The Meural Sketchbook

The Pen at the Copper Hewitt

by Katherine Hall, Staff writer

In a previous Art of Technology article, we looked at interactive design firm, Local Project’s, work at the Cleveland Museum of Art. In Cleveland’s traditional fine arts atmosphere, the new technology is contained in the Gallery One space. Today, we’ll discuss another Local Projects venture that takes a very different approach. At the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum in New York, the firm has integrated interactive technology through the entire building.

Housed in the historic Carnegie Mansion along Manhattan’s Museum Mile, from the outside its hard to guess that the Cooper Hewitt is full of innovative new technology. However, from the moment visitors enter the museum they are given an electronic Pen to carry with them during their visit. The Pen not only allows them to click and draw on interactive surfaces in the museum, it includes a scanner that can be touched to a small barcode that accompanies nearly every item on display. By scanning an object’s code the visitor saves it to their personal cache and upon leaving they can access their selections and learn more about them at a custom URL address. While not all visitors make use of their online cache, the function still provides important information to the museum about how many people do follow up after their visit, how they moved through the museum and which objects are the most intriguing to visitors. Although only about a third of Pen users accessed their personalized URLs after their visit, the Cooper Hewitt now has a baseline from which to measure improvement. 

The Pens can also be used on the Cooper Hewitt’s interactive tables and in the Immersion Room. The interactive tables are located throughout the museum, and table users can explore the museum’s collection or take a turn at designing something themselves. Similar to the Cleveland Museum of Art’s Gallery One touch screen wall, the Cooper Hewitt tables stream thumbnails of works in the collection and when clicked on users can learn more about that work and browse related objects. The design feature allows visitors to actively participate in the creative process by making their own architecture, furniture, and other designs and allowing them to save these creations on their Pen. 

The Cooper Hewitt

The Immersion Room takes interactive technology a step further, creating an environment where visitors not only have access to the entire wallpaper archive but can also choose to have their own designs digitally projected to cover the room. Previously, the museum’s extensive collection of wall coverings were only able to be viewed in small sample swatches. That format made it hard to imagine what a whole room would look like covered in a design. As the museum’s website states, “more than just entertainment, the Immersion Room provides the first opportunity to discover Cooper Hewitt’s wall coverings as they were intended to be viewed.” In addition, the Immersion Room allows users to draw their own wallpaper swatch and project it across the whole room; yet another opportunity for creating and participating in design as well as viewing it. On a recent visit, users of the immersion room tables drew everything from random squiggles, to writing their names, to intricate patterns. The ability to see a sample replicated across the walls instead of just a single square proved to be a valuable design lesson to users as they experimented with filling in the whole swatch to create continuous patterns or leaving areas blank to allow for more space between patterns. 

The Immersion Room at the Cooper Hewitt

The Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum has proven to be the perfect testing ground for interactive technology in arts institutions. The Pens allow visitors to have a seamlessly integrated art viewing experience while encouraging them to engage in creative activity. Local Projects’ implementation leads to not only aesthetic appreciation of design but a greater understanding of the design process, a combination that makes it easy to see why incorporating technology into museum experiences is such a rapidly growing trend.

Each week, we bring you the backstory of work featured in our collection, written by a member of our curatorial team.

by Poppy Simpson, Head of Content

Suburbia. It’s never been popular with the chattering classes. Today, social critics tend to venerate the creativity and culture of the crowded city, whilst deriding the cookie-cutter conformity of the ‘suburban wasteland’. And it was much the same in the post-war era, when mass-produced suburbs like Levittown, NY or Lakewood, CA were denounced as stultifying, hollow and, in the words of die-hard urbanite Jane Jacobs, ‘a great blight of dullness’.

But the photographer Bill Owens saw things somewhat differently. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Owens was working for a local newspaper in San Francisco—the Livermore Independent News—and got to know many of the families in the towns and communities east of the Bay. He took pictures of tupperware parties, 4th of July parades, couples and their kids at home and at play. And, in doing so, Owen recognised that the rapid migration from cramped urban apartments to new-builds on the outskirts of the city was not simply a demographic shift, but a profoundly social and psychological one. These families were openly chasing the American dream, and Owens respected their honest determination to improve their lot along with their new-found sense of liberation. This empathy permeates the keenly-observed images of middle-class life in Owen’s first photography book ‘Suburbia’, published in 1972. The collection, which was an immediate success, “personalised a national aspiration” (Smithsonian) even if it gently critiqued it.

I’ve long been drawn to Owens’ Suburbia series—although as British person, it was my fascination with and distance from the American Dream, as opposed to my belief in it, that piqued my interest. But beyond that, it was also the nuance of Owens’ approach that I enjoyed. There’s not the same overt politics of, say, Robert Frank or Diane Arbus. And yet there is a complexity inherent in Owens’ photographs—scenes of banality but also individuality, subjects who are at once traditional and broad-minded. Some of these layers come from the juxtaposition of the image and a short commentary: "How can I worry about the damned dishes when there are children dying in Vietnam?" asks one woman standing in her kitchen, her hair in curlers and a baby in her arms. However, it’s also the way that Owens’ gives his subjects certain license to own their representation—these are straightforward folks and, at first glance, straightforward images.

After a long hiatus, and notable success as a brewer and publisher, Owens has begun photographing again. He quit photography in the 1980s. Why? He explains: “I didn’t so much give up on photography as it gave up on me. You can’t make a living as a photographer if you live in the suburbs...”

In each installment, a guest writer chooses one Pantone color they find particularly meaningful, intriguing, or just aesthetically beautiful—and tells us why.

By Jonathan McIntosh, artist (featured on my.meural)

Yellow is life, warmth, happiness and sunshine. It's love, youth and energy. Yellow is one of my favorite colors and it shines through most of my work, capturing the spirit of "action", "now" and "positivity".

Each installment features a writer, artist, or curator discussing an underrated artist, artwork, movement, or museum.

Photo credit: Mahmoud Merjan

Today we're with Rachel Dedman, an independent curator and writer based in Beirut, in conversation of the waxwork museums of Lebanon, including the Marie Baz Museum in Beiteddine, the Qasr Moussa (Moussa's Castle) in Deir el-Qamar, and the Waxworks Museum of Jbeil. You previously brought up the materiality of the wax, and its connection to the history of Lebanon, but first I want to know: What was your first experience in one of these museums? How would you describe them to someone who has never visited? 

I love a niche museum, and stumbled across a house of wax when driving in a rural part of Lebanon in 2013. That particular place—‘Moussa’s Castle’—is a multi-storied faux-chateau, whose lower floors are populated by miscellaneous relics of dubious antiquity, but whose upper rooms are filled with waxen figures. Initially these are dedicated to traditional Lebanese customs: lumpen figures awkwardly cook, grind flour, and till imaginary soil via hydraulics. Beyond that, the museum tells the story of Moussa (its eponymous founder, who still roams the halls aged 90), in semi-autobiographical mise-en-scenes. Up the road in Deir el-Qamar, the Marie Baz wax museum is dedicated to Lebanese political history, gathering in awkward assembly obscure eighteenth century figures alongside contemporary political leaders. Cheikh Rustom Elias Baz (1819-1902) glances concernedly at his neighbour, Emir Bachir Chehab II (1767-1850), while Lady Hester Stanhope (1776-1839)—a British aristocrat who left England to travel the Middle-East—raises a casually waxen hand to converse with Gibran Khalil Gibran (1883-1931), iconic Lebanese writer. Next door Walid Jumblatt and Hassan Nasrallah mingle with Jacques Chirac and George Bush Senior, while another room hosts an ancient desk and tattered Lebanese flag as backdrop to an impossible scene: every Lebanese president in history competing for standing room, grinning darkly. A dank, strip-lit basement houses an assortment of local nuns and notable Popes. 

I became compelled by such spaces in Lebanon, visiting more as I came across them. Beyond the obvious absurdity of the poorly-rendered waxworks—mostly dusty, unlifelike and increasingly discoloured—I was struck by the serious ways in which these museums attempt to represent Lebanese history in a country without authoritative or singular national narratives. Wax is fascinating to me: it has the ability to eerily mimic flesh, to achieve mimesis, yet at the same time is a material that hovers on the brink of dissolution, able to be moulded and remoulded again. I felt sure there was a correlation between the use and formation of such spaces and the imperfect, complex writing or unwriting of Lebanese history and constitution of local identity. 

Photo credit: Mahmoud Merjan

Is there anything similar to them outside of Lebanon? Why do you think they're such a local concept? 

Waxwork museums exist everywhere, I think. Madame Tussauds in London is perhaps most famous. But the ubiquity and prevalence of such small, informal, family-run institutions in Lebanon is, I imagine, unusual. And while Mme Tussauds is about spectacle—of death and the guillotine when it first began, celebrity mimesis today—such museums in Lebanon appear less obsessed with likeness on its own terms. They are performative spaces that allow for the subjective construction of historical narrative—one that is all surface, constituted by a linear roll-call of characters. Museologically, these are museums not interested in objects or the material deposits of history, rather in the speculative three-dimensional versions of its almost uniquely male players. The awkwardness of the results reflects the problematics of the attempt itself.

The makers of these institutions (Moussa, the Baz family) have the ability to mould, like wax, arbitrary versions of shared history—selecting figures based on sectarian leanings, political inclinations and family agenda. Subjectivity is an element, of course, that applies to all historiographic processes, but is particularly problematic in these spaces—which claim to represent public Lebanese history while remaining absolutely personal.

Photo credit: Mahmoud Merjan

What do you hope to see happen with them in the future? Do you believe they're underrepresented in the canon of global art? Why? 

I’d love to initiate a project in such spaces: to invite artists, writers and historians to intervene in these museums and engage with the kinds of history they propose. These spaces are underrepresented in the art world, of course, because they aren’t part of it at all. Such museums operate entirely divorced from contemporary global art or formal institutional historiography. They are considered irrelevant, dusty relics, and wax an unsexy, old-fashioned medium. And yet wax as a material—slippery, liminal, unstable—and these museums as places—strange, mundane and invisible—address elements of the process of writing history that feel absolutely contemporary.

Andy Lomas, Cellular Forms, 2014 Lumen Prize Winner. Courtesy of The Lumen Prize.

Today we're speaking with Charlotte Lee of The Lumen Prize, an international award for digital art. Now in its fifth year, the Prize's goal is "to celebrate the power and potential of this exciting genre through an annual competition and global tour of works selected by an eminent panel of judges." Would you start us off with how the Prize first originated?

The prize really originated with Carla Rapoport, our Director, and her admiration for the work of artists like David Hockney. Quickly realising that Hockney couldn’t be the only artist creating works of art using the iPad, Carla wanted to find the best of this exciting medium and raise its profile worldwide—and the idea of the Lumen Prize was born.

How has it changed since your launch, five years ago?

Since the launch, two of the main things that have changed are the global reach of the prize and the technology that we see the artists using. This year we’ve had entries from as far afield as the Philippines, Mexico and Trinidad & Tobago.

We’ve also seen a big shift in how artists are engaging with technology and what they are able to produce. Responding to this change, we have this year introduced new prizes including Mixed Reality and Web-based.

Chevalert, Murmur, 2014 Lumen Prize Silver Award. Courtesy of The Lumen Prize.

What are the basics—specifically the rules, judging process, and prizes?

We have two stages to judging. First, our International Selectors’ Committee, which is headed by the Museum of London’s Foteini Aravani, reviews all the entries and each work will be seen by at least 5 committee members. The 55 highest rated works form the Lumen Longlist—these then go to our Jury Panel which is made up of 5 eminent members of the contemporary art scene including Doug Dodds, Senior Curator of the V&A Museum and WeiWei Wang, Senior Curator at Shanghai’s Museum of Contemporary Art. The Jury Panel review all 55 and select the 28 works that form the shortlist and the overall winner of each of our 7 categories.

We also have the People’s Choice Award, this gives the public the opportunity to vote for their favourite and this piece gets itself a spot on our 2016/17 tour.  

Why focus on digital art? Do you feel as though the genre is left out of other art world competitions?

Despite technology being omnipresent, there does still seem be some trepidation around work that is created digitally. It’s strange considering that smartphones, computers and iPads are everywhere nowadays, but people don’t often know how to respond to this genre.

The art world does seem to shy away from anything that plugs in, but at Lumen we’re dedicated to raising the awareness of digital art everywhere. One of the ways we do this is by making sure that each exhibition we host is connected to a seminar.

Michael Takeo Magruder, A New Jerusalem (installation view), 2015 Immersive Environment Award. Courtesy of The Lumen Prize.

Can you tell us a bit about the global tour?

So this year our 2016/17 global tour kicks off in London with our Winners’ Gala. We’re then heading back to our roots in Wales with a show at Caerphilly Castle in November, then we’re off to Shanghai and we’ll be back at NY’s Creative Tech Week again next April.

By moving around the world every year we’re able to broaden our partnerships and networks—these can then be shared with the artists who have been part of the Lumen family since 2012. 

What does the future hold for The Lumen Prize? Are there any big changes planned?

We’ve actually just launched an online marketplace for Lumen Prize artists. We’ve partnered with ascribe, a Berlin-based tech-company, to produce Lumenus, which offers you the chance to collect block-chain secured digital editions. You can currently explore the work of Marcus West, Claire Reika Wright and Alejandro Devalos, and we’ll have more works by Lumen artists available shortly!

Each week, we bring you the backstory of work featured in our collection, written by a member of our curatorial team.

Photo credit: James Bareham for The Verge

by Andrew Lipstein, Director of Communication  

Normally on Thursdays, we write an article about the backstory of a work of art in our collection. This week we’re writing about art that isn’t in our collection, and can’t be (that is, until we produce holographic frames): the five identical statues of the GOP presidential nominee Donald J Trump that appeared across the United States last week. In short, the pieces omitted Trump’s most prized assets, and left his most heralded development a bit underdeveloped.

I hesitate to write that word, art, as I know the piece was offensive to many on both the right (for demeaning their doyen) and the left (for propagating body shaming and transphobia). But it certainly wouldn’t be the first time a work of art was deemed too flagrant. As we wrote about in a previous installment of In The Collection, John Singer Sargent’s Madame X provoked outrage for being suggestive and lewd. And yet mores shift; today the painting seems about as quaint as the Quaker Oats guy.

Madame X (Madame Pierre Gautreau), 1884, Metropolitan Museum of Art

But I believe it isn’t just the Trump statues’ vulgarity that make us shy from calling it art. It’s the work’s pure populism. There’s something in the statues for every entertainment class: lowbrow (it’s funny and cruel), middlebrow (it’s partisan—a nod to the tradition of placing idealized statues of historical figures in public places), and highbrow (it recontextualizes a modern figure against fairy tale lore; the piece is called The Emperor Has No Balls after the Hans Christian Andersen story The Emperor's New Clothes).

Modern ideas about art evoke images of sterile galleries, museums, auctions, top buttons buttoned and chins thoroughly stroked. But art is anything that transmits beauty, meaning, or emotion. Perhaps the first of the three is a lost cause here, but there’s no denying the installments’ substance. Here is a man whose popularity and promise to his followers relies on his own success, relies on the concept that he is wealthy and undefeated and holds status far above the rest of us. But these statues bring him back down to our level, show his body flawed like ours, show him free to be picked at and prodded and, eventually, picked up by the authorities.

Photo credit: James Bareham for The Verge

In each installment, a guest writer chooses one Pantone color they find particularly meaningful, intriguing, or just aesthetically beautiful—and tells us why.

By Holly Harrison, a mixed-media artist living in Concord, MA.

A few weeks ago, I had an idea of making a trio of paintings in three different colors: raspberry, sky blue and buttery yellow. Impatient to start, I grabbed what was available in the studio (a pair of my husband’s 30 x 30-inch deep-cradled painting boards), figuring I’d buy a third one later. I often work in white, but it was spring and I was ready for color, so I painted the panels and eventually completed the raspberry one. Then an interesting thing happened: the blue wouldn’t cooperate. I painted it out four or five times, but it was always too light, too dark, too flat, and I would sand it smooth and start over. As I worked, I drank tea from a wasabi green Pantone mug (no. 397), one of my favorites. One morning, almost on a whim, I abandoned the blue and mixed some paint to match the mug—and the painting suddenly worked. The acidity of the wasabi was just the right counterpoint to the sweetness of the raspberry, so now I have a pair instead of a trio. You just never know where you’re going to find inspiration and answers.

Holly Harrison, Into the Green, 30” x 30”, mixed media on wood panel

Each installment features a writer, artist, or curator discussing an underrated artist, artwork, movement, or museum.

A family photo from Kaitlyn’s uncle Bill’s archive 

Today we're with Kaitlynn Redell, an artist and educator in the Los Angeles area. For Deep Cuts, she wanted to discuss "unspoken/unrepresented personal and cultural histories and a kind of slippage between 'fact,' the imagined, and the fabricated", specifically the work of Hilda Yen, Sable Elyse Smith, and collaborators Tamara Cedré and Carlene Munoz. Yen is an especially interesting case for you, as she's your aunt, and you're currently researching your families history, and discovering a very specific sort of 'slippage'. Before jumping into how these artists resonant, let's start easy: how did you come upon the work of each?

Sable and I went to grad school together in New York. We were in different programs, but had a few classes together and have overlapping conceptual interests. Tammy and I met through an exhibition that Malaika Ali curated at On The Ground Floor in Los Angeles. I later found out about Tammy’s collaboration with Carlene when we had a studio visit for an exhibition I was co-curating (entitled, History As I Know It). 

History As I Know It actually grew out of conversations I had had with Sable way back in grad school; around the notion that personal and cultural history can exist as this kind of shifting and fluid entity. Ultimately I worked on curation with Allison McDaniel and Virigina Arce and the exhibition ran concurrently in Los Angeles and Philadelphia. In addition to Sable, Tammy and Carlene we included the work of Mari Cruz Alarcon, Kate Harding, Tiona McClodden, Ty Pownall and Kameelah Janan Rasheed (more information about the exhibition can be found here). 

This idea of the fluidity of memory and the influx nature of personal and collective histories is a concept I’m interested in my own work as well and it has ultimately brought me to researching my Auntie Hilda (Yen). Hilda is an Auntie on my mother’s side. She’s actually my mother’s Aunt, but in Chinese culture the term “Auntie” is kind of all encompassing for female relatives and close family friends that aren’t your mother or grandmother. I never had the opportunity to meet Hilda, but I’ve been researching her for a new body of work. She was one of the first female, Chinese aviators (beginning in the 1930s) and was a member of the League of Nations and the World Women’s Party for Equal Rights. She was definitely a woman ahead of her time. I’m interested in the sort of historical and personal mythology that has been built around her and how women like her are so often left out of “commonly known” history.

Tamara Cedré & Carlene Muñoz, Tiajuana Estuary 4.12, 2015, Monoprint; Drawings on Photographs, 17 x 22 inches

How are these four artists exploring the idea of falsification (with intent or without) in similar ways? How are they differentiated from each other?

I think falsification is maybe too strong a word. I think all three artists (as well as myself) are more interested in the structure in which “facts” are presented and how we come to embody and understand different histories. It’s a malleable and emotional accumulation that can't always be placed in a fixed language.

For instance in her video piece, How We Tell Stories to Children, Sable creates a fragmented narrative that flashes between segments of personal home video, Kendrick Lamar music videos, artist voiceover and silence. It becomes unclear what portions allude to personal childhood memories, assumed pop cultural references and if the voiceover script is rooted in fiction or nonfiction. And that’s just what makes it so powerful. As a viewer you want to really sit with the piece and try to navigate through the source material of each segment, while in the process realize it's the amalgamation that produces a new presence, a new history, a new story. Equally, Tammy and Carlene’s collaborative process in their series, Borders | Fronteras, delves into a new sort of imagined history. Tammy begins the process by photographing border towns (between Florida and California) and then Carlene draws on top of the images. The photographs present a kind of silent violence—void of visuals of people, but palpable of bodies once present—while the meticulously ghostly drawing on top unearths the psychic power of each site’s imagined history.

How do Yen, Smith, Cedré, and Munoz each see the artist's responsibility to carry absolute truth within their work?

I don’t want to speak for any other artist, but I don’t believe any of them would believe in the idea of “absolute truth.” The notions of “truth” and “fact” are messy. Our understanding of something that may appear to be absolute can shift radically with additional “knowledge” or even taking into account the instability of memory.

Tamara Cedré & Carlene Muñoz, Laredo 10.1, 2015, Monoprint; Drawings on Photographs, 17 x 22 inches

Take us into the research you've done on your family. What fault lines have you discovered in the veritability of her work?

Where to begin...I think the first time I learned about Hilda is from my Uncle Bill. Uncle Bill is a bit of the family historian and has digitized an insane amount of family photographs from the 1930s on. He mentioned that a book had been written about my Auntie Hilda called, Sisters of Heaven: China’s Barnstorming Aviatrixes: Modernity, Feminism, and Popular Imagination in Asia and the West, by Patti Gully. At the time I had been reading a lot of Judith Butler and had just been introduced to The Melancholy of Race (by Anne Anlin Cheng), so I just about died when I found out I had this Auntie that occupied a related space.

As I’ve gotten deeper into the research she’s become more and more fascinating to me in terms of how she’s been represented (or not) as a historical figure. Equally there is this whole other side in relation to my family’s personal memories of her. I’m interested in the kind of dovetailing between my mother and uncle’s fragmented memories of her and the glimpses of her representation in printed “history” (books, newspaper articles, League of Nations documents). A lot of the newspaper documentation is so representative of the racial and gender biases of the time period; I’m interested in how that narrative frames the information provided and only tells a fragment of the story.

I think that one—unnervingly contemporary—quote from Hilda’s 1935 address to the League of Nations sums up how I interpret her mythology: “Give your women legal equality willingly and in good spirit, or have it taken from you.”

Personally, do you think the question of 'slippage' ought to be a greater part of the conversation around art?

I find the most interesting work inherently approaches notions of slippage, be in materially or conceptually. If work is presented in a fixed or absolute way, it’s not interesting because it leaves no room for interpretation or imagination. Approaching some sort of slippage allows room for dialogue and makes us question not only what we are looking at, but think critically about how all forms of information and knowledge are consumed on a daily basis.

Today we're in discussion with David Borgonjon, the Communications Manager at Eyebeam, "a nonprofit studio for collaborative experiments with technology toward a more imaginative and just world." That's a fairly lofty mission—can you give some background on the history of Eyebeam, and how the organization has changed since its inception in 1997?

When Eyebeam started as an "art and technology center", there was nothing of its kind. Since then, that experimental scene has gone mainstream in the tech industry (though not without losing some things along the way). We like that—our goal has always been to be copied, and our philosophy is that this is where things kick off, not where they end up.

We were founded in 1997 in Brooklyn, did a long stint in a Chelsea garage, and recently moved back to Brooklyn to a former factory. Last year, we hit the age of majority, 18, and we're focusing more carefully on our core: technology, by artists, for everyone.

Being a small, artist-run organization, lets us have outsized impact because of our open-source principles and the exceptional brilliance of the people who work with us as residents, students and staff. With the vision of artists and the power of technology, we could really have a much more equitable society.

In recent history, what have been some of the most interesting projects that have worked toward "a more imaginative and just world"?

An archive of future African artifacts. Lunar-phase wi-fi. Community gardens that fight against solitary confinement. Lego for electronics. Genetic portraits. Bacterial architecture. Better Sketchup avatars. 3D printers for weaving. Gender equity on Wikipedia. Crowd-funded bridges. Coding with youth who are deaf or hard of hearing. A solar-powered studio on wheels. Music that grows. Warm data. Tenant-owned real estate developers. Rap as research. Fashion as game controllers. I could keep going. That's the last two or three years. 

What is The Research Residency? What have been some of the most notable projects that have come out of it?

The Research Residency is the answer to the prayer, "If only I could quit whatever I'm doing and get paid a real salary with no strings and total support among a community of brilliant peers to make something I'm care about because I think it could change the world." It provides a year of round-the-clock studio access, top-notch mentoring, awesome community, and up to $31,762.60 (based on a Brooklyn living wage).

The first "share" button that launched the social media revolution began at Eyebeam with the ReBlog. The residency is also key to the creation of several coding languages (including Open Frameworks, p5.js and Arduino). We've propelled the careers of countless artists like Cory Arcangel, Shirin Neshat and Trevor Paglen. When you add it all up, we've given about $3 million and 225 years to brilliant minds to just make their ideas real. Also, we supported the founders of BuzzFeed, littleBits, Delicious and Adafruit, so we sometimes joke that we're one of the best incubators on the East Coast—without trying to be. 

Your "model of practice" includes three tenets: i) Ideas work, ii) Process matters, iii) Impact counts. Can you dive a little deeper into what those mean, and how they work together?

Eyebeam is a unique mix of a think tank, an artist studio, and an incubator. Each resident and student ideally iterates through the entire model, from ideas to process to impact, many times over the course of their stay with us. We challenge our residents to iterate through the steps on an accelerated timeline. 

We're actually relaunching a series of boot camps dedicated to expanding the Eyebeam model to more people—we're floating it under the title of "Tech By Artists," since that's what we do.

Eyebeam receives support from a hallowed list of institutions, including Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Andy Warhol Foundation for the Arts, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and Rockefeller Foundation. How have you made such a name for yourself, and how have you kept that name?

We attribute a lot of our success to our open-source principles. Every resident signs a contract which says that whatever they make while here has to be open-sourced—whether that's as a software commit on Github, or a replicable hardware kit with downloadable instructions, or a published journal entry about their process. We create value for the entire field, we don't capture it for ourselves. Eyebeam is where creative technology all begins, so when you fund Eyebeam, you fund the field.

Each week, we bring you the backstory of work featured in our collection, written by a member of our curatorial team.

Joanie San Chirico, Surge 4, Acrylic and thread on canvas

by Sara Robertson, Curator

The artist Joanie Gagnon San Chirico does most of her work from her studio in Toms River, New Jersey, her hometown on the Jersey shore. Not far from her is the bustling downtown of New York City, but when San Chirico looks out her studio window, her view is quite a different spectacle. She can see the woods—a view of grass, trees, water, birds and even the occasional deer who leisurely roams her lawn. She is surrounded by nature as she works, and is constantly inspired by it.

Her abstract canvases are covered in large patches of eye-dazzling colors found in nature—ocean blues, golden yellows, earthy reds and browns—that San Chirico first applies with acrylic paint, then etches intricate details to the surface. Her final process is to sew fine patterns of thread into the canvas, adding another level of dimension and depth to an otherwise flat surface. One’s first impression of San Chirico’s artwork is that she has a fantastical eye for beauty and her inspiration found in nature is translated in such a soothing way. The impulse to relate to San Chirico’s work, first, on an aesthetic level is something she encourages; but her aim is to lead viewers to a deeper experience—to examine, read about, and fully comprehend her art. For, while San Chirico is inspired by nature, she is perhaps more importantly inspired to create on behalf of it, and this is imperative to understand in order to really grasp the essence of her work.

Joanie San Chirico, Surge 1, Acrylic and thread on canvas

To many, art has served a purpose, throughout human history, of preserving our culture. For San Chirico, instead of preserving our culture, she creates her art with intentions of preserving humankind and the world that we inhabit. In fact, when taking San Chirico’s artistic intentions literally—her brightly colored acrylic actually represents the different algaes that infest our waters and land; the etched details are organisms that float in our waterways; the delicate threads are spores that grow and fester; although they look alluring as they are painted on a canvas, they are, in reality, deadly forces brought on by climate change and human ignorance. San Chirico hopes that her work, with its appeal and more importantly, it’s representation of nature, will raise our awareness of what happens to the world when we do not care for it.

Joanie San Chirico, Spores 5.2, Acrylic and thread on canvas

Speaking with Joanie, I became aware that her involvement in bringing awareness to earth’s preservation doesn’t end with her artwork, but is implemented into her daily life as well. She has witnessed, first-hand, what human error can do to the water’s that she lives by. For instance, harmful algae and spores have grown within the bay area that she lives in, due to recent, and drastic changes in the Earth’s climate. Earlier in her life, she saw the effects that a chemical spill had on the waterway’s in her hometown. It is through her art, that Chirico found an outlet to express what she had spent her life becoming aware of and advocating for. When I asked if she would want to work on any other subject, San Chirico said that she will always incorporate the theme of preservation in her work: “If we don’t start taking care of what we have, soon there may be nothing left”—Joanie Gagnon San Chirico

In each installment, a guest writer chooses one Pantone color they find particularly meaningful, intriguing, or just aesthetically beautiful—and tells us why.

By Ryan Frank, an artist and curator (Instagram: @ryanmfrank)

Falling somewhere between green and blue, this color (Pantone 3245) is a rare and vibrant gem in the natural world. It made its greatest impression on me last summer when I visited Askja, the volcanic caldera in the remote central highlands of Iceland. At the crater's lip I saw the bright glistening blue-green water of Viti Lake some 50 meters below, a stunning contrast to everything around it: the reddish-brown cliffs surrounding the lake, the snow covered ground above and the deep blue sky overhead. Since then I have seen this color sparingly in nature -- in unique bodies of water, in the occasional rock, and perhaps even the sky in just the right weather and time of day. What makes this color special is not just its stand alone visual appeal, but rather the chromatic harmony it creates with other colors in close proximity. Like an accent wall, it provides a soothing contrast for the natural landscape and brings out the true color of everything around it. Seeing it is a tranquil and enlightening experience for one's eyes.

Original photograph here.

by Katherine Hall, Staff writer

The difference between early museum adaptions of technology and the future of the medium is the difference between pure information and interactivity. Today, following trends in museum education, the best approaches invite users to actively participate, to create their own content and help take control of the narrative surrounding works of art. With this in mind, museums have turned to innovative interactive experiences using stationary, large format interactive technology.

One design firm, Local Projects, has recently worked with two institutions to integrate this sort of technology into their spaces. The first museum is the Cleveland Museum of Art and its Gallery One Space. We’ve already covered the Cleveland Museum of Art and its ArtLens app, which allows users to access information on the whole collection from home before or after their visits—as well as create their own collection of favorites to form a customized tour for when they visit. In addition to the app, Gallery One serves as a separate space from the rest of the museum, so visitors can choose whether or not they want to utilize the interactive technology available or have a more traditional museum experience. Within Gallery One is a wall-sized touch screen that hosts an ever-changing cloud of the museum’s collection; tapping on an image will enlarge it and bring up information about it. This allows visitors to preview the collection and even see works that may not be on display in the galleries. The large size enables group viewing and multiple users to interact with the wall at once, which contrasts the individual experience of using an app. Critics of the touch wall like to to cite it as an example of technology that detracts from the art viewing experience, arguing that it is a situation where visitors look and touch but don’t see and consume art in a meaningful way.

Original photograph here.

However, some features in Gallery One stand in direct opposition to those who argue that technology is always a negative influence on museum attendance experience. The motion-match detector, an excellent counterexample, is a wholly interactive element. The feature includes a work of art, a video camera with motion detecting capability to capture the user’s position, and a large screen that displays their position and a percentage of how well their pose matches the work of art they have been instructed to imitate. Physically recreating the postures in works of art allows visitors to understand things that their eyes alone would not have noticed. This approach allows visitors to interact with art in ways that they never would have it in a more typical museum format. In addition to the motion-match detector, which encourages audiences to discover a specific piece, another station allows visitors to personally connect with works in the collection. The expression match station helps users discover works throughout the collection by “look[ing] into a camera, mak[ing] a face, and the screen displays pieces from the museum with similar facial expressions.” In effect, users are acting out different expressions and emotions which, again, allows them to connect physically with the art they are viewing in addition to visually consuming it.

Original photograph here.

As technology continues to evolve and become even more ubiquitous, museums will be forced to address it, either ignoring it completely to become spaces apart from digital onslaught, or integrating it at various levels. Local Projects’ work at the Cleveland Museum is a pioneering adaption of large format interactive technology in a separate space while maintaining a traditional format for the main collection. In the coming weeks, we will cover Local Projects’ Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum redesign which integrates technology throughout the entire visit.

Each Friday, our writers review a few choice (New York) gallery openings from the night before. This week is a bit of a change of pace—we’re diving into out of town exhibits instead.

Unfinished Business at the Parrish Art Museum

by Elinor Case-Pethica, Staff writer

With August now in full swing, the city streets are sweltering and everyone able to has packed up and decamped for cooler climes. New York’s art scene is no more immune to the heat and has slowed to a crawl—so this week we share some more far-flung art picks for those lucky enough to be out of the hot city center.

Parrish Art Museum, 279 Montauk Highway, Water Mill, NY “Unfinished Business”

This show takes its name from Ross Bleckner, Eric Fischl, and David Salle’s persistence to continue exploring painting during the 1970’s and 80’s, when the medium was considered by many to be exhausted. The artists met in art school in California before all three went on to major careers, and this show is a unique opportunity to see the direct dialogues present in their work.

The Dan Flavin Art Institute, Corwith Avenue off Main Street, Bridgehampton, NY Firehouse Installation

Many are familiar with Flavin’s sculptural work using fluorescent light fixtures and tubes. This Bridgehampton firehouse-turned church now houses a permanent collection of his pieces, created between 1963 and 1981. The project was made possible by the Dia Art Foundation.

Storm King Art Center, 1 Museum Road, New Windsor, NY

Storm King is a museum and sculpture park with a significant collection of monumental outdoor-sited works and earthworks. Rambling over 500 acres of pristine landscape in the Hudson Valley, the center represents a full day's excursion. Currently on special exhibition: Dennis Oppenheim’s “Terrestrial Studio,” and Josephine Halvorson’s “Outlooks.”

Granary Gallery, 636 Old County Road, West Tisbury, MA

Each week, we bring you the backstory of work featured in our collection, written by a member of our curatorial team.

Twisted Tree in the Desert near the Salton Sea, CA (2012)

by Poppy Simpson, Head of Curation

"For 34 years. I have driven thousands and thousands of miles. I just drove because...it’s what’s between here and there that’s the most important thing."

In ‘Why I Write’, his short treatise written in 1946, George Orwell identified four ‘great motives’ for writing—motives that he believed existed in different degrees in every writer. They were:

(i) Sheer egoism (ii) Aesthetic enthusiasm (iii) Historical impulse (iv) Political purpose

These four, Orwell wrote, could come into conflict, differ from writer to writer and shift from time to time. But good prose, it seemed to him, was forged through the experience of the writer and the interplay of his/her motivations: "I cannot say with certainty which of my motives are the strongest, but I know which of them deserve to be followed. And looking back through my work, I see that it is invariably where I lacked a political purpose that I wrote lifeless books and was betrayed into purple passages, sentences without meaning, decorative adjectives and humbug generally."

I thought of Orwell and this essay when I first came across the work of Carol Highsmith. For over 30 years, Highsmith has been traversing the United States, camera in hand, capturing photographs of each State’s architecture, landscape and urban and rural scenes. Her aim is to provide a visual record of what she calls "our moment in time", and she intends to spend the rest of her life documenting America.

The Jefferson Memorial at Dusk (2006)

Historical impulse drives Highsmith in the same way that political purpose drove Orwell. But while this instinct to preserve for posterity characterizes Highsmith’s work, it does not overwhelm it. Highsmith’s photographs, like Orwell’s writing, are infused with an obvious love of aesthetics and a natural compassion and wit.

It began in 1980 with a night photography class in Washington. Highsmith, who was then working in sales, started taking pictures of the abandoned and dilapidated Willard Hotel at 1401 Pennsylvania Avenue as part of a class project. The Willard had a distinguished history—Lincoln stayed there for 10 days before his inauguration (and had had to wait for his first presidential paycheck to settle the bill) and it had hosted the great and the good of D.C. But by the 1980s the once lavish Beaux-Arts building was a wreck: "The main tenant was a bum who was setting fires on the sixth floor, and there were rats the size of cats," Ms. Highsmith remembers. "It changed my whole life. If I didn't take pictures, what would it look like in a few more years?"

It was as she researched the history of the property that Highsmith came across the work of Frances Benjamin Johnston—a pioneering female photographer and photo-journalist—who had extensively documented the Willard’s renovation in 1901. In fact, it was Johnston’s photographs that helped architects and designers restore the property to its former glory in the mid-1980s.

Highsmith was inspired by Johnston’s photographic legacy as well as her public-spiritedness; Johnston donated her life’s work, copyright-free, to the Library of Congress. She says: "I wondered what could happen in my lifetime...Buildings were being demolished and ripped down willy-nilly, and our historic structures were not being very highly regarded. So I told the Library of Congress in 1980 that I, in fact, would spend my life photographing first Washington and then throughout America, and anything I photographed would go copyright free to them. They looked at me like I was completely out of my mind.”

Old, Abandoned Gas Station, North Carolina (1980)

Today, the Carol M. Highsmith Collection at the Library of Congress is featured in the top six collections out of 15 million images in the Library’s Prints & Photographs archive, alongside photographic legends such as Dorothea Lange. She is the only living photographer to be showcased by the Library, which describes her work and donation as “one of the greatest acts of generosity” in the institution’s history.

In each installment, a guest writer chooses one Pantone color they find particularly meaningful, intriguing, or just aesthetically beautiful—and tells us why.

By Robin Wallis Atkinson, Independent Curator and Artistic Director of Northwest Arkansas Fashion Week.

One color that forever holds a spot in my heart is the deep, orange red of Matisse’s The Red Studio. This Fauvist favorite of mine is one of the defining works of the artist’s oeuvre and sits on display on the fifth floor of the MOMA in NYC. In The Red Studio the artworks are the only elements set apart from the luscious red background, all other objects just a suggestion with a line. Matisse paints the world as radically differentiated from art, but rightfully just as evocative. This color also happens to be the most delicious shade for a date night lipstick or a precision pick for a devastating pair of high heels. Pantone 3516 C is a close correlation to the fiery background that brings this painting to life. It is textbook example of how difficult and exhilarating it can be to find that perfect power red.

The Red Studio, Henri Matisse, 1911, from henrimatisse.com

Each installment features a writer, artist, or curator discussing an underrated artist, artwork, movement, or museum.

Untitled, Iole Alessandrini

Today we're with Shelly Leavens—a curator, artist, and oral historian—in discussion of the crossover of architecture and contemporary art, specifically Iole Alessandrini. Alessandrini is an Italian-American artist (based in Seattle) who, as Shelly put it, "is trained in architecture and doing some fascinating conceptual work with light, structure and tessellation." When did you first come upon Alessandrini's work? Why do you find her especially exciting?

It’s likely that I saw my first Iole Alessandrini installation at Soil, an art collective and gallery in Seattle, where I believe she has been a member for some time. The gallery is known for housing some of Seattle’s best contemporary artists and hosting work that is challenging and stimulating, so I never miss it when I’m out looking at work. For a curator like myself, interested in artists who take risks and experiment with materials, I’m instantly attracted to work like that of Alessandrini’s. My original understanding of her work was that her medium was light, and she still uses it as a primary element, but after curating her into two very different shows over the past several years, I now understand the depth of her ability to work with a variety of materials. Ultimately, her work is about connecting our physical space, with its layers of history and human influence, to our emotional and psychological space, equally layered. Since I came to art curation through the back door, via the humanities and history, I’m excited by her work because she pulls history and research into a very central role, as it pertains to how her work interacts with the built environment. In addition, she is often testing out a new method of fabrication or utilizing industrial materials in her work, so I never know what I’m going to get at first glance. Her latest project installing LEDs into a road surface in Edmonds, Washington, Luminous Forest (2016) is a perfect example. There is much more than meets the eye. Lastly, I appreciate that she imbues meaning in a way that is simple enough to be accessible, yet emotionally connected enough to feel profound. When the lights come on at dusk in Edmonds, people have literally been stopping traffic to dance in the street.

Winter, Season of Light, Iole Alessandrini

How does Alessandrini's background in architecture show in her work? How does it (surprisingly) not show?

The ideas of architecture are prevalent in many Alessandrini works but not always obvious. Certainly, there are large scale public works like Winter, Season of Light (1999) that connect the viewer’s experience directly with the architecture incorporated into the piece, since constructed light is washing over the architectural space creating a new topography. In Winter’s case it is a topography that has changed dramatically because of development. Several of her laser pieces also provide direct connections to architecture in that they promote and provoke other artists and viewers to play with the light inside a particular space, making one very aware of the surrounding architecture that creates a boundary within which the body can perform. The installation Untitled (2004) is an example, which resulted in a performance piece and later, a set of chine colle and screenprints abstracting the shapes made by the lasers.

This type of work is truly what Alessandrini has become know for, and yet, some works, like several using beeswax and sometimes wood, are departures from architecture specifically but are highly personal and still promote interaction and introspection.

Winter, Season of Light, Iole Alessandrini

What do you (speculatively) count her influences as?

Alessandrini is closely connected to her family and to her Italian identity. Her mother was an herbalist and her father a cabinetmaker in a small Roman town, so she was exposed to craft and creativity from a young age. In a recent conversation with her she told me about some of the reasons why she decided to pursue visual modes of working (whether architecture or fine art) versus a career geared more towards writing. She is the youngest of several siblings and growing up she looked up to her siblings as geniuses, particularly with their ability to write. She always felt her writing was inferior to theirs, and her ideas were better expressed visually. Tangentially, she also described how her mother’s childhood home was taken over by the Nazis as their headquarters in her town during WWII. At one point her brother (Alessandrini’s uncle) joined the Partisans in resistance and plotted against the Axis occupiers. He was found out. Just as he was about to be executed in front of the family, Alessandrini’s mother stepped forward and pleaded with the soldiers to have mercy. She was successful and her brother was released. Long after the War, during Alessandrini’s childhood, she wanted to keep a journal and her mother discouraged it. She recalls her mother pointing out that anyone could find it and it could be incriminating in some way. This, no doubt, contributed to Alessandrini’s hesitance towards writing and a focus on expression through visual art.

What differentiates her work from others experimenting in light and space?

Light-based work is rather ubiquitous, particularly in the Northwest, and much I enjoy. It tends to vary from merely decoration within a space (and fall on the spectrum of design as much as fine art), to installations that evoke awe and wonder, and perhaps make one even more aware of the all-encompassing nature of darkness. Our region is known for its subdued, particular light (cloud filtered) and we endure many dark months in the winter and fall, so in Seattle we are very aware of the presence and absence of light. Many artists in Seattle, while perhaps not focusing an entire practice on working with light, are working with ideas around light in some way. Wendy Orville, Jasmine Valandani and the venerable Norman Lundin all come immediately to mind. In relationship to my experiences with Alessandrini’s work, her use of light and ongoing dialog with architecture is not only built on a structure of research and history, it pulls the viewer into becoming a participant; a doer and activator in the world she has created around the piece.

Luminous Forest, Iole Alessandrini

Can you think of anyone else doing exciting work in the space between architecture and contemporary art?

A few I am paying close attention to right now (mostly local) are Rodrigo Valenzuela whose practice utilizes basically every medium, Chris Fraser, whose installation at Disjecta in Portland a few years back kept me at the gallery for two hours, Leo Saul Berk, whose recent Frye Art Museum solo show set the bar for meticulous craft in conceptual sculpture, and Mary Iverson, who reveals the matrix between natural and built space in her striking paintings.