Today, we are launching Split Second: Indian Paintings and it’s something I’ve been excited about for quite a while. Split Second is an opportunity to facilitate a collaboration between our curators and our online community using technology and the web to learn more about the visitor experience. Our online experiment and resulting installation will explore how someone’s initial reaction to a work of art is affected by what they know, are asked, or are told about the object in question.
Photo: Armand Dijcks via Flickr. Licensed CC-BY-NC-SA
This project’s main source of inspiration is Malcolm Gladwell’s book Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking. The book explores the power and pitfalls of initial reactions. After reading it, I started to wonder how the same theories might apply to a visitor’s reaction to a work of art. How does a person’s split-second reaction to a work of art change with the addition of typical museum interpretive text? As visitors walk through our galleries, what kind of work are they drawn to? And if they stop, look, read, or respond, how does their opinion of that work change?
Over the course of the next several months, I’ll be blogging more about the concepts and choices we’ve made in developing an online activity to collect data on this, so stay tuned. In the meantime, we’d love it if you would take part. By participating, you’re helping determine the content of a small installation of Indian paintings—along with an analysis of the data we get on the questions above—opening in July 2011. The more data we have, the better the installation will be, so we’d be grateful if you’d help us spread the word by encouraging others to contribute a few minutes of their time.
The online activity is ready and waiting for you. It will be up until April 14, 2011, at midnight (Eastern Standard Time).
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Eastern Parkway/Brooklyn Museum
I’m a docent at the Worcester Art Museum and find your project interesting.
Thanks for taking part, Nancy! If you’d help spread the word in Worcester, we’d appreciate it greatly.
What a great experiment! It’s up on my Facebook, and I’ve emailed it to my students. Good luck!
I’m very intrigued by this, but wonder if I did not carry it out correctly. I was not asked to write about any images, only asked how many figures were in each image–was this a trick to see if I would respond more imaginatively and go beyond the question? I also did not see any “typical interpretive texts” in part three, only what we call “tombstone info”. Did I miss something?
Hi Barbara,
Thanks for taking part – we appreciate it! You did everything correct…in part two (where we ask you questions) and part three (where we give you information to read) participants are randomly put into different small subset groups, so not everyone is asked the same question or being asked to read the same information. I’ll be blogging about the ins and outs of the app and why we made some of these choices next week (or maybe the week after), so stay tuned.
Shelley
Because each quick-look-rate image did not fit fully on my screen, I used up time trying to scroll down to see it all. Frustrating! Also, some of the texts were more helpful than others to interpret the paintings. All in all, however, an interesting exercise. Looking forward to the results. Many issues embedded here!
I had a go at the split-second test, found it unnerving, and closed the window shortly after starting. I just can’t decide which is more interesting that quickly, so I was choosing randomly each time, which is just dumb. I need at least a minute.
I also found the art in the split second exercise was partially covered and I had to scroll down. I got a message that I was taking too long, so I just judged the rest of the paintings by the top two-thirds. I figured the bottom third was painted by the same artist who painted the top (adaptation of an old theater joke: A reviewer left after the first act of a play. Someone asked how he could review the play after only one act? He answered: I figure the same person who wrote the first act wrote the other two.) This was great fun and I look forward to seeing the exhibit–maybe it will have some of my faves. I love Indian art.
Hi Peggy – that’s such a great joke…I’m quoting you in my blog post tomorrow about Split Second.
Hi Shelly,
I’ve been doing the activity – did the first two parts in one go and then had to jump off and am only getting back to part three several days later. I’ll be very interested in what you learn because I tend to assume that knowing something of the story behind an artwork will always make it more appealing – because you have more appreciation of what’s being conveyed.
But I wonder how much you’ll be able to tell about people’s responses based on the slider method of measuring. It seems so imprecise. Did you consider asking people to rate the pictures from 1-10 in every exercise? It might have been easier to compare their answers, and thus more informative.
Still, it’s another one of BMA’s great ideas.
Thanks!
Hi Robin,
When it comes to art, we feel like a more subtle rating scale is more appropriate. This is something that worked incredibly well with Click! and has been retained here with a slight, but important difference that I’ll talk about in my next post.
Another fascinating project, i look forward to the results and further technical reflections. And I’m bringing this into the classroom tomorrow as an example of your extension of the “click!” project – I see it as more potentially educational since we’re also learning about a period/origin of art that is little studied in the typical course of art history studies in the States.
My personal observations: I wonder if you’ll get lower ratings for horizontally-oriented images. I found them harder to see, simply because the images are limited to a set horizontal pixel width. For a similar reason, I wonder if people will respond more favourably in the split-second test to simpler images, perhaps with bright colours.
In the longer “reflection” test, I found that learning the story behind the style and content of each work increased my appreciation of it, but that expressing an opinion of it on just one scale wasn’t sufficient. I wanted to judge its merits on scales related to artistic skill or aesthetics on one hand, and on the other hand rate how interesting it is to me… with due note to the fact that the wording “how do you rate – mah/amazing” is entirely open to interpretation.
Really nicely designed! It looks and runs fantastically. I would be curious to know about the software you are using. In particular I think there are some elements of this that could be rather useful in a generic sense for other projects. Did you write your own software or plugin for some existing system? In either case is the code something you would think about releasing open source or is it a proprietary system?
I also found this an interesting exercise, but like others in the first part (split second piece) I had to scroll down to see the work and that didn’t mesh with the short time available to respond, which caused problems. I don’t think this section worked as well as intended because the time frame was actually too short– I understand it’s meant to be a ‘gut’ reaction and so the time needed to be short, but I felt so pressured into choosing one I also found myself clicking randomly rather than actually following the prompt.
An interesting project! I started out having fun but for some reason either my clicking wasn’t fast enough or my hitting the 1 or 2 wasn’t working as I got the “try again” page after a few artworks – and this happened four times! I finally succeeded. I did enjoy the one-word description activity in part two.
Also, I thought it would be a shorter exercise – perhaps I took the “Split Second” too literally.
The text paragraphs accompanying the third part were way too long. I grew to almost resent whoever wrote them but felt committed to completing the whole activity for your study.
I also learned I don’t really like Indian art.
I’ve read Blink and find your application really interesting.
Good luck!
I think it’s great that some museums are starting to involve the public in the initial stages of their exhibitions. It would be even better to incorporate equally democratic interpretive initiatives in the physical gallery space when the show opens. I have a masters in art history, but know very little about Indian art. This project taught me a lot about what is appealing to me in Indian art and also really makes me want to make the trip (from Kansas City) to Brooklyn to see the show.
Thanks for including me!
~Sarah
Thank you for providing the opportunity to participate in your exhibit. I’ve never done this before, but I hope more institutions follow your example.
The choice of 1=left and 2=right needs to be repeated on each page, not shown only once at beginning. “Intriguing” is not the word I’d have chosen. “Attractive” would be better, since “intriguing” implies “more complicated”. A portrait of a single person would be attractive, but less intriguing than a complex scene with many figures. A major issue is which paintings are clear (cleaned?) an easy to see.
I enjoyed this but kept getting told to look faster, however, I am on a small laptop and the screen size only allowed me to see a small portion of the images. Perhaps some consideration for the fact that I was then basing my decision on only the upper half of the work should be made. I didn’t have time to scroll and see the bottom half and I didn’t know before I started what screen size I might need. Thanks for the experiment.
Split Second was an incredibly fun way to get what amounted to a brief but intense refresher course in the basics of Indian art. I’d love to do this exercise again for other areas of art.
I find this politically highly suspicious and manipulative. If this would be a scientific experiment (how many figures can you count in a split second) – oh, well, just fine. Regarding any aesthetic or curatorial criteria, this undertaking is pandering to crowd-sourcing and old people trying to connect with what young people use. It’s the prejudice accelerator. You know that curator comes from Latin curare – it means to take care of, to foster, to look after – it’s about time and love – and taking responsibility for one’s action. Art is about observing, taking time, looking in detail – opening one’s mind to other perspectives which one had not encountered yet. If this “experiment” (which it is absolutely not – it is only superficial and it’s all in the eye of the beholder=reviewer of the collected data) so: if this “experiment” is really meant to bring meaning forward, to add to what you don’t know, you will most likely only see as result what you knew before.
nice i like art