Museum Making

Back in April, Rahul Bhargava—the instructor for Data Storytelling Studio at MIT—challenged our class to create physical representations of data. I worked with Laura Perovich to develop art crayons; in a nutshell, these are bar graphs that represent up to the top five colors in a corresponding work of art. The height of each color indicates the percentage of that color found in that particular painting, drawing, or print.

This crayon corresponds to Georgia O’Keeffe’s Music, Pink and Blue No. 2

This project was all made possible—and inspired—by a handful of Python modules we found through the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. First we used RoyGBiv, originally developed for the Powerhouse Museum, which analyzes an image and yields the top five colors within it. Then we ran the results through the Cooper Hewitt’s swatchbook to match the hues to Crayola crayon colors. For us, the only logical next step was to make a wholly new crayon out of Crayola colors, representing the color data of one work of art. For our first prototypes, we made makeshift molds out of wax paper and hot glue. They looked more like stumps than crayons, but we were pretty excited.

For our final class project, Laura and I decided to build on this concept to develop the Art Crayon Toolkit. Our goal was to create an art activity set that engages kids with data, artworks, and art making. Each toolkit consists of several components:

A pack of eight crayons, four of which are artwork-based, with four supplementary colors;

Packaging, include labels for the crayons and boxes to contain them;

An educational activity workbook to accompany the crayons.

We decided that each set would include crayons based on works of art that share a theme or characteristic. After running many-a-artwork through the algorithms, we whittled down two lists of four artworks that share a theme (“Food” and “Place”), selecting a variety of more- and less-known artists that represent diverse ethnic and gender backgrounds and whose artwork includes a variety of aesthetic styles.

Laura improved upon our original prototypes by using Oomoo to create silicone rubber molds based on small Crayola crayons. We then used a heat gun to melt the appropriate ratio of corresponding crayon colors for each artwork, pouring wax into the mold one color at a time.

We designed labels and boxes in Adobe Illustrator based on existing product packaging, emulating Crayola’s design to a certain extent so as to resonate with kids. But instead of having names like “Razzmatazz” and “Perwinkle,” we named the crayons after works of art. We made translucent labels for the artwork-based crayons out of vellum so that you could get a sense of the bar graph encased within it.  The back of each crayon box also lists the works of art included in the pack. We decided to include four supplementary crayons—plain ol’ Crayola blacks, whites, and primary colors—so that kids have other options for drawing in the workbook; we replaced the Crayola labels with labels printed on white paper that match the rest of our graphic identity.

And the workbooks are where the magic happens! These books were inspired by existing interpretive art museum materials for kids, such as MoMA’s Art Cards, which combine didactic content with hands-on activities to get kids to engage with art in the galleries. The first page of the workbooks show thumbnail images of the four works of art represented in the pack; we ask kids to try to guess which crayon matches with which painting or print. On the following pages, we include a short text about the artwork as well as drawing prompts that aim to get kids to reflect on the artworks, the pack’s theme, and color more generally. We also included a bar graph indicating the percentages of each color incorporated in the corresponding crayon. Check out the Food and Place workbooks for yourself!

We tested out the Art Crayon Toolkits with three kids. Both groups were excited about the bar graph crayons. We found that the art crayons were an interesting way to get children to think about how the artists use color. As one kid explained, he liked the crayons because it helped him to “know what the artist used to make it. Some art it’s hard to describe what the artist used to make it.” The kids spent a good amount of time comparing the bar graph visualizations to the actual crayons. In certain cases, very similar colors, such as sepia and brown, were adjacent within the crayon, making it difficult to distinguish between the two (one kid believed that a color was “missing”). Some of the testers read the percentages of different colors in a crayon, showing a basic understanding of how the data in the crayon relates to the images.

The data crayons also served as an initial hook to get the kids to look more closely at works of art. One kid was familiar with Hokusai’s Great Wave print because he had studied Japan in class, but he noted, “I never realized there was a boat right there.” Another tester realized that there is a small skeleton, or calavera, in Kahlo’s painting. The thematic groupings were a useful way to spark children’s interest, too; one kid reported liking the theme of food as a way to think about art.

I’m taking a class this semester called Data Storytelling Studio in which I’m working with Laura Perovich to probe into museum APIs* to see what stories we can uncover and how data can be used to engage audiences. For the most recent session, we were asked to make a physical object that represented data in some way. Rahul Bhargava, our instructor, asked our class to go beyond just making a bar chart in three dimensions. 

We completely flouted this rule, but I think the result was pretty neat: art crayons!

Each crayon corresponds to a painting, representing up to the top five colors in the work of art. The height of each color corresponds to the amount of that color found in the painting.

I love this project because it miraculously combines my interest in all things digital—an interest I’ve developed as an adult—with my childhood memories of melting leftover crayon stubs to make new crafts. In the process, we tapped into existing code for image analysis and color matching, the same codebases that the Cooper Hewitt uses for the color browse functionality on their collections website.

Here’s how we made them:

First, we used the RoyGBiv python module to pull out the five most prominent colors in a work of art. The code looks at the image, determines a palette of up to five colors (in RGB and hex values), and also tells us how prominent each color is within the image—in other works, what percentage of the image’s area matches that color.

Georgia O’Keeffe, Music, Pink and Blue No. 2, 1918, Whitney Museum of American Art (source)

So for Georgia O’Keeffe’s Music, Pink and Blue No. 2, here’s what RoyGBiv returned:

(RGB + prominence)

Palette(colors=[Color(value=(198, 215, 232), prominence=0.1407946498819827), Color(value=(212, 142, 208), prominence=0.11437844217151849), Color(value=(249, 227, 227), prominence=0.10458300550747443), Color(value=(1, 129, 184), prominence=0.08713611329661684), Color(value=(171, 220, 206), prominence=0.07812745869394178)], bgcolor=None)

(Hex)

['#c6d7e8', '#d48eca', '#0488ba', '#f5b2d4', '# fddbe1']

You may have noticed that the prominence values don’t equal 100%—that’s because RoyGbiv returns only the top five colors, but a quick look at the O’Keeffe painting reveals some other lovely shades, like seafoam green and peach. We normalized the prominence values out of 100%, so that the first color would be 27%, the second color 22%, then 20%, 17%, and 15%.

Next, we took those color values and used the Cooper Hewitt’s swatchbook, a python module that matches RGB and hex values to specific color palettes. Currently, they have three color palettes on hand: CSS3, CSS4 (the main palette for their collection website), and Crayola.

Holy moly, a Crayola color palette! (Also known as my new favorite Wikipedia entry.) This is where things get exciting. Every crayon that Crayola has produced has an assigned hex value, allowing art nerds like me to see the world (or at least the world wide web) in shades of Tickle Me Pink, Robin’s Egg Blue, and Purple Mountains’ Majesty.

Here’s what we got when we ran the O’Keeffe painting through the swatchbook:

('#c5d0e6', 'Periwinkle') ('#cda4de', 'Wisteria') ('#0081ab', 'Steel Blue') ('#fcb4d5', 'Lavender') ('#fddde6', 'Piggy Pink')

So I went to Michael’s, bought two packs of 120-count Crayolas, and set to searching for these colors. I couldn’t find the Metallic FX Crayola pack in the store, so we substituted Steel Blue with Blue Green, the next closest color according to the swatchbook algorithm. We divided the crayons into the appropriate percentages, melted them in Dixie cups in a microwave, and poured the wax layer by layer into some awesome makeshift molds that Laura fashioned from wax paper, tape, and hot glue.

Here’s the resulting crayon, with some wax paper and hot glue still on it:

I also threw the color hex codes and prominence percentages into an HTML table. Here’s what the crayon should look like:

This was a pretty fun project, and we’re planning on expanding it further. The project isn’t without its challenges. Sometimes, RoyGBiv wouldn’t recognize patches of color that, to my eye, seem very prominent, like the red and blue garments in Artmesia Gentileschi’s Judith and Holofernes. Other times, the hex codes that RoyGBiv yielded were great, but then the swatchbook would match it to a crayon color that seemed off.

Artemesia Gentileschi, Judith Slaying Holofernes, c. 1614-1620, National Museum of Capodimonte (source)

Still, I’m excited about these because they’re a great way to get people interested in both data and art. Our art crayons are simultaneously visualizations of data but also functional objects—you could recreate the painting just by coloring with this crayon!

Last week I presented (twice, actually) at Museums and the Web. I'm sharing here my slides and transcript of one of the two talks, titled "Museum Making: Creating with New Technologies in Art Museums." Based on my thesis research, this presentation critically examined a recent trend in art museums of initiatives that invite technologists and artists to experiment with emerging technologies. These programs might take of the form of hackathons, maker spaces, or startup incubators. Below, I look at the historical precedents of these programs—specifically in the history of museums as sites for art making, and in the origins of hackers and makers—and then share a few key lessons from the fieldwork I've conducted at three museum sites.

Museum Making: Creating with New Technologies in Art Museums from Desi Gonzalez

The presentation is based on my full MW2015 paper, accessible here.

Slide 2: This is the MIT Media Lab. I go there almost every day. It’s an interdisciplinary research lab known for it’s high-tech, whizz-bang experimentations. I think for a lot of people, the MIT Media Lab symbolizes, to put it glibly, The Future.

Slide 3: This is the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. 6.28 million visitors go to it every year. As the largest and most trafficked art museum in the United States’ busiest and most populous city, the Metropolitan is viewed as an authority on art, and also one that is traditional. At the same time, the Met’s collection of artistic treasures captures the imagination of people around the world.

Slide 4:Since I’m getting a degree in Comparative Media Studies, I thought I’d compare a few images. Here, we have two titans within their respective fields, one a glimpse to the future, the other stewards of our past.

Now, we all know that this is kind of a reductive comparison, or else we wouldn’t be here at this conference. But I do think this is an interesting place to start, because it points out the kind of perceptions that audiences have about what technology and museums are, and where creativity happens.

Slide 5: And THIS is the Metropolitan Museum’s Media Lab. Located on the fourth floor of the beaux-arts style building, its architecture is characterized more by drop-tile ceilings and fluorescent lights.

Slide 6: If you look around, you find hidden gems scattered among the Met Media Lab. Here’s an army of 3D printed models, some scanned from a single museum object, others remixing sculptures together to make wholly new artworks.

Slide 7: And this is a robotic arm that drags a black marker across a sheet of paper, plotting out the staccato lines of a seventeenth-century etching that have been modeled on Rhino Grasshopper software.

Slide 8: Those are just some of the projects being developed at the Met Media Lab. You could think of them as a scrappy R&D wing—one with only two staff and very tight budgets. Since 2012, the Media Lab has invited technologists to create with emerging technologies through a variety of programs, such as hackathons and their internship program. Bringing in outside creators became a way for the Met Media Lab to experiment with a broad range of new technologies within constraints of time, expertise, and budget, while tapping into new audiences.

Slide 9: So if we go back to our comparisons:

The Met Media Lab shares the MIT Media Lab’s spirit of experimentation, but lacks the kind of funding and access to big tech of its namesake.

Slide 10: Working within the Metropolitan Museum of Art, we see them forging their experimental path within an institution thought not thought of for its technology.

Slide 11: The Met Media Lab is part of a recent trend that I call “museum making.” Over the last few years, art museums have started to develop initiatives that invite audiences, from casual visitors to professional artists and technologists, to take the reins of creative production through experimentation with new technologies.

Slide 12: In my research, I’ve focused on three case studies, and those are the ones I’ll be talking about today. Last year, the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, MA opened its Maker Lounge. It’s an in-gallery space in which visitors are invited to learn about and tinker with high and low technologies. As opposed to a maker space, in which members usually commit to participating for long periods of time, often with the goal of creating a finished project, this lounge is tailored to fit the drop-in mentality of the casual museum visit.

Slide 13: And on the other side of the country, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art is wrapping up the first year of its Art + Technology Lab. In this program, artists apply for competitive grants of up to $50,000 to work on technology-oriented projects. They also receive in-kind support and mentorship from major technology corporations such as Google, SpaceX, or augmented reality company DAQRI. This is an image of artist Tavares Strachan talking with Gwynne Shotwell, chief operating officer of SpaceX.

Slide 14: My research has focused on art institutions because of the specific questions museum making brings up about what is aesthetically and culturally valuable. What does it mean for an art museum to encourage new forms of creative production, when that kind of production is not represented in the museum’s galleries or collections? More broadly, how do change and innovation happen in traditional cultural institutions?

Slide 15: My research has taken me on a journey: from archives where I uncover institution’s pasts, through hands-on participation in museum making programs, to discussing with staff about how they imagine their museums’ futures. In this talk, I’ll start with a historical lens, finding roots both in the history of museums as sites for art making and in the rise of hacker and maker cultures. I’ll then address two key things I’ve learned through fieldwork at the three case studies I mentioned before: the Met’s Media, the Peabody Essex Maker Lounge, and LACMA’s Art+Technology Lab. First, I’ll then dive how these museum technology programs are able to navigate limitations in order to make these initiatives happen. And finally, I’ll address a few things museums get out inviting audiences to work with technology.

Slide 16: Historian Lawrence Levine argues that in the 19th century, the distinction between highbrow and lowbrow as we understand them today didn’t exist. Audiences across all classes enjoyed cultural figures and forms such as Shakespeare and opera. These diverse publics were not limited as audiences, but also they were also creators: amateur art practice was a part of their every day life.

Slide 17: With this sort of historical landscape of arts engagement, it’s fitting, then, that since their founding, art museums in the U.S. have been sites for art making. The Metropolitan Museum of Art is an example of an institution with a rich history of creative production. For example, soon after it opened, the Met granted permission to artists to copy works in their collection on Tuesdays through Saturdays from 9:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. In 1880, the museum established the School of Industrial Arts, providing free classes to artisans in skills such as woodworking and metalworking, and later ornamental painting and carving, architecture, drawing, and clay modeling.

Slide 18: Today, arts participation through amateur art practice is again on the rise in the United States, and subsequently museums are being reinvigorated as sites for art making for all ages and levels of professionalization. Some programs even take a page out of their institution’s roots: In December 2014, the Metropolitan announced that it would relaunch its copyist program, inviting anyone who applies to set up an easel to paint and draw directly from the works in the museum’s collection.

I’d like to suggest that museum making today fits within this larger history of art making in museums. But these technology-oriented programs are also stemming from another historical lineage, one that brings with it particular attitudes: that of hackers and makers.

Slide 19: The earliest computer hackers emerged at MIT in the late 1950s. Student members of the Tech Model Railroad Club would break into off-limits offices to use giant mainframe computers in the evenings, spending all night coding. For these hackers, programming computers became a way of life. Underlying their “hacker ethic” was a counter-cultural, anti-authoritarian leaning that is still central to our image of computer hackers today. They believed that information should be accessible to all and that coding is ultimately a creative endeavor.

Slide 20: The so-called maker movement builds on the attitudes of hackers. The maker movement, or maker culture, refers to a contemporary subculture interested in using technology for do-it-yourself projects, using strategies and technologies such as computer programming, robotics, and 3D printing, among others. But despite its roots, maker culture lacks the subversive agenda that fueled hackers. From its beginning—at least as a branded entity—the maker movement was not a grassroots movement, but rather led by a for-profit company. Many mark the official birth of maker culture in 2005 with the launch of Make magazine. Now, Maker Media also publishes digital and print books, produces Maker Faires—large “show-and-tell” convenings in which makers show off their projects—and operates the e-commerce site Maker Shed.

Slide 21: What has proven to be compelling about the maker movement is how it includes virtually all disciplines within its rhetoric of innovation. Make magazine founder Dale Dougherty wrote: 

When I talk about the maker movement, I make an effort to stay away from the word “inventor”—most people just don’t identify themselves that way. “Maker,” on the other hand, describes each one of us, no matter how we live our lives or what our goals might be. We all are makers: as cooks preparing food for our families, as gardeners, as knitters.

Slide 22: Maker culture has entered popular discourse as the movement increases in attention, often discussed in relation to the movement’s implications on business, government, and education. In June 2014, Obama hosted the inaugural White House Maker Faire. Recent years have seen increasing advocacy for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, or STEM fields, across all levels of education. It’s within this context—a discourse saturated with rhetoric of technology’s power—that art museums have begun to invite creators to experiment with new technologies.

Slide 23: Hackers and makers are but a part of what some might call a participatory attitude that has become widespread in the last fifteen years. The term “participatory culture” was popularized by media scholar Henry Jenkins to describe a new cultural landscape in which amateurs take the reins of the production of media. That many museum thinkers have adopted this participatory ethos over the last decade probably does not come as a surprise to you. I did a search of the Museums and the Web 2015 site for the word “participatory” and yielded 48 results.

Like museums of the nineteenth century that offered art-making opportunities in keeping with the broader culture of amateur arts practice, museums today recognize the greater participatory zeitgeist and incorporate such strategies into their own offerings.

Slide 24: While art museums exhibit a very particular kind of visual art that follows the conventions of the contemporary art world, increasingly, more generalist audiences are blurring the boundaries between art, media, and technology. The maker movement encompasses all kinds of creators, from robotics builders to knitters; STEM has made room for art in the acronym STEAM.

Slide 25: Platforms like Etsy and Kickstarter have emerged as new marketplaces for creative production, agnostic of labels such as “art” and “technology.”

Art museums are adopting the tools and strategies of creative technology today for many reasons. On the one hand, it is easy to see a parallel between artists and hackers, both groups dedicating themselves to the enactment of counterculture through creative production. But in practice, tapping into the contemporary tech ethos isn’t all that radical, as the maker movement rushes into the mainstream.

Slide 26: In her book Status Update, Alice Marwick critiques the coexisting, but contradictory, ethos within the current world of tech. If early hackers championed anti-institutionalism, Silicon Valley soon borrowed some of these cyber-utopian beliefs to form what’s been called the Californian Ideology: a paradoxical combination of technological determinism and libertarianism. By framing themselves through the hackers, Silicon Valley gives itself an anti-establishment veneer while maintaining—and perhaps even masking and profiting off of—its capitalistic privileges.

Taking Marwick’s analysis into account, it is unsurprising that art museums are aligning themselves with the attitudes and rhetoric of the contemporary technology world. Museums have always embodied a similar paradox: As institutions whose dual mission is to educate, and to collect and preserve art, they are caught between supporting creators and deciding which of these creators are worthy of being displayed on their walls.

Slide 27: So we’ve just explored why museum making is taking hold now; another major question I’ve been addressing in my research is how museum making happens. These programs vary from emerging from grass roots places to high up in the institution; but either way, often, these programs are hoping to experiment with technologies that museums don’t normally work with. We also know that museums are made up of a lot of departments and individuals that, at times, have somewhat competing perspectives and goals.

So then how do museum making initiatives, with limited funding and technological knowhow, and in the face of a potentially tricky institutional climate, happen?

Slide 28: Let’s return to the Met Media Lab, which has this really fantastic origin story: it started in a really grassroots way, a two- or three-person enterprise championing its cause within a huge institution. Unlike my other two case studies, the Met Media Lab doesn’t have the luxury of having a public space. In fact, to get this space featured here, Media Lab manager Don Undeen basically squatted in an abandoned office space—what had previously been an image library, and then turned into a storage space when the images had been digitized. And to furnish the space, he keeps an eye on the museum's Surplus Furniture website, an internal resource in which museum departments exchange equipment they no longer need.

Slide 29: Another major strategy has been to partner with the experts. The first time the Met Media Lab invited outside audiences to create was during their 2012 hackathon, held in conjunction with 3D printing company Makerbot. Makerbot provided printers and tapped into their community of creative technologists; these participants learned about objects in the collection from museum curators, then scanned objects, remixed 3D models on their computers, and printed out new works of art.

Slide 30: All three of the case studies I looked at really relied on partnerships with the world of tech to make these initiatives happen. The Peabody Essex Museum has worked with the MIT Media Lab, bringing in project demos for their opening day.

Slide 31: And of course, LACMA’s program is predicated on relationships with major corporations, which has brought it funding and connects professional artists with technology experts.

Slide 32: But just as museums look outward, they also must look inward, developing strategies to work within the institution. For example, for the Met Media Lab, staff become important resources for creative technologists working on projects. Over the course of the semester, interns develop what the Lab describes as “prototypes and artistic provocations that fuel conversation and new ideas.” They do so in conjunction with museum staff who can serve as mentors—whether a curator who can provide expertise on an art historical period or a media archivist who gives them access to archival equipment.

In order to make this happen, Don Undeen of the Met has cultivated relationships across the museum, identifying folks who are excited about working with creative people. In a way, he’s redefining what we mean when we say the museum is a public resource: it’s not just the collection that we connect to our audiences, but also the knowledges of staff at all levels.

Slide 33: In my final short section I’ll talk about what engaging with creative technologies might bring to a museum.

Slide 34: But first, I want to turn to the Peabody Essex Museum. At any time, a 3d printer is likely whirring in the corner. One shelf houses books with titled like Disruptus, Hacking Electronics, and Fabricated. iPads are scattered in various locations. But for all of the technology inscribed in the Maker Lounge, you’ll notice kids are usually engrossed in a very non-technical activity: creating objects out of simple materials. This is in part a limitation of its location—the Maker Lounge is in an unfacilitated gallery, and so expensive and potentially dangerous high-tech equipment can’t be left unattended. But this also points to another idea: Museum making initiatives like the Maker Lounge are ostensibly about technology, but often, their benefits and outcomes lie outside of the world of tech. In an interview, the Peabody Essex Museum’s Juliette Fritsch told me, “We’re not technology specialists, we’re learning specialists.”

Slide 35: And I think that’s important to keep in mind. We don’t have to be the MIT Media Lab, producing the whizzbang innovations of the future.

If we’re not necessarily producing crazy new technologies, what do museums get out of having audiences create with technologies? For the Maker Lounge, technology becomes a way to make creativity accessible to people who find art intimidating. Underlying the Lounge is the idea that technologies prevalent today are just another manifestation of the creativity captured within PEM’s collection.

Slide 36: I’d also argue that the hacker and maker attitudes infused in museum making programs bring a sense of playfulness and irreverence not commonly associated with museums. I attended one workshop at the Met Media Lab in which a team used 3D models of works in the Metropolitan’s collection to make stamps. These stamps were to be used on dog poop that owners neglected to pick up, thus rendering waste into something beautiful. I thought the project was both poignant and hilarious. A playful attitude lightens the seriousness and intimidation factor of museums, making these sites of authority slightly more welcoming to audiences.

Slide 37: But I don’t think it’s just audiences that benefit from this technology ethos; museum making programs bring a dedication of flexibility, brought from the world of technology, into museum staff practices and institutional decisions. For example, flexibility is key to the success of LACMA’s Art + Technology Lab. The goals of the Lab are deliberately open-ended: artists can engage with corporate advisors if they would like, but are not required to; artists can produce a work of art, or just focus on research; and any tangible works of art produced are entirely up to the artist’s jurisdiction.

And both LACMA and the Peabody Essex technology spaces are open to the public and seen as places to witness the creative process on view. Here we see here is a paradigm shift, transforming museums from sites that exhibit objects to sites that exhibit processes. By underscoring flexibility and process, museums must also concede a bit of control; they can’t be as pristine as they’re used to.

Slide 38: To summarize: We’ve seen that creative technology programs have precedents in both museums as sites of artmaking and in hacker and maker cultures. We’ve seen that museum making can expand how museums define what’s culturally valuable by including new forms of creative technology-based production, but that museums do so in part to maintain their authoritative status. We’ve seen that museum staff have taken on unusual strategies to build capacity for these programs within institutions that have limited funding and technological knowledge. And we’ve seen that even though museum making programs aren’t able to compete with technology production in the for-profit sector, they do bring a technology ethos of playfulness, experimentation, and flexibility into the museum.

Slide 39: My area of research has focused on how audiences are invited to create with new technologies, but I’d like to complicate this notion of what it means to be an audience. One of the most important things I’ve found in my research includes how these technology programs, which focus on experimentation, flexibility, and process, have influenced how museum staff think about their own work. I’d like to suggest that some of the most important audiences for museum making are actual museums themselves.

— Desi Gonzalez (@desigonz) March 6, 2015

I'll be presenting on my thesis research this April at Museums and the Web 2015 in Chicago. As part of my participation in the conference, I've written a paper on the topic, now available online! My thesis is a gargantuan project that has involved historical research, participant observation, and countless interviews, and it's not over yet. I realized I couldn't do all of my work (thus far) justice in a paper less than 5,000 pages; this paper is tailored to consider the historical precedents for experimenting with new technologies in museums and why these kinds of initiatives are emerging now. In fact, here's a little overview:

This paper represents only a fraction of my thesis project, drawing from historical research to examine from where and why these museum-making programs have emerged. I’ll trace the precedents that have led to the development of museum-making programs. The first section examines arts participation, particularly through amateur art practice, in the history of the United States. I will discuss how amateur art practice was common in the nineteenth century, waned in the twentieth century, and is currently on the rise again. Within this context of cultural engagement, I will delineate how art museums have historically served as sites of creative production. The second section of this paper traces the precedents that have led to the landscape of creative technology we know today. The earliest computer hackers eschewed authority, championed a hands-on ethic, and saw their hacking as a form of art. The more recent development of the so-called “maker movement” exemplifies a mainstreaming of creative technology: as it becomes easier to access digital and fabrication tools, more people can become amateur technologists. Art museums today are tapping into both the countercultural impulses of hackers—which resonate with that of artists—as well as the mainstream appeals of the maker movement. In the final section, I discuss how the two threads—art-based and tech-based production—are now merging at a time when, at least to many public audiences, the distinctions between art, media, and technology are no longer important; instead, a general sense of creative production, whether aligning itself with the art world or the tech world, is king.

Happy 2015! I have a few exciting Museum Making updates for the new year:

Next week, I’ll be leading a workshop in New York on museum hackathons. This event, hosted by the lovely and estimable New York City Museum Educator’s Roundtable (or NYCMER), will take place on Wednesday, January 28 from 2 to 5pm at the BRIC in Downtown Brooklyn. Join us!

Photogrammetry avatar at Hollywood and Vine, image © 2014 John Craig Freeman

For my grad school thesis, I'm investigating an emerging wave of museum initiatives that invite audiences to experiment with new technologies. Among my case studies is the Los Angeles County Museum of Art's Art + Technology Lab. This program revives the spirit of the original Art & Technology program, an effort led by curator Maurice Tuchman from 1967 to 1971 that placed artists (Andy Warhol, James Turrell, and Claes Oldenburg, to name a few) in residence at tech and engineering companies such as Boeing. In its current incarnation, the A+T Lab invites artists to apply for a grant of up to $50,000, as well as support from the Lab's partners, to explore artist applications of emerging technologies.

A few recent museum-world happenings got me thinkin’.

Last Friday, the American Museum of Natural History in New York hosted their first-ever hackathon. The event was centered around The Digital Universe dataset, a project that compiles data from global organizations “to create the most complete and accurate 3-D atlas of the Universe.” (The museum’s Hayden Planetarium has been working on this project since 1998!) The dataset is free to download and is distributed to (and used by) planetariums around the world. Now that’s open.

According to the Atlantic’s Rose Eleveth, the hackathon yielded some pretty impressive results. Around 130 participants convened at the museum, and a team of astrophysicists and coders were on hand to help with any needs. The final projects included a system that uses an Oculus Rift headset to fly through the universe, a virtual reality game for building your own solar system, and an API to allow developers to more easily access the data in the future. 

And speaking of APIs, Seb Chan of the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum in New York published an excellent blog post comparing his museum’s API to the labyrinth of sewers underlying our cities. Sewers, those old, unglamorous systems hidden beneath our streets, are essential to the continued expansion of cities. Similarly, Cooper Hewitt has prioritized the development of its API; it’s upon this infrastructure that museum experiences are built. The image above, drawn by Cooper Hewitt’s media technologist Kelly Shelly, illustrates this notion. The API is essential to the museum’s upcoming new interactives, such as the Pen and the Immersion Room, that allow visitors to create their own designs and keep a record of their visit.

At the heart of both the AMNH hackathon and Cooper Hewitt blog post are datasets. And it’s not just the data that’s important; it’s the fact that both museums are making these datasets accessible for users—whether a rogue coder, an exhibition designer, or a visitor to a museum—to build on top of them. 

This is an idea I’ve written about before; it’s what Elizabeth Merritt calls the Distributed Museum, Lath Carlson calls Museum 3.0, and what I’ve vaguely termed “museum as a resource.” The idea is that a museum’s most valuable function is to provide data (a collection, content, information) to its users (participants, visitors) upon which these users can build meanings and, increasingly, new objects. In some ways, this theory isn’t all that distinct from how museum education has been thinking about the museum experience since at least the mid-twentieth century. As I wrote about recently, museum educators have long been infusing the ideas of educational pioneers theorists like Maria Montessori, John Dewey, Jean Piaget, and more recently Seymour Papert, who postulated that we learn through hands-on, real world experiences.

Last week has Hacking Arts, a three-day event held at MIT celebrating the intersection of all kinds of arts—from music and visual arts to virtual reality, TV, and games—and technology. In addition to a roster of panels with pioneers in their respective fields, we held a hackathon in which over 100 participants worked for 24 hours to produce a fantastic line-up of projects.

Hacking Arts music panel (photo by Nakul Jamadagni) 

I was one of the two co-leads for the hackathon portion, so I was able to witness all of the ideating, tinkering, designing, and building in the flesh. While Hacking Arts was not run by a museum, the kinds of projects created last weekend are the type you might see in a museum tech event. I’ve decided to share my experiences as a hackathon organizer here and reflect on how museums might (and do!) run their own hackathons.

But first things first: What is a hackathon?

Hackathons are intensive events, often spanning multiple days or a weekend, in which participants come together to design, create, tinker, and build software or hardware. They are often organized around a particular theme or technology.

Teams hacking away on the sixth floor of the Media Lab

At the beginning of the hackathon, there is some kind of ideation session, in which participants pitch concepts they’d like to try out. Based on these pitches, participants subsequently form teams. And then they’re off! Teams work for hours on end to refine their concepts and build prototypes. At the end of the event, teams present their projects. Some hackathons add an aspect of competition; at Hacking Arts, for example, we invited an awesome panel of judges to award prizes to the top four teams. We also added an additional element to the mix: on Sunday morning, during the final 6 hours of hacking, we brought in mentors to contribute rigorous feedback. These 20-minute or so consultations allowed teams to get an outside perspective as they continued refining their concepts and prototypes.

Lessons learned: or, how to run (and how to not run) a hackathon

Think about whether you’d like to limit the scope of the hackathon. Are your participants hacking on hardware or software? Do you want to focus on a particular platform or technology, such as when the Metropolitan Museum’s hackathon focused on 3D printing? Do you want to participants to tap into your museum’s API, like UC Berkeley’s Hearst Museum and the Walters Museum did? Answering these questions might determine the materials you need to provide and the staff support that should be available for the event.

Late night snacks: essential supplies for any hackathon

In our case, the hackathon was wide open! Participants were free to work on literally whatever they wanted, so long that the project related to the arts, broadly defined. We didn’t limit to hardware or software or frame the event around a particularly technology (although three groups brought their own Kinects to incorporate motion sensing in their projects).

The decision to keep was both a blessing and a curse. The blessing: at the final presentation, we had a lovely variety of projects. Some proposed technological solutions for street theater; others built an application that recommend music from around the world. Some projects were plans for a product or a startup, while other hacks were works of art in and of themselves. The curse: At Hacking Arts, we gave out four prizes to the top projects, which proved difficult for our judges. How can you compare a business plan for a film recommendation service to a purely aesthetic experience? 

Think about what participants have time to do. Twenty-four hours was not a lot of time for Hacking Arts participants to work on the project, although I was thoroughly impressed with what groups were able to achieve in that time! In developing your event, consider whether you expect groups to have a fully functioning prototype, or if presenting wireframes and/or mockups are enough.

Teams present their final projects

Coordinating a hackthon is WORK. I was surprised that putting on a hackathon employed many of the same skills I used developed while working in family programs at the Whitney Museum. Running a hackathon means that you’re doing a lot of coordination, and leaving (most of) the hacking up to participants. At any moment I might have been running around finding extra power strips and extension cords, emailing participants to tell them they had one hours left so please upload presentations to the Dropbox, or coming up with a schedule for participants to meet with mentors.

But I also served as a mediator and an advisor. I had participants who, hours after the ideation session, approached me saying they still didn’t agree on their concept, and were their other groups they could join? Or: I’ve decided to go solo on a concept, but it’s still a fuzzy idea, could you help me brainstorm? I also directed participants to resources: just before midnight on Saturday, one team member asked how they could mock up a website without HTML or coding skills. Which brings me to my last point…

Have useful resources up your sleeve. As a hackthon organizer, even if you aren’t a developer or a hardware person, it’s useful to have a working knowledge of free and easy-to-use design and prototyping tools. A lot of folks on the interwebs have compiled excellent lists of resources, so I’m not going to reinvent the wheel, but I’ll point you to a few good links:

If groups are stuck during the ideation session, the Design Thinking for Educators toolkit is an excellent place to start.

I find Sarah-Jane Morris’ list of hackathon tools and resources incredibly helpful. Her suggestions run the gamut: from learn-to-code resources and text editors, to wireframing tools, webhosting platforms, mobile dev tools, and web design templates.

I’m a huge fan of paper prototyping! For non-coders (and coders, too), you can use tools like POP or Marvel to transform paper prototypes into clickable, linkable mobile and web prototypes.

In the Reading List series, I discuss a book or an article I’ve read recently and how it relates to museums, art, and tech.

CAVS in action: Charlotte Moorman with Jerome Wiesner, Otto Piene and Nam June Paik (source)

In 1967, MIT founded the Center for Advanced Visual Studies, the university’s first major commitment to contemporary art. Over the next decade, CAVS would host a series of artists realizing projects that touch on technological and participatory social practices, often in collaboration with university researchers. In the journal Daedelus, artist György Kepes explained his goals:

New technological tools and materials; new approaches to teamwork among creative individuals in the arts and in the sciences with different backgrounds and training; new awareness of the interplay of visual factors in the dynamic urban scene, these are the challenges to collaborative daring.

His vision gained traction among some scientists and engineers, who believed it was a moral imperative for technology and science to engage with the arts. In a time when MIT’s research was so closely tied to the cold war military agenda, art was seen as a way to humanize technology.

Okay. So what does this have to do with museums?

The last few years have witnessed a surge of art museum initiatives focusing on inviting artists (and amateurs) to experiment with emerging technologies. The narrative surrounding these endeavors is that, with the fusion of art and technology, museums are breaking new ground; but in fact, folks have long been interested in bridging these two seemingly distant fields.

As Matthew Wisnioski explains in “Why MIT Institutionalized the Avant-Garde: Negotiating Aesthetic Virtue in the Postwar Defense Institute,” in the 1960s, the intersection of arts and tech/science was predicated on two qualities: collaboration and creativity.

Collaboration was cast as a means of capitalizing on the integration of different knowledge domains to solve complex sociotechnical problems, and, in so doing, to bridge larger societal divisions. Above all, art was a mark of creativity, and as such was a universal marker of intellectual, professional, and social good that could rehabilitate the image of science and technology through the alteration of the self. (91)

In some ways, art was a way for MIT to manage its public image, especially as escalation in Vietnam led to anti-technology and anti-corporation attitudes from civil rights, antiwar, and student movements. But there was also something more, that which Wisnioski calls aesthetic virtue: art lent technology a higher meaning.

Interdisciplinarity between the arts and sciences, then, came from an ideological place. But as Wisnioski explains, CAVS’s survival was also predicated on the social and economical. Though Kepes had a particular vision of artists, engineers, and scientists working together, his ideals shifted in the 1970s as funding waned and distrust of all things military and industry grew, incorporating “anti-technology rhetoric into his otherwise optimistic message” (110). (Under the leadership of Otto Piene, the Center’s second director, CAVS would shift toward participatory and environmental art.)

Recently, there has been a renewed interest in the intersection of art and technology. Wisnioski points out several contemporary examples: Google holds an employee art contest; a recent National Science Foundation grantee claims to “broaden students’ engineering perspectives” through art (115). Wisnioski explains:

general exuberance for a convergence of art and technology today is similarly built on competing claims to creativity and collaboration, on desires to refashion scientific and engineering selves, on projects to define the creative human in a technological age. (116)

Aesthetic virtue explains why the tech and science sectors are interested in working with the arts: art lends these fields a sense of humanity and good with a capital G. Like CAVS, technology initiatives at art museums today also rely on this art/technology rhetoric. But while Kepes had to convince MIT to bring art into engineering and science, the people spearheading the kinds of programs I’m studying are working in the opposite direction: appealing to science and technology as essential to the future of visual arts.

So if museums, their galleries filled with ostensibly powerful works of art, are already chock-full of aesthetic virtue, why might they want to work with technologists and scientists? There are a couple of reasons I can think of. As non-profit organizations, museums are taking advantage of the prestige and funding currently directed toward STEM fields and organizations. Additionally, by working with scientists, engineers, and technologists, artists gain access to new techniques and tools.

I wonder if, in this sudden trend of museum tech projects, we can find a corollary to the aesthetic virtue of CAVS. Perhaps we find it in the concept of the technological sublime—coined by Perry Miller and developed by Leo Marx—in which “the awe and reverence once reserved for the Deity and later bestowed upon the visible landscape is directed toward technology, or rather, the technological conquest of matter” (Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden, 197). Technology dominates public discourse today: talk of the power of big data, the importance of disruption and innovation, the newest iWhatever release. Just as science and technology institutions like MIT appealed to art as a moral imperative, museums might be looking to tap into the almost religious frenzy around technology.

Before temporarily exiling myself to the world of media studies and graduate school, I worked in the field of museum education. I like to keep up with the museum ed scene through a number of ways, one of the most notable being the Museum-Ed listserv, where I learn about conference and workshop opportunities, get advice from colleagues across the country and world, and engage in discussions about the field. Last week, one post piqued my interest: any advertisement for an online workshop on developing maker spaces and similar programming in museums. It was a perfect fit for my own research interests focusing on the infusion of tech initiatives in art museums.

(Peabody Essex Museum's Maker Lounge)

Okay, so $79 is a steep price for a grad student like me, but what was more interesting than the possibility of attending this workshop was the fact that it existed at all. “Maker” programs have gained so much traction in museums—and education at large—that someone sees the potential of profiting off of the propagation of this maker ethos. The language used in the workshop ad is fascinating:

There is a kind of revolution going on in programming and museums are one of the leaders of the movement. Whether you call them Maker, Community, or Hacker Spaces, these DIY working areas in libraries and museums have become a popular meeting and creative program space for patrons of all ages. 

In other words: Hop on the maker bandwagon or risk missing out, y’all.

A few days later, a listserv member questioned the sudden trend in all things maker:

I have a question that has actually been nagging at me for a while about the "Maker Space" movement. I have been in museum education for almost 30 years now and have been doing this type of integrated workshop for most of my career and have participated at these types of events at other museums and zoos as well. Why are they suddenly a new thing (beside the name)? Is there something that I am not understanding?

She, and a few others who chimed in, expressed a question I’ve been toying around with in my own research: What’s so special about maker spaces (or hacker spaces, or hacklabs, or whatever you want to call them), anyway? The above workshop—and the so-called “maker movement” at large, which emphasizes DIY creation—touts maker spaces as revolutionizing the way we approach learning. But for many museum educators, hands-on learning is nothing new. For over a hundred years, educational approaches developed by Maria Montessori have emphasized the importance of independence and freedom in learning environments. Similarly, the Reggio Emilia approach is all about self-directed exploration and discovery within a supportive community. Constructivist theory posits that students learn best by through real-life experience; decades later, Seymour Papert’s constructionism put forth that learning is most effective ewhen individuals create tangible objects.

These are theories that museum educators have been thinking about for years. That explains the original poster’s confusion with the excitement around maker spaces: “I guess I really got to thinking about this when a new staff member came in with this "hot" new idea, and we had been doing it at our museum for the past 19 years!”

So why all the hype around maker spaces? Are maker spaces just the same old ideas in new packaging?

Yes and no. Sure, maker spaces share a lot of the same attitudes as other pre-existing educational museum approaches, but I also think it is important to consider how maker spaces might be different. On the Museum-Ed discussion, one person commented:

I think [the maker movement is] “new” or trending because it’s a very open-ended approach to workshops and learning. Historically educators approach workshops with a more specific objective and design an experience for visitors/participants to achieve that objective. Maker Space puts more emphasis on the participant being in control of what they are learning and firmly makes the educator a facilitator rather than instructor.

So while Montessori and Reggio Emilia approaches tend to be implemented in classrooms or in situations with particular learning objectives, maker spaces tend to be entirely self-directed. They are places where individuals can pop in for hours at a time and work on whatever they want.

This is an overgeneralization, of course; maker spaces have their origins as community-operated spaces, but as they are adopted in schools, libraries, and now museums, I imagine that they will serve more specific learning outcomes. In the museum sphere, institutions are seeing the growing power of maker space-type programming and adapting the model to fit their particular situation or needs. For example, the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, MA wanted to create a permanent community workspace where people can tinker and develop tech-related projects. There, people can play with circuits and 3D printers within their galleries. But the folks behind this initiative reimagined the model for the drop-in mentality of casual visitors: instead of a maker space, it’s a Maker Lounge, where visitors can easily jump into a brief design challenge and aren’t necessarily expected to return to work on a sustained project.

Here’s another difference between maker spaces and other museum programming: maker spaces are often (but not always) electronics- and technology-oriented and tend to have a certain set of tools at a user’s disposal. (See the Makerspace Playbook for more details.) Similarly, Maker Faires, founded and organized by the commercial entity Make magazine (who also popularized the terms “making,” “makers,” and “maker spaces”), tend to showcase tech-related projects.

Grad school, I’m back for year 2! Now that I’ve settled into my new apartment and finally (mostly) figured out my class schedule, I’m ready to focus on thesis research once again. But first things first: during my brief hiatus, a couple of intriguing developments have been happening in the world of museums and creative technology…

The Portland Art Museum recently announced Online Collections Remix, a contest that invites participants to create their own version of the museum’s homepage. The tool of choice? Mozilla’s X-Ray Goggles, a technology that allows you move around elements on a webpage while simultaneously teaching you about the building blocks of the web. Contest participants are encouraged to add images and info from the museum’s collection. The Online Collections Remix strikes me as an interesting way to get folks to experiment with open-source tools while taking advantage of another freely available resource—a museum’s collection data.

UC Berkeley’s Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology will be hosting a hackathon—tomorrow! From 4:30 to 9:30pm on September 10, attendees will convene to design applications using collection data, all available through the Heart’s API. I’m interested to see what kind of audience this event attracts—university students? local coders? a larger museumgoing community?—and what will become of the projects conceived at this event.

In the Reading List series, I discuss a book or an article I’ve read recently and how it relates to museums, art, and tech.

Arts audiences are increasingly getting older. Cultural institutions are struggling to get diverse patrons through their doors. Attendance at arts events has never been lower.

Whether you agree with the above statements or not, these are phrases heard over and over again in the arts. To some, such concerns are symptomatic of a larger societal problem: people just don’t care to participate in the arts these days. (Must be those darn smartphones.)

Engaging Art: The Next Great Transformation of America's Cultural Life, a volume edited by Bill Ivey and Steven J. Tepper, argues the opposite, and offers a more nuanced explanation to boot. They suggest that engagement with the arts is as strong—and perhaps stronger—than ever. We just need to rethink how we define cultural participation.

First, the instruments we use to measure engagement—those surveys that ask you how many times in the last year you’ve been to the opera—need to be expanded. Arts participation isn’t just happening within established (and to many potential audiences, stuffy, snooty) cultural institutions like concert halls or museums; arts participation can happen at home, on the subway, in afterschool programs. And secondly, participation with the arts isn’t just about appreciation (oh how I seethed at the term). It’s more than taking in art made by a professional, whether watching the staging of a renowned play or examining a Renoir painting; engaging in a personal art practice, whether throwing pottery as a pro or making amateur YouTube videos, is participation, as well.

Take music, for example. In the nineteenth century, pianos were a common sight in households (serving as “the nation’s archetypal cultural hearth”), and families would often gather around the piano to for a sing or a post-dinner performance. As Ivey explains, “Then, the abilit[ies] to sing or play music…were considered everyday skills, integrated into family life as thoroughly as sewing or the canning of autumn garden produce” (3). Domestic piano-playing was how music was circulated and enjoyed. But this would decline in the twentieth century. Ivey writes:

The Great Depression contributed to this decline, but it was more than a crippled economy that pushed the piano sales to their twentieth-century low point. By the early 1930s, America’s new cultural industries were well on their way to transforming the way citizens engaged culture, thereby reconfiguring our definition of participation in art and culture. (4)

The radio, and later the television, replaced the piano as the home’s cultural hearth. Arts and culture participation became passive—the receiving of music rather than the creation of it. Both shifting cultural attitudes and technological changes (such as the introduction of recorded music and broadcast media) were part and parcel to this new definition of arts participation.

Today, in museums and outside of them, we see an expanding notion of what arts participation might be. Amateur practice is making a comeback: just look at the kind of amazing projects on sites like Kickstarter, a few of which are high-profile, professional endeavors but most of which are grassroots and DIY. It’s also increasingly difficult to draw borders between art and media, art and design, or art and technology (and believe me, I spent my whole first year of grad school contemplating these boundaries; I haven’t made much progress).

Museum making initiatives—ones dedicated to experimenting with emerging technology—acknowledge that artistic practice is an important indicator of arts participation. Museums are now spaces to engage with creative production, and not just consuming it passively.

Here’s one thought I’m left with after poring through Engaging Art: The objects on the walls of the museum don’t necessarily match the kinds of production encouraged in museum tech initiatives. How do we reconcile that? I wonder if museum making is the first step toward acknowledging a bigger cultural shift in how we view creative practice—that what people outside of museums might consider “art” doesn’t align itself with what’s coming out of the (market-driven) art world.

Last week, Anand Giridharadas published an article in the New York Times comparing the digital strategies of two art museums just a subway ride away from me in either direction: the Metropolitan and the Brooklyn. Eight years ago, the Brooklyn Museum was all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed about the democratizing possibilities of the web:

“The dream was that anyone, anywhere, could participate and would, if given the chance,” said Shelley Bernstein, the vice director of digital engagement and technology at the Brooklyn Museum. “I had the ‘anyone, anywhere’ dream. I remember sitting in countless meetings and arguing for that dream.”

The Brooklyn Museum was an early pioneer in this endeavor, but announced a few months ago that it was strategically shuttering several of its social media channels. The Met, however, is only getting started. In the past year or two (perhaps since the hiring of its chief digital officer, Sree Srinivasan), the Met has started to ramp up such efforts, putting its collection online, directing traffic via Instagram, and allowing users to discover artworks via themes and descriptors on the new "One Met. Many Worlds.” website.

The idea of using digital technologies to spread the art love around the world—what Elizabeth Merritt would consider as part of the Distributed Museum model and which I wrote about briefly here—has long been the dream of many a museum techie. The Met is taking on strategies that plenty of museums have flirted with, but with its brand recognition, a prominent senior hire, and such a comprehensive and prestigious collection, people (or at least the New York Times) are finally paying attention.

We think of digital technologies as powerful for their ability to have a global reach, but perhaps the value lies closer to home. What Bernstein and her colleagues at the Brooklyn Museum has noticed is that the best kind of engagement—physically and also virtually—occurred within the Brooklyn community:

What occurred along the way was a series of pathbreaking experiments in digital outreach that seemed to prove a vastly different thesis from the Met’s: that no matter how free and easy it was to share the Brooklyn’s collection with Ghana and Mongolia and the Alabama piedmont, it was people living physically close by — and only such people — who could be convinced to care about the museum and engage with it online.…

Ms. Bernstein said that this data shook up her team. For her, the whole idea of these tools was to break the old pattern of museums catering too much to an educated elite. But the digital sphere was, in her museum’s case, simply replicating (if not amplifying) the elitism of physical visit patterns. “The farther away you were, the less deeply engaged you were in scale and scope,” she said. “The closer you are, the more engaged you were. It has caused us as an institution to completely rethink what we do in terms of digital engagement.”

Even though the Brooklyn Museum pinned and got repinned, even though their collection was plastered on the far corners of the web, they found that the people who really cared about the museum were within a few miles’ radius. They’re now reorganizing their technology efforts, using the digital to focus on fostering the local community. It’s the people first and the technology second.

The wave of museum initiatives I’m studying tap into this latter impulse of using technology to foster local relationships and communities. The Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts launched a Maker Lounge last spring, and they’re working with local tech partners, like 3D printing mavens Formlabs and the MIT Media Lab, both based in nearby Cambridge. The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Media Lab hosts meetups in which New York-based artists, coders, dilettantes, and newbies are all welcome to experiment with tech. (They even use Meetup.com to organize these shindigs. To me, using the social networking site as the Media Lab’s home base speaks to an openness and grassroots attitude to all who want to join.) It’s the community that forms around the intersection between art and technology that I find most interesting. As I continue my research, I hope to further examine this question of how museum making programs can foster community and dialog.

And just for good measure, one more quote that I really liked:

I’m fresh off of a redeye from California, where I launched my research on the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s new Art + Technology Lab. There, I delved into the archives of the original Art and Technology, a program spearheaded by curator Maurice Tuchman from 1967 to 1971 that placed an impressive roster of (unfortunately all-male) artists in major corporations. I also had the chance to talk to Amy Heibel, Joel Ferree, and Jessica Gambling, who are currently reviving the spirit of the historical program. Through the new initiative, the museum recently awarded grants of up to $50,000 and mentorship from individuals at tech companies such as Google, DAQRI, and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory to four individual artists and one pair of artists.

LACMA!

Sometimes (perhaps too often?), museum tech initiatives focus around particular tools and products, from MakerBots to Google Glass. A glance at LACMA’s request for proposals, however, reveals a much wider understanding of what technology might be. From “visualization and computational graphics” and “machine design” to “sensors,” “data structures,” and “space exploration,” the folks at A+T aren’t interested in particular end products (mobile apps, 3D-printed-whatever) but instead in processes and concepts.

I love the way LACMA broadly defines technology, allowing for experimentation and flights of fancy that could potentially result in some pretty neat projects. Often, when museums talk about technology, they mean social media, mobile apps, and screens. These definitions of technology are informed by what’s hyped in the media and what peer institutions are doing (something I discussed in a previous post). But LACMA reframes our understanding of technology and its potential.  In a quote from a Verge article, Heibel says the A+T Lab aims to tap into “impractical and creative applications of technology…we are not looking for the next great mobile guide app.”

Additionally, the ways people in museums understand technology has shifted over time. In 1971, Maurice Tuchman wrote of the original LACMA program:

In 1966, when Art and Technology was first conceived, I had been living in Southern California for two years. A newcomer to this region is particularly sensitive to the futuristic character of Los Angeles, especially as it manifested in advanced technology.

His view of technology was defined by those industries that gave 1960s L.A. a sense of whizbang possibility: space exploration, defense, and automobiles. We might think of contemporary tech as the software, data, and wearables coming out of the Bay area—a vision far off from the giant machines of Tuchman’s time. But today, as incubators, major companies like Google, and visual and virtual reality technologists start to open offices in places like Santa Monica and Venice—dubbed “Silicon Beach”—L.A. is again emerging as a budding tech center. 

Airports and automobiles: a little taste of the 1960s Los Angeles tech-cool vibe via Mad Men (source)

Last week, I virtually attended the Future of Museums conference, a free, online affair that brought together speakers imagining the potential of cultural institutions with practitioners who are fostering change within their own museums. (Recordings of the sessions are available online.) Two talks, in particular, resonated with my own research.

First, Elizabeth Merritt, founding director of the Center for the Future of Museums, gave the opening keynote. She envisioned three different museums in the year 2030, all of which have their roots in trends (and fears) pervading today’s museum landscape:

The Quantified Museum: Like the Quantified Self movement, this institution hinges on leveraging data about its visitors to shape experiences

The Disconnected Museum: In response to digital overload that pervades our lives, this museum imagines itself as an oasis, a physical space to take a break from the technology that surrounds us elsewhere

The Distributed Museum: Rejecting the gallery walls as its limits, this museum uses digital technologies and analog strategies to spread its holdings around the world 

A few hours later, Lath Carlson, the vice president of exhibits at the Tech Museum of Innovation in Silicon Valley, proposed that museums are entering a new phase of evolution. If Museum 1.0 characterizes the first wave of these cultural institutions, in which a museum delivers information about the objects or ideas on view to its audience, and Museum 2.0 (also known as the Participatory Museum) is about creating a dialogue with a visitor, then the mantra for Museum 3.0 is “museum as resource.” The institution, as a vital resource for a community, is there first and foremost for the audience and should therefore collaborate with individuals as they decide what exhibitions to mount, how to disseminate their collections, or what kind of in-gallery experiences to spearhead.

Both the Distributed Museum and Museum 3.0 models touch on an idea I’ve alluded to in two recent posts. It used to be that you had to be physically within the walls of a museum to experience its collection, but these days, museum content is more available than ever. Museums have progressively been opening up their APIs, making data accessible and making the institution transparent to the public. So now that all this knowledge is out there, what do we do with it?

Merritt framed initiatives like hackathons and maker spaces as part of the distributed museum, allowing people to take a museum’s content and infuse it into new creations that will go out into the world. It’s not just enough to make museum data available on the web; museum now encourage the creation of new art. We’ve gone full circle: from the physical experience of objects to the digital dissemination of data, and back to the physical creation of new objects. Physical to digital to physical; objects to data to objects. (Liz Neely touches upon a similar idea in her discussion on 3D printing at the Art Institute of Chicago: atoms to bits and back again.)