the Luce Center. Visitors are encouraged to make their own new pairings of these objects through an interactive display, and share them on social media using a hashtag.
I found this mixed display - a modernist hang, where artworks are given a great deal of space and interpretation, alongside a denser, compacted display of multiple items on a similar theme - to be the most successful of the visible storage approaches I saw on my visit. Despite coming to this gallery at the end of my seven-hour visit to the museum, I was still pulled in to both the artworks and the pairing-making activity. The contrast between overtly curated display and ostensibly random sampling gives the impression of both an experience that has been created for you as the viewer, and an experience that is handed over to you to serendipitously explore, and to respond to in a concrete way. https://www.brooklynmuseum.org/exhibitions/double_take_african_innovations
Visible storage and digitised collections have evolved alongside each other as responses to the constraint of physical space, and museums' inability to ever properly display more than a small percentage of their holdings in curated exhibitions. While the area of digital developments is extremely well documented, there is little research or evaluation generally available on the history, trends, and visitor experience of visible storage.
The general trend for new and planned visible storage spaces is to take a more dramatic or overtly designed approach to the design of displays, contra to the earlier emphasis on evoking or replicating the functional design of actual storage spaces.
For example, the York Museums has recently opened the Centre of Ceramic Art. The museum holds Britain's most significant collection of British studio pottery, and its building was recently redeveloped to create this centre. A large number of collection items are presented in a variety of ways: the 17-metre long Wall of Pots contains over 1000 objects from the Roman era to the present day, currently organised by colour; two domestically-scaled rooms have been created to display the collection of Anthony B Shaw, mingling objects with bookshelves; and for the opening of the centre ceramicist Clare Twomey was commissioned to create Manifest: 10,000 Hours, a towering installation of 10,000 identical white slip-cast vessels. http://www.centreofceramicart.org.uk/
In another example, the New York Historical Society (a previous recipient of a Luce Foundation grant for visible storage) is currently renovating its fourth floor galleries. Opening in January 2017, the renovated floor will include a gallery designed by architect Eva Jiřičná dedicated to the Tiffany lamp collection; the newly established Center for the Study of Women’s History, which will present exhibitions and public programmes along with an 'immersive multimedia film', and a and a 're-imagined display of collection highlights' in the Henry Luce III Center for the Study of American Culture. http://www.nyhistory.org/exhibits/all/about/0/table/paged/title
An alternative approach is evinced at the newly opened Broad Museum in Los Angeles. The architectural conceit of this building, designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro, is of the 'vault and the veil'. The building, wrapped in a striking articulated fibreglass-enriched concrete mesh, is constructed around a large central well which forms the collection storage space. Windows are let into the public access staircase and the first floor, allowing visitors to peek into the working storage space. While convincing as a design notion, the actual visitor experience is of small apertures in out of the way locations, that do not provide large or comfortable views. The windows, let into corners on the staircase, are surprisingly easily missed and uncomfortable to linger at, as there is nowhere to lean or sit, or to avoid becoming an obstruction to other visitors' progress. http://www.thebroad.org/building
An interactive display at the Cooper Hewitt offers another alternative for mass-access to a collection, through digitisation rather than display of objects. In the immersion room, visitors can access the museum's extensive collection of wallcoverings. Using an interactive table, visitors can browse through wallpapers and project them onto the walls of the small gallery. Visitors can also use the collection items for inspiration for their own designs, which they can create on the table and project. The Immersion Room is not only popular with visitors, but a strong attractor for social media engagement, through the sharing of photos taken in the gallery. Much like the Brooklyn Museum's African art display, the room enables exploration of a large collection, visitors' own creation and then subsequent sharing; its very positive reception suggests these could be key features in future developments of such spaces. http://www.cooperhewitt.org/events/current-exhibitions/immersion-room/
Visible storage spaces tend to be heavily invested in upfront and then not updated for a considerable period of time: any area of a museum that is left unloved for too long inevitably begins to convey some sense of that neglect to visitors, like a room in a house that is never aired out.
My experiences on this research trip suggest that the 'behind the scenes' aesthetic is beginning to pall, and that "mixed-density" displays, combining the familiar aesthetics of both gallery exhibition and collection storage, with a higher level of interpretation and greater opportunity for visitor interaction, are becoming more appealing.
Visible storage is also an area of museum practice that is ripe for more research into visitors' interest, expectations, and actual experience. This is especially so in a digital age where access to a museum's holdings through technology (be that an interactive screen, table, or personal device)is becoming the default setting, at the same time that museums employ more and more design techniques to create immersive and spectacular displays in order to remain compelling in an increasingly visual and design-driven world.
Henry Luce Foundation American Art Program http://www.hluce.org/americanart.aspx
Celestine Bohlen, 'Museums as Walk-In Closets; Visible Storage Opens Troves to the Public', New York Times, 8 May 2001 http://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/08/arts/museums-as-walk-in-closets-visible-storage-opens-troves-to-the-public.html?pagewanted=all
Elizabeth Cooper, 'Letting Some Light Into the Attic', New York Sun, 13 January 2005 http://www.nysun.com/arts/letting-some-light-into-the-attic/7674/
Georgina Goodlander, 'Overview of the Luce Foundation Center', presentation notes, 25 November 2009 http://www.slideshare.net/georginab/luce-foundation-center-overview-presentation-notes
Jori Finkel, 'LACMA, Broad, other art museums work to put storage on display', Los Angeles Times, 20 July 2013 http://articles.latimes.com/2013/jul/20/entertainment/la-et-cm-lacma-broad-museum-storage-20130721
Cameron Maynard, 'Turning museums inside out with beautiful visible storage', Atlas Obscura, 24 September 2014 http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/turning-museums-inside-out-with-beautiful-visible-storage
I should emphasise that this really is a *draft* and changes to the final document are inevitable.
1.1 Introduction
Open collections, or visible storage, is a general term used to describe public displays within museums where the emphasis is placed upon access and serendipitous discovery rather than a curated, white-wall experience. Visible storage is a way of giving museum visitors a feeling of being 'behind the scenes' in the normally off-limits art collection store, and addresses the oft-heard complaint that museums only display a tiny fraction of their permanent holdings at any given time.
Visible storage displays began being introduced in the mid 1970s, as museums moved towards a more educational and audience-focused mission. In these space, objects are usually displayed in fairly functional cases and shelving, closely grouped. Objects may be minimally labelled, or described through numbering, and handbooks or database access is provided to assist the visitor to learn more: lengthy descriptive labels are rare. Objects do not tend to be moved or exchanged often, although items may be withdrawn for exhibition or loan. Small temporary display spaces may be built into the larger space, offering the opportunity to create 'focus' exhibitions on certain groups of objects with more interpretation.
Sculpture, ceramics, glass, design objects, furniture and paintings are well suited to this form of long term display. Light-sensitive materials such as textiles and watercolours are rarely displayed in this manner, as the conservation risk is too high.
In American museums, visible storage ranges from small galleries, almost like nooks (such as that at the Dallas Museum of Art displaying ceramics and glass) to large purpose-built spaces that may include space for researchers to work. It is worth noting that while these study centres are presented as 'uncurated' spaces (suggesting that the objects on display have not been selected with the same level of curatorial decision-making as objects in a normal gallery exhibition, and that the display has not been designed with the same level of aesthetic attention) there is a strong shared visual language and interpretation approach to visible storage. A virtue is made of providing only minimal labelling or interpretation, meant to encourage browsing and a visual, rather than textual, engagement with the objects. Objects are grouped by medium, size, type, or place of origin (carved wooden toys / furniture / large sculpture / metalwork) as opposed to chronologically, thematically, or by artist, as a visitor would expect in a normal exhibition. Display cases and racks are functional (glass and metal cases, or large heavy drawers) or old-fashioned (small, wooden): white plinths of the sort used in collection or temporary galleries are rarely employed. The overarching narrative is that visible storage encourages unmediated access where visitors are free to make their own observations and engage in slow, close looking: this is, of course, as conscious a curatorial and design choice as any other arrangement of objects into a gallery display.
1.2 Henry Luce Foundation support
Between 1985 and 2001 the Henry Luce Foundation, through its American Art Program, gave significant amounts of funding to four museums to create visible storage spaces.
Metropolitan Museum of Art
http://www.metmuseum.org/visit/museum-map/galleries/the-american-wing/774
In 1985 the Met received the first Luce Foundation grant to create a visible storage center. The 16,000 square foot facility named the Henry R. Luce Center for the Study of American Art, opened in 1988 and displays a significant portion of their American fine art and decorative art collection (over 10,000 objects). Items are grouped by material (painting, sculpture, furniture and woodwork, glass, ceramics, silver and metalwork) and within those categories by date. Light-sensitive works such as textiles and watercolours are not on view but can be seen by appointment.
New York Historical Society
http://www.nyhistory.org/exhibits/all/about/0/table/paged/title
The NYHS was the second recipient of a Luce Foundation grant for visible storage. In this instance, rather than fitting out a display space, the grant was used to create views into actual storage spaces, giving visual access to approximately 40,000 objects. This facility, the Henry Luce III Center for the Study of American Culture, opened in 2000. The Center is currently undergoing an extensive renovation.
Brooklyn Museum
https://www.brooklynmuseum.org/exhibitions/luce
https://www.brooklynmuseum.org/exhibitions/small_wonders
The Brooklyn Museum received a $10 million grant in 2001 towards a reinstallation of their permanent collection galleries displaying their American Art collection, and a visible storage center. The Luce Center for American Art is a 5,000 square foot space displaying approximately 2000 objects, from Tiffany glass to contemporary furniture, and with nearly 600 paintings on rolling racks. Space is set aside for small feature exhibitions and representative selections of Native American and Spanish colonial objects are included. Database access points are built into the space.
Smithsonian American Art Museum
http://americanart.si.edu/luce/index.cfm
SAAM received a $10 million grant to create the Luce Foundation Center in 2001; $7 million towards the development of the Center and $3 million towards an endowment to support ongoing staffing and programmes. A library within the museum's 19th century building - previously the National Patents Office - was renovated to create the Center. Approximately 3,3000 objects are spread over three levels: large sculptures on the bottom floor, and then paintings and objects in cases cases and pneumatic drawers on two mezzanine levels. Objects on display vary from portrait miniatures to Roman glass vessels to folk art paintings. The drawers make it possible to display some light sensitive materials, as they are climate controlled and only lit when opened.
The Luce Conservation Center is adjacent to the space, allowing behind-the-scenes view of conservation procedures. Study tables and some database access points are built into the space.
1.3 Visits
Smithsonian American Art Museum
I first visited the Luce Foundation at SAAM in mid 2013. At the time I found the experience engaging; the eclectic mixing of objects, the lack of overt supervision which created a more intimate sense as a visitor - like browsing in someone's house while they were in another room. There was no-one to discourage photography on either visit, and the setting - wooden balustrades, large chandeliers, small staircases between floors - lends to the old-fashioned, romantic atmosphere - almost like a very good antique store.
The experience is however becoming tired. I did not notice any changes having taken place in the two years between my visits, and in fact a set of the pneumatic drawers that had were not functioning in 2013 were still out of order in 2015.
The database stations are becoming outmoded and the research space is basic. The Center was unstaffed on the weekend that I visited. While the bones are in place for a rich experience, my second visit to the space was curiously unengaging; this was a surprise to me, because my own tendencies as a visitor incline me towards galleries like this.
Brooklyn Museum The Brooklyn Museum's Luce Center for American Art is entered off the permanent galleries displaying the American Art collection - being redesigned in early 2016, these galleries displayed American art, design and craft along with Native American and Spanish colonial-era art in eight thematic displays that were highly designed, richly coloured, and mixed objects from different genres in each display.
The Luce Center had a strikingly different aesthetic. The back of the space - behind a glass wall - is devoted to painting racks, of which only the first row is visible. The rest of the space is full of tall, multi-level glass and steel cases, giving a warehouse-like atmosphere. Lighting is kept dim, and many cases have a flashlight attached to them to allow for better inspection. The objects vary greatly in size, from jewellery in drawers to large statues in their own cases. Database access is provided through screens affixed to the sides of cases with a metal chair provided. The overall effect was more dramatic and contemporary than SAAM, but the space also felt dim, cool, and not conducive to lingering, compared, for example, to recent work done at the Museum to make the foyer a more hospitable space, with comfortable seating with inbuilt device chargers.
I met with the exhibition designer who had originally worked on the construction of the space. The industrial materials were chosen to be cost-effective, but also to contrast to the curated galleries. The brief sought to communicate the sense of the wealth and diversity of the collections, and this is achieved. The lighting is in need of renewal, but this is not a priority, and hence the space is darker than intended - with the spartan furnishings, the overall effect is a space rich for exploration, but not comfortable to spend time in.
While at the Brooklyn Museum I also visited Double Take: African Innovations, a temporary display of objects from the museum's African Art collection. This is the second shorter term exhibition of this collection, undertaken during a longer term renovation of the museum's first floor galleries.
The main gallery displays nearly 40 collection items arranged in 15 pairs or small groups, each exploring subjects, themes and artistic techniques that recur throughout African history: the emphasis is on continuity and innovation. Each display encourages viewers to draw connections between the artworks they are looking at. In an adjacent gallery, a further 150 items are displayed in what the curator describes as an 'unstructured sampling': the display method is more closely packed and presented with less interpretation than the next door gallery, but is still displayed in more a a 'gallery' aesthetic than the Luce Center. Visitors are encouraged to make their own new pairings of these objects through an interactive display, and share them on social media using a hashtag.
I found this mixed display - a modernist hang, where artworks are given a great deal of space and interpretation, alongside a denser, compacted display of multiple items on a similar theme - to be the most successful of the visible storage approaches I saw on my visit. Despite coming to this gallery at the end of my seven-hour visit to the museum, I was still pulled in to both the artworks and the pairing-making activity. The contrast between overtly curated display and ostensibly random sampling gives the impression of both an experience that has been created for you as the viewer, and an experience that is handed over to you to serendipitously explore, and to respond to in a concrete way. https://www.brooklynmuseum.org/exhibitions/double_take_african_innovations
1.4 Recent developments in visible storage
Visible storage and digitised collections have evolved alongside each other as responses to the constraint of physical space, and museums' inability to ever properly display more than a small percentage of their holdings in curated exhibitions. While the area of digital developments is extremely well documented, there is little research or evaluation generally available on the history, trends, and visitor experience of visible storage.
The general trend for new and planned visible storage spaces is to take a more dramatic or overtly designed approach to the design of displays, contra to the earlier emphasis on evoking or replicating the functional design of actual storage spaces.
For example, the York Museums has recently opened the Centre of Ceramic Art. The museum holds Britain's most significant collection of British studio pottery, and its building was recently redeveloped to create this centre. A large number of collection items are presented in a variety of ways: the 17-metre long Wall of Pots contains over 1000 objects from the Roman era to the present day, currently organised by colour; two domestically-scaled rooms have been created to display the collection of Anthony B Shaw, mingling objects with bookshelves; and for the opening of the centre ceramicist Clare Twomey was commissioned to create Manifest: 10,000 Hours, a towering installation of 10,000 identical white slip-cast vessels. http://www.centreofceramicart.org.uk/
In another example, the New York Historical Society (a previous recipient of a Luce Foundation grant for visible storage) is currently renovating its fourth floor galleries. Opening in January 2017, the renovated floor will include a gallery designed by architect Eva Jiřičná dedicated to the Tiffany lamp collection; the newly established Center for the Study of Women’s History, which will present exhibitions and public programmes along with an 'immersive multimedia film', and a and a 're-imagined display of collection highlights' in the Henry Luce III Center for the Study of American Culture. http://www.nyhistory.org/exhibits/all/about/0/table/paged/title
An alternative approach is evinced at the newly opened Broad Museum in Los Angeles. The architectural conceit of this building, designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro, is of the 'vault and the veil'. The building, wrapped in a striking articulated fibreglass-enriched concrete mesh, is constructed around a large central well which forms the collection storage space. Windows are let into the public access staircase and the first floor, allowing visitors to peek into the working storage space. While convincing as a design notion, the actual visitor experience is of small apertures in out of the way locations, that do not provide large or comfortable views. The windows, let into corners on the staircase, are surprisingly easily missed and uncomfortable to linger at, as there is nowhere to lean or sit, or to avoid becoming an obstruction to other visitors' progress. http://www.thebroad.org/building
An interactive display at the Cooper Hewitt offers another alternative for mass-access to a collection, through digitisation rather than display of objects. In the immersion room, visitors can access the museum's extensive collection of wallcoverings. Using an interactive table, visitors can browse through wallpapers and project them onto the walls of the small gallery. Visitors can also use the collection items for inspiration for their own designs, which they can create on the table and project. The Immersion Room is not only popular with visitors, but a strong attractor for social media engagement, through the sharing of photos taken in the gallery. Much like the Brooklyn Museum's African art display, the room enables exploration of a large collection, visitors' own creation and then subsequent sharing; its very positive reception suggests these could be key features in future developments of such spaces. http://www.cooperhewitt.org/events/current-exhibitions/immersion-room/
1.5 Conclusion
Visible storage spaces tend to be heavily invested in upfront and then not updated for a considerable period of time: any area of a museum that is left unloved for too long inevitably begins to convey some sense of that neglect to visitors, like a room in a house that is never aired out.
My experiences on this research trip suggest that the 'behind the scenes' aesthetic is beginning to pall, and that "mixed-density" displays, combining the familiar aesthetics of both gallery exhibition and collection storage, with a higher level of interpretation and greater opportunity for visitor interaction, are becoming more appealing.
Visible storage is also an area of museum practice that is ripe for more research into visitors' interest, expectations, and actual experience. This is especially so in a digital age where access to a museum's holdings through technology (be that an interactive screen, table, or personal device)is becoming the default setting, at the same time that museums employ more and more design techniques to create immersive and spectacular displays in order to remain compelling in an increasingly visual and design-driven world.
1.6 Further information
Henry Luce Foundation American Art Program http://www.hluce.org/americanart.aspx
Celestine Bohlen, 'Museums as Walk-In Closets; Visible Storage Opens Troves to the Public', New York Times, 8 May 2001 http://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/08/arts/museums-as-walk-in-closets-visible-storage-opens-troves-to-the-public.html?pagewanted=all
Elizabeth Cooper, 'Letting Some Light Into the Attic', New York Sun, 13 January 2005 http://www.nysun.com/arts/letting-some-light-into-the-attic/7674/
Georgina Goodlander, 'Overview of the Luce Foundation Center', presentation notes, 25 November 2009 http://www.slideshare.net/georginab/luce-foundation-center-overview-presentation-notes
Jori Finkel, 'LACMA, Broad, other art museums work to put storage on display', Los Angeles Times, 20 July 2013 http://articles.latimes.com/2013/jul/20/entertainment/la-et-cm-lacma-broad-museum-storage-20130721
Cameron Maynard, 'Turning museums inside out with beautiful visible storage', Atlas Obscura, 24 September 2014 http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/turning-museums-inside-out-with-beautiful-visible-storage
Saturday, 16 January 2016
Reading List, 16 January 2016
By the numbers #1: Colleen Dilenschneider on 'optimal audience acquisition costs' for cultural non-profits.
By the numbers #2: The American Association of Art Museum Directors analysis of their 2015 members survey on topics such as revenue sources, admission charges, and objects borrowed > objects lent.
By the numbers #3: Carolina Miranda outlines 9 ways Helen Molesworth's hang of the permanent collection at MOCA in Los Angeles offers a different take on modern and contemporary American art history.
By the numbers #4: the British Museums Association annual survey indicates that 'nearly one in five regional museums has closed a part or branch of their museum to the public in the last year, or plans such a closure in the year to come' while 8% introduced entry charges last year and 12% intend to do so this year, due to funding cuts.
Plenty of numbers in Seb Chan's end of year round-up, but it's the differences he identifies between American and NZ/Aus museums that I find most fascinating. And this:
On Artsy, a site I've never really thought to read before, Meredith Mendelsohn and Tess Thackara on How Advocates of African-American Art Are Advancing Racial Equality in the Art World.
By the numbers #2: The American Association of Art Museum Directors analysis of their 2015 members survey on topics such as revenue sources, admission charges, and objects borrowed > objects lent.
By the numbers #3: Carolina Miranda outlines 9 ways Helen Molesworth's hang of the permanent collection at MOCA in Los Angeles offers a different take on modern and contemporary American art history.
By the numbers #4: the British Museums Association annual survey indicates that 'nearly one in five regional museums has closed a part or branch of their museum to the public in the last year, or plans such a closure in the year to come' while 8% introduced entry charges last year and 12% intend to do so this year, due to funding cuts.
Plenty of numbers in Seb Chan's end of year round-up, but it's the differences he identifies between American and NZ/Aus museums that I find most fascinating. And this:
... digital transformation efforts are really in the service of visitors wherever they might be. In that sense, ‘digital transformation’ follows in the footsteps of the education-led museology of the 1990s. You can sense this in Nicholas Serota’s recently published “commonwealth of ideas” speech about a new Tate.Nothing to do with numbers, but this Reddit AMA on museum technology by Michael Edson, Eric Rodley and Emily Lytle-Painter is full of interesting nuggets. I'm finding myself increasingly drawn to the Reddit style of conducting these group conversations over the hashtag pile-ons of Twitter chats. I wonder what they're like as a respondent?
On Artsy, a site I've never really thought to read before, Meredith Mendelsohn and Tess Thackara on How Advocates of African-American Art Are Advancing Racial Equality in the Art World.
Wednesday, 13 January 2016
If something returns this slowly, does that mean it never died?
Every morning I start my day with my version of reading the newspaper: firing up The Dowse's facebook account, my Twitter and my Feedly RSS subscriptions and spending about an hour over breakfast catching up on the overnight posts and clicking through to various items.
One of the links I paused over this morning from Twitter was from Fiona Romeo, to this LinkedIn post on the return of email newsletters (weird Venn diagram right there) by Warren Ellis. In it Ellis lists all the email newsletters he currently follows. These are not all digests (such as that published by Brain Pickings) but rather old school email newsletters, like blog posts sent to your inbox, many powered by Tiny Letter.
The resurgence of the email newsletter has been well covered over the past few years: even a lazy google brings up Wired in September 2013, the NYT in June 2014, this roundtable on Medium in June 2015 and the Harvard Business Review in October 2015.
I currently subscribe to a number of email digests (mostly to generate leads for items for my Nine to Noon spots) and exactly one email newsletter of the kind being described here: Lena Dunham and Jenni Konner's 'Lenny'. In fact, it was the first thing I read this morning.
Described by the Guardian at its launch mid last year as a 'lifestyle mailout ...following in the digital footsteps of lifestyle gurus Gwyneth Paltrow and Blake Lively', the newsletter has a strong girl-power message, impressive access (this morning's missive included an interview with the Democratic National Committee chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz), and an overall confessional tone (matching up with Dunham and Konner's Girls). I don't *enjoy* reading it, exactly - that tone is so ubiquitous in my online sphere right now that I struggle to stay engaged - but I feel like it's important to pursue, partly to be part of this newsletter trend, partly exactly because it rubs against my grain, and partly because I'm trying to read more online writing by women, because most of the bloggers I follow are men.
My career and my intellectual life has been so strongly shaped by the free publishing of people's advice, insights and instructions to the internet. I'm immediately averse to all kinds of walled gardens, and thrilled to see a faint green haze like a freshly seeded lawn appearing over some of the blogs I used to follow, as people begin to publish in a longer format again. Warren Ellis introduces that list of newsletters with this observation: Everyone's gone to the mattresses in 2016. You need a map to find all the players, because they're all firing from cover. What he means by that by their very nature, these email newsletters are not easy to stumble upon. A Tiny Letter-powered newsletter homepage is basically a heading, a line of text, and a sign-up box. All that delicious content goes directly to people's inboxes, making it somewhat intimate ... but also invisible. And that makes me a little sad.
One of the links I paused over this morning from Twitter was from Fiona Romeo, to this LinkedIn post on the return of email newsletters (weird Venn diagram right there) by Warren Ellis. In it Ellis lists all the email newsletters he currently follows. These are not all digests (such as that published by Brain Pickings) but rather old school email newsletters, like blog posts sent to your inbox, many powered by Tiny Letter.
The resurgence of the email newsletter has been well covered over the past few years: even a lazy google brings up Wired in September 2013, the NYT in June 2014, this roundtable on Medium in June 2015 and the Harvard Business Review in October 2015.
I currently subscribe to a number of email digests (mostly to generate leads for items for my Nine to Noon spots) and exactly one email newsletter of the kind being described here: Lena Dunham and Jenni Konner's 'Lenny'. In fact, it was the first thing I read this morning.
Described by the Guardian at its launch mid last year as a 'lifestyle mailout ...following in the digital footsteps of lifestyle gurus Gwyneth Paltrow and Blake Lively', the newsletter has a strong girl-power message, impressive access (this morning's missive included an interview with the Democratic National Committee chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz), and an overall confessional tone (matching up with Dunham and Konner's Girls). I don't *enjoy* reading it, exactly - that tone is so ubiquitous in my online sphere right now that I struggle to stay engaged - but I feel like it's important to pursue, partly to be part of this newsletter trend, partly exactly because it rubs against my grain, and partly because I'm trying to read more online writing by women, because most of the bloggers I follow are men.
My career and my intellectual life has been so strongly shaped by the free publishing of people's advice, insights and instructions to the internet. I'm immediately averse to all kinds of walled gardens, and thrilled to see a faint green haze like a freshly seeded lawn appearing over some of the blogs I used to follow, as people begin to publish in a longer format again. Warren Ellis introduces that list of newsletters with this observation: Everyone's gone to the mattresses in 2016. You need a map to find all the players, because they're all firing from cover. What he means by that by their very nature, these email newsletters are not easy to stumble upon. A Tiny Letter-powered newsletter homepage is basically a heading, a line of text, and a sign-up box. All that delicious content goes directly to people's inboxes, making it somewhat intimate ... but also invisible. And that makes me a little sad.
Saturday, 9 January 2016
Reading list, 9 January 2016
Maciej Cegłowski on the website obesity crisis. Maybe you don't care at all about the size of the pages you're downloading on the internet, or what that - a few steps down - means for online advertising. I don't care about your don't cares. Read this as a wonderful example of how polemic on a technical topic can be fluent, funny, and mind-expanding.
'Blogs were gold and bloggers were rock stars back in 2008 when I was arrested' - Hossein Derakhshan was sentenced to nearly 20 years in jail in 2008, mostly for his web activities. Following his surprise early arrest, he has tried to re-establish himself online, and his insights on how the internet has changed over that time as a person who uses it to share writing are fascinating. A quite different take on the 'Facebook is killing the internet' theme.
Nicholas Serota in the Art Newspaper: The 21st-century Tate is a commonwealth of ideas (which, shamefully, introduced me to their online performance series, which I'd never heard of.
The Little Old Lady from the Upper West Side how the New Yorker's DNA has been sustained over time.
And in the New Yorker - Ben Lerner on conservation of contemporary art at the Whitney, and beyond.
'Blogs were gold and bloggers were rock stars back in 2008 when I was arrested' - Hossein Derakhshan was sentenced to nearly 20 years in jail in 2008, mostly for his web activities. Following his surprise early arrest, he has tried to re-establish himself online, and his insights on how the internet has changed over that time as a person who uses it to share writing are fascinating. A quite different take on the 'Facebook is killing the internet' theme.
Nicholas Serota in the Art Newspaper: The 21st-century Tate is a commonwealth of ideas (which, shamefully, introduced me to their online performance series, which I'd never heard of.
The Little Old Lady from the Upper West Side how the New Yorker's DNA has been sustained over time.
And in the New Yorker - Ben Lerner on conservation of contemporary art at the Whitney, and beyond.
Wednesday, 6 January 2016
'Sup, Colin?
Sometimes a little idea brings a lot of pleasure. An example of this, which has been around since 2014 but only just passed my transom today, is Sup Bowie, a site that answers the vital question: What did David Bowie do at your age?
It does what it says on the box: you enter your name, and it shows you an event from Bowie's life.
My first thought was, of course, that this would be fun to apply to a New Zealand artist who worked steadily and productively across their lifetime - Colin McCahon, with the added advantage of the McCahon database, is the obvious option. In his 36th (approximately) year, for example, McCahon was living in Titirangi, experimenting with a new visual landscape in a Cubist-influenced style, doing some stage designs for the art gallery ballet, and producing a few rather theatrical early word paintings, like Sacred to the memory of Death.
I thought this idea could be extrapolated out: for example, a collection search could let you call up works by various artists, based on their age (Show me all the things made by artists when they were 36). Mulling this over though, I realised this was kind of dry (and totally the kind of thing people like me come up with and get all excited about).
A creative director or UX lead might explain that the appeal of Sup Bowie is getting to use a very basic shared attribute (we were all born in some year, we were all born in some place, we are all a certain age) to draw a connection yourself and the content being delivered/marketed to you. The appeal with the Bowie site, of course, is being able to compare your life progress with a mythical unicorn beast. The reason I *like* Sup Bowie though is that instead of being programmatically driven off, say, his Wikipedia discography, each year has been specifically scripted. While some years are marked by showstoppers (his marriage to Iman, the release of Let's Dance) his childhood years are marked with imaginatively captioned photos and some years (possibly the less active, to be fair) are given to basically random shit
The what-did-Bowie-do-at-an-age-he-hasn't-reached is also dealt with ...
This brings the site closer to story telling than data visualisation. It's also more human. Mixing in a bit of humour and a bit of ordinary life make you want to keep prodding it with new numbers, precisely because it doesn't just spit out the usual biodata. And that's a useful thing to keep in mind.
It does what it says on the box: you enter your name, and it shows you an event from Bowie's life.
My first thought was, of course, that this would be fun to apply to a New Zealand artist who worked steadily and productively across their lifetime - Colin McCahon, with the added advantage of the McCahon database, is the obvious option. In his 36th (approximately) year, for example, McCahon was living in Titirangi, experimenting with a new visual landscape in a Cubist-influenced style, doing some stage designs for the art gallery ballet, and producing a few rather theatrical early word paintings, like Sacred to the memory of Death.
I thought this idea could be extrapolated out: for example, a collection search could let you call up works by various artists, based on their age (Show me all the things made by artists when they were 36). Mulling this over though, I realised this was kind of dry (and totally the kind of thing people like me come up with and get all excited about).
A creative director or UX lead might explain that the appeal of Sup Bowie is getting to use a very basic shared attribute (we were all born in some year, we were all born in some place, we are all a certain age) to draw a connection yourself and the content being delivered/marketed to you. The appeal with the Bowie site, of course, is being able to compare your life progress with a mythical unicorn beast. The reason I *like* Sup Bowie though is that instead of being programmatically driven off, say, his Wikipedia discography, each year has been specifically scripted. While some years are marked by showstoppers (his marriage to Iman, the release of Let's Dance) his childhood years are marked with imaginatively captioned photos and some years (possibly the less active, to be fair) are given to basically random shit
The what-did-Bowie-do-at-an-age-he-hasn't-reached is also dealt with ...
This brings the site closer to story telling than data visualisation. It's also more human. Mixing in a bit of humour and a bit of ordinary life make you want to keep prodding it with new numbers, precisely because it doesn't just spit out the usual biodata. And that's a useful thing to keep in mind.
Tuesday, 5 January 2016
Summer school II
It's nearly the end of my holiday - and hopefully of the brief spat of poor weather. That means less laptop time and maximising what's left of the sun before going back into the Director Cave.
It's been a good break. I've read a lot, but I've listened to even more words on podcasts than I think I've read, including catching up on my Slate Culture Gabfest and Pop Culture Happy Hour regulars, but also finally getting around to Gimlet Media's Start-Up podcast, backlistening to Song Exploder, trialling Pitch and About Race, and spending a vastly enjoyable 90 odd minutes listening to this NYPL conversation between Ira Glass and Nico Muhly from 2013.
I've worked on my spider guard a bit (not as much as I meant to) but I've also played around in the sun with friends and with rings and paralettes and Jefferson curls and my rope-climbing technique (as in, I have the beginning of a technique now), and that's been immensely satisfying.
This is the first time in three summers when a few days haven't been dedicated to a massive chucking-out binge and I am thankful for that, and also for doing that before #konmari became a thing.
I've done the two bits of work-related stuff that I brought home (both fun, both on the down-low for now).
And I've plugged away at my self-set Wikipedia goals. I didn't achieve quite as much as I hoped to, but I've created or substantially edited a number of pages which makes me quite content:
It's been a good break. I've read a lot, but I've listened to even more words on podcasts than I think I've read, including catching up on my Slate Culture Gabfest and Pop Culture Happy Hour regulars, but also finally getting around to Gimlet Media's Start-Up podcast, backlistening to Song Exploder, trialling Pitch and About Race, and spending a vastly enjoyable 90 odd minutes listening to this NYPL conversation between Ira Glass and Nico Muhly from 2013.
I've worked on my spider guard a bit (not as much as I meant to) but I've also played around in the sun with friends and with rings and paralettes and Jefferson curls and my rope-climbing technique (as in, I have the beginning of a technique now), and that's been immensely satisfying.
This is the first time in three summers when a few days haven't been dedicated to a massive chucking-out binge and I am thankful for that, and also for doing that before #konmari became a thing.
I've done the two bits of work-related stuff that I brought home (both fun, both on the down-low for now).
And I've plugged away at my self-set Wikipedia goals. I didn't achieve quite as much as I hoped to, but I've created or substantially edited a number of pages which makes me quite content:
- Allie Eagle
- Tina Barton
- Jill Trevelyan
- Rhana Devenport
- Ngahuia Te Awekotuku
- Cheryll Sotheran
- Rodney Wilson
- Shirley Horrocks
- Jenny Harper
- Alter / Image
- Bottled Ocean
- Immune and Implicated
That's a bit better than one every two days. I've made about 350 edits since 1 December, and also upped my blogging frequency: after this, it's 11 more posts until I hit 1,500 entries here. Given that my first post was made in December 2006, I guess that makes this my 10th year of blogging? Good lord.
Monday, 4 January 2016
Role models
When we were married, William and I always looked up to Tim and Sherrah Francis as the couple we wanted to grow old like. When we visited their home and undertook the slow circuit of the overflowing walls, I'd think This is how I want to be. It wasn't just the amazing art: it was the modesty and the affection with which Tim and Sherrah treated their collection; their intent engagement with every work that crossed their path; the way their interests kept growing and expanding even as physically they became more frail.
Tim died this week. Jim and Mary Barr have written a lovely piece on him - and on Sherrah too, as they are almost unimaginable apart.
Tim died this week. Jim and Mary Barr have written a lovely piece on him - and on Sherrah too, as they are almost unimaginable apart.
Saturday, 2 January 2016
Reading list, 2 January 2016
Cheating a little, I saved Artnet's list of 2015 stand-out art essays for the post-Christmas quiet period. I'm still picking my way through it, but Maura O'Reilly's piece on the place of women in the visual arts is one of the most important things I personally read this year, and I was glad to see it here.
On Boxing Day morning I made coffee and sat down to read Jeremy Collins' Shadow Boxing: Lessons About Life, Death, And Writing, From Rocky, about grief, determination, writing and Sylvester Stallone. It's terrific. Thank you Simon, for sending it to me.
I picked up three new (to me) podcasts via Mother Jones's list to trial while lounging in Wellington's unseasonable - nay, unfeasible - run of good weather.
'... scholarship, like tobacco farming, exhausts the soil and then moves on' - Michael J. Lewis on the rise and fall of Victorian studies.
Linda Holmes, of Pop Culture Happy Hour, puts together a list of her 50 favourite pop-cultural things from 2015. (The reassuring voices of my favourite podcast presenters would be high on my list, if I had one.)
On Boxing Day morning I made coffee and sat down to read Jeremy Collins' Shadow Boxing: Lessons About Life, Death, And Writing, From Rocky, about grief, determination, writing and Sylvester Stallone. It's terrific. Thank you Simon, for sending it to me.
I picked up three new (to me) podcasts via Mother Jones's list to trial while lounging in Wellington's unseasonable - nay, unfeasible - run of good weather.
'... scholarship, like tobacco farming, exhausts the soil and then moves on' - Michael J. Lewis on the rise and fall of Victorian studies.
Linda Holmes, of Pop Culture Happy Hour, puts together a list of her 50 favourite pop-cultural things from 2015. (The reassuring voices of my favourite podcast presenters would be high on my list, if I had one.)
Friday, 1 January 2016
On stars, and thinking things through
In which I started out talking about something I like on the internet and ended up thinking quite a bit harder than I intended to.
This has been a summer break of small and quiet joys, mostly involving sunshine, reading, and sweaty physical exertion with people who I care a lot about.*
One of these small and quiet joys is Matt Webb's new-ish internet play thing, 5point9billion. It's a little Twitter bot that, after you provide it with your date of birth, tweets you regular updates on the progression of your personal light cone: the movement of the light that left the Earth on the day of your birth reaching the surrounding stars. You can read more about light cones and see how I got that description wrong on Wikipedia. And you can read all about the background and the technical details on Matt's blog.
After you've given 5point9billion your date of birth, it starts tweeting you as your light cone races towards the bright stars in the sky - first long-range forecasts (months in advance), then weekly, then day by day and then ...
A few of my friends have signed up to the bot, and there's something lovely about seeing the days pass in all of our lives through this very gentle and abstract medium.
Here's one conversation that we had about that online. Usually, I balk at passing over details like date of birth, and especially when signing up for something that publishes evidence of your birthdate for all to see. But - I trust Matt Webb, and so I did it.
When you are signed in to the service you can also see a chronology of your star-past:
Matt's also made a little 'personal star map' app, which when you're signed in shows your relative position to the surrounding stars in three dimensions.
After a very busy couple of weeks, I've entered a slow patch again, and 5point9billion will fade from my consciousness until May. But I like knowing it's there, and I like knowing that it's there in my friends' lives. It's one of those very light ties-that-bind that are facilitated by the internet.
There are three things I like about what Matt Webb does. One: he makes thoughtful things. Two: he makes them in public, and publicises them just enough, so you can follow his thinking and learning and see his mind at work. And three: I get the sense that although his activities seem quite broad (tramping, hardware coffee clubs, twitterbots) they all feed into and off of one another, and that appeals to me at this time when I'm trying to figure out what my thing is.
Matt (to my eyes, anyway) doesn't have a singular 'thing': he has this kind of spangly web of interests and skills that coalesces around a line of enquiry and results in the making or doing of a thing, and these things in turn become part of that web and generate further experiments and thinking. (I also, as I mangle away at this metaphor, am thinking of contrails, those vapour trails left by planes in the sky - directional traces of activity - as a descriptor for the various things I've seen Matt make and do online, but that image lacks the generative power I'm trying to convey).
What I'm trying to express is that I am drawn to Matt's experimenting and thinking because it doesn't seem directed towards a monolithic output (an app, a research paper, a book, a podcast series) but instead strikes me as a lived intellectual endeavour that is generously shared and not taken too heavily: thinking out loud on the internet. It appeals to me because, I guess, in my small sense, that's what I'm trying to do too.
And writing this just now has made something I've been feeling uncomfortable about fit better into my head. See, I met Matt once, about five and a half years ago, at Foo Camp in the States - went to a session he and Matt Jones ran and then played cricket in the parking lot with a bunch of other English and New Zealand people. But I don't know him. When I write about him like this - speculatively, making assumptions - I'm effectively using him as a thinking or teaching aid for myself. I read into what he does what I need to get out of it: my perception of his activity helps me assess and critique my own, suggests to me where I might direct more effort, gives me a model I can use. The Matt Webb that is useful to me might be unrecognisable to Matt Webb himself.
For a while now I've been struggling with the experience of being a role model for people. It's not a new phenomena or concern for me - as far back as when I worked at National Library I had the odd person come up to me and say that they looked up to me for the work I do. It's become a bit more common as I've gotten into leadership roles, and while I do appreciate it, it also worries me.
For one thing, at 36, I don't want to be old enough to be 'looked up to' by people in their 20s - I want to be thought of as a peer, someone with just as much likelihood of getting it right or fucking it up as they have. Being a role model also feels a little bit like being put on the shelf. At the same time, one of the things I've really relished over the past three years has been being in a position where I can create opportunities for people - but hopefully for people of all ages, not just my younger/newer colleagues.
The other thing, of course, is feeling like a fake. I try to be grateful, and gracious, when someone comes up to me and says something like 'You don't know me but you're my hero' (actual quote) but I tend to oscillate between two poles. One is irritation - if I don't know you, how do you know me well enough to putting me on some kind of pedastal without any input from me? And the other, of course, is fear: If you really knew me, you wouldn't feel like that at all. If you saw me in everyday work life, hunkering down in my office, getting things wrong, missing opportunities, being snappy with people, taking the easy course of action rather than pushing harder, being pretty uninspiring 95% of the times, you'd be disappointed in how far I am from the mental model you've constructed of me.
[As a side note, I also struggle with the empty hyperbole of the internet, the awesome-isation of everything, the kick-ass and babe! of tweets and Instagram comments. I wrote a somewhat satirical piece on the devaluation of competence once, but it wasn't really all that satirical, now or at the time. The way we craft our online personalities and presences doesn't help, of course. The internet gives us much greater access to people we don't know in real life, but without the checks and balances of real life. I am discomforted (but also a little thrilled, and then discomforted at that thrill) when some of that online adulation is attached to something I've done or said.]
But writing this just now has made me realise, in a way, that this doesn't matter. (As long as I'm not a big fat con artist, anyway.) I've finally figured out that to use someone as a role model you don't need to know every in-and-out of their character or their practice. Instead, you find something in a person that helps move you ahead in whatever it is you're trying to the achieve. Something that they've done, or the way they've done it, becomes the special ingredient in your recipe. It's not about the hero, it's about the person whose story this is. The role model/hero an unwitting teaching aid. And that's kind of cool.
[An update, on Saturday morning: Jolisa Gracewood suggested in this series of tweets the model of the gravitational assist, whereby a spacecraft uses the relative movement and gravity of a planet or other astronomical object to get a leg up on its own journey by increasing or decreasing speed. This is the perfect metaphor for me because inside my head I see a planet just serenely carrying on, doing its planetary business, while the plucky little spaceship benefits from the energy of that business, without siphoning any of it off.]
So Matt - if by any chance you're reading this, I do think 5point9billion is kick-ass, and that you're awesome. But more importantly: thanks for the work you do, and the way you do it, because it is helpful to me, in ways that you probably wouldn't ever expect.
*One day I am going to write a long piece on just what it is that jiu jitsu means to me, but not today. This abnormal Wellington sunshine has made me too mentally lazy. Serious writing is a cold weather activity.
This has been a summer break of small and quiet joys, mostly involving sunshine, reading, and sweaty physical exertion with people who I care a lot about.*
One of these small and quiet joys is Matt Webb's new-ish internet play thing, 5point9billion. It's a little Twitter bot that, after you provide it with your date of birth, tweets you regular updates on the progression of your personal light cone: the movement of the light that left the Earth on the day of your birth reaching the surrounding stars. You can read more about light cones and see how I got that description wrong on Wikipedia. And you can read all about the background and the technical details on Matt's blog.
After you've given 5point9billion your date of birth, it starts tweeting you as your light cone races towards the bright stars in the sky - first long-range forecasts (months in advance), then weekly, then day by day and then ...
A few of my friends have signed up to the bot, and there's something lovely about seeing the days pass in all of our lives through this very gentle and abstract medium.
Here's one conversation that we had about that online. Usually, I balk at passing over details like date of birth, and especially when signing up for something that publishes evidence of your birthdate for all to see. But - I trust Matt Webb, and so I did it.
When you are signed in to the service you can also see a chronology of your star-past:
Matt's also made a little 'personal star map' app, which when you're signed in shows your relative position to the surrounding stars in three dimensions.
After a very busy couple of weeks, I've entered a slow patch again, and 5point9billion will fade from my consciousness until May. But I like knowing it's there, and I like knowing that it's there in my friends' lives. It's one of those very light ties-that-bind that are facilitated by the internet.
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There are three things I like about what Matt Webb does. One: he makes thoughtful things. Two: he makes them in public, and publicises them just enough, so you can follow his thinking and learning and see his mind at work. And three: I get the sense that although his activities seem quite broad (tramping, hardware coffee clubs, twitterbots) they all feed into and off of one another, and that appeals to me at this time when I'm trying to figure out what my thing is.
Matt (to my eyes, anyway) doesn't have a singular 'thing': he has this kind of spangly web of interests and skills that coalesces around a line of enquiry and results in the making or doing of a thing, and these things in turn become part of that web and generate further experiments and thinking. (I also, as I mangle away at this metaphor, am thinking of contrails, those vapour trails left by planes in the sky - directional traces of activity - as a descriptor for the various things I've seen Matt make and do online, but that image lacks the generative power I'm trying to convey).
What I'm trying to express is that I am drawn to Matt's experimenting and thinking because it doesn't seem directed towards a monolithic output (an app, a research paper, a book, a podcast series) but instead strikes me as a lived intellectual endeavour that is generously shared and not taken too heavily: thinking out loud on the internet. It appeals to me because, I guess, in my small sense, that's what I'm trying to do too.
And writing this just now has made something I've been feeling uncomfortable about fit better into my head. See, I met Matt once, about five and a half years ago, at Foo Camp in the States - went to a session he and Matt Jones ran and then played cricket in the parking lot with a bunch of other English and New Zealand people. But I don't know him. When I write about him like this - speculatively, making assumptions - I'm effectively using him as a thinking or teaching aid for myself. I read into what he does what I need to get out of it: my perception of his activity helps me assess and critique my own, suggests to me where I might direct more effort, gives me a model I can use. The Matt Webb that is useful to me might be unrecognisable to Matt Webb himself.
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| Colin McCahon, Teaching aids 2 (June), 1975. Collection of Auckland Art Gallery. |
For one thing, at 36, I don't want to be old enough to be 'looked up to' by people in their 20s - I want to be thought of as a peer, someone with just as much likelihood of getting it right or fucking it up as they have. Being a role model also feels a little bit like being put on the shelf. At the same time, one of the things I've really relished over the past three years has been being in a position where I can create opportunities for people - but hopefully for people of all ages, not just my younger/newer colleagues.
The other thing, of course, is feeling like a fake. I try to be grateful, and gracious, when someone comes up to me and says something like 'You don't know me but you're my hero' (actual quote) but I tend to oscillate between two poles. One is irritation - if I don't know you, how do you know me well enough to putting me on some kind of pedastal without any input from me? And the other, of course, is fear: If you really knew me, you wouldn't feel like that at all. If you saw me in everyday work life, hunkering down in my office, getting things wrong, missing opportunities, being snappy with people, taking the easy course of action rather than pushing harder, being pretty uninspiring 95% of the times, you'd be disappointed in how far I am from the mental model you've constructed of me.
[As a side note, I also struggle with the empty hyperbole of the internet, the awesome-isation of everything, the kick-ass and babe! of tweets and Instagram comments. I wrote a somewhat satirical piece on the devaluation of competence once, but it wasn't really all that satirical, now or at the time. The way we craft our online personalities and presences doesn't help, of course. The internet gives us much greater access to people we don't know in real life, but without the checks and balances of real life. I am discomforted (but also a little thrilled, and then discomforted at that thrill) when some of that online adulation is attached to something I've done or said.]
But writing this just now has made me realise, in a way, that this doesn't matter. (As long as I'm not a big fat con artist, anyway.) I've finally figured out that to use someone as a role model you don't need to know every in-and-out of their character or their practice. Instead, you find something in a person that helps move you ahead in whatever it is you're trying to the achieve. Something that they've done, or the way they've done it, becomes the special ingredient in your recipe. It's not about the hero, it's about the person whose story this is. The role model/hero an unwitting teaching aid. And that's kind of cool.
[An update, on Saturday morning: Jolisa Gracewood suggested in this series of tweets the model of the gravitational assist, whereby a spacecraft uses the relative movement and gravity of a planet or other astronomical object to get a leg up on its own journey by increasing or decreasing speed. This is the perfect metaphor for me because inside my head I see a planet just serenely carrying on, doing its planetary business, while the plucky little spaceship benefits from the energy of that business, without siphoning any of it off.]
So Matt - if by any chance you're reading this, I do think 5point9billion is kick-ass, and that you're awesome. But more importantly: thanks for the work you do, and the way you do it, because it is helpful to me, in ways that you probably wouldn't ever expect.
*One day I am going to write a long piece on just what it is that jiu jitsu means to me, but not today. This abnormal Wellington sunshine has made me too mentally lazy. Serious writing is a cold weather activity.
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