Community: bloggers@brooklynmuseum

Going into our second year of 1stfans, Shelley and I wanted to do a survey to see how members felt about the first year of the program. We knew that we’d hear a variety of responses based on how people used their membership, but we were determined to see if we could identify any trends that we could use to make changes to the program. Below are a few things we learned from the 35 folks that responded to the open-ended survey we sent a couple weeks ago, as well as two changes that we’re definitely going to make for year two of 1stfans.

Concept

The most positive thing we heard from the survey was that people enjoy 1stfans as an idea. Whether that sentiment followed several sentences about taking part in the meetups and interacting online, or whether it came as a consolation. Erin from Texas wrote, “I don’t know how useful my feedback will be - since I became a member primarily because I think what you’re doing rocks - and not because I expected to take advantage of the benefits (as I live more than 1000 miles from the Museum).”

It seems like many 1stfans joined to demonstrate their gratitude that a Museum had created a membership program that was catered to how they interact with museums today. On the other end of the geographic spectrum, one local wrote, “Already a museum member, I joined 1stfans because I love that my local art institution is so forward thinking about the concept of a virtual membership and I have definitely gotten my $20 worth.” One person who wasn’t entirely pleased with their experience wrote, “I don’t think I’ve gotten what I thought I would out of my $20 membership fee so far, although I’m not so sure exactly what I was expecting.  I am glad to support the museum nonetheless.”

Meetups

We heard a variety of feedback about our meetups at Target First Saturday. Most enjoyed them, although some thought they were too early in the evening, while others thought they were just the right time and length to allow them to participate in the other events. For those that came regularly, the in-person aspect of the membership is what they appreciated, not the online benefits. Mike wrote, “While I never made use of the electronic networking opportunities (blogs, twitter, facebook, etc.), I enjoyed interacting with others at the events and thought that the event composition was great. It was fun to hear about both the creative and technical aspects of art and the museum.”

The “action item” that came out of the feedback from the meetups concerned bringing guests. Most didn’t come alone, and felt bad making their friends sign up for 1stfans if they knew they probably wouldn’t be back to First Saturday anytime soon. Chris brought up a good point, writing, “…if each member can bring a guest to a 1st Fans Meetup, then you would have an excellent chance of dramatically increasing your membership, since it’s hard to get a good idea of what 1st Fans Meetups are all about without actually attending one.” So from now on, we’ll allow one guest to attend 1stfans meetups at select First Saturday events. We’ll announce in the invite whether guests will be allowed.

Communication

We found that communication was something a lot of people talked about. That makes sense intuitively, given that communication in 1stfans is a la carte and based on how many of the social networks you are on. If you’re on facebook, twitter, and flickr frequently, you’ll probably get most of what we put out there. Three folks mentioned the Twitter Art Feed as being confusing or out of context. One person wrote, “I’ve had a hard time getting regular twitter updates. It seems like I’m always missing them and forget to check back, so I don’t always catch them.” Another wrote, “Because I am an on again off again twitter user, I would love an email every time there is a new artist with a short bio and a description of the project to remind me to check my twitter.” Most people recognize that they won’t love every Twitter Art Feed project, but it’s still our responsibility to ensure that the word gets out.

Since we also heard from a couple folks about receiving emails (in addition to facebook, flickr, and twitter invites), the other big thing we’re going to work on in year two of 1stfans is putting together some sort of short newsletter so everyone can have a consolidated version of what is happening coming directly to them in one place. That should help out those who think we aren’t communicating as well as we could be, and it also won’t add a lot more work on our end. By increasing our level of communication with 1stfan members and allowing them to give their friends some access to 1stfans programming, we’re hoping to increase 1stfans participation and awareness of what’s going on, as well as and expose 1stfans as a concept to a wider audience.

We’ve always said that 1stfans is about growing a relationship with the Museum, and we’re determined to have 1stfans play just as large a role in shaping the future of the program. We’re grateful to everyone who responded to the survey, and we’re happy to take any more feedback either in the comments or below or by e-mailing me directly.

February’s 1stfans Twitter Art Feed artist is Brooklyn’s own Man Bartlett. Man’s work includes drawings (mostly of circles), paintings, sculpture, and, as those on twitter may know, performance. Shelley mentioned Man’s “#BestNonBuy” project a couple weeks ago, and this week Man is attempting an even greater feat of focus and stamina. #Theseus will take place beginning tomorrow morning at 9am, and will involve Man walking the “labyrinth” that is midtown Manhattan for twenty hours or so.  As Man puts in succinctly in his Artist Statement, with regards to performance he is specifically interested in “Duration in relation to space (social, environmental, physical.)” For the Twitter Art Feed, Man has proposed something called #Inpermatweet. I’ll let him explain:

#Inpermatweet
A pun on the term “permalink,” this month would feature a self portrait of tweets as cumulative “full data” aggregation (e.g. links to web browsing, iPhone screenshots, twitpics of what I’m looking at, drawings in progress, “status” updates, etc). This process would further blur the lines between art/artist/life with wit and absurdity. Over the course of the month the @1stfans avatar would slowly lose its opacity, eventually reaching 0%. At the end of the month, all of my tweets would be ritualistically deleted, leaving only a single link to a memorial page that would contain the month’s data as a visual representation of memory, complete with missing or incorrectly re-represented tweets and images.

As always, 1stfans should feel free to share their feedback with Man throughout the month. As anyone who follows him on twitter knows, he’s incredibly funny and always quick with a quip. Man will be sending some of the tweets for 1stfans from Queens, where he is currently in residency at the Flux Factory, and where he will have a solo show of recent work titled Systema Mundi opening April 2.

I grow more convinced every day that unique partnerships and creative incentives are the key to acquiring and retaining members. With 1stfans, Shelley and I spent the last year watching as this program, which started as an idea, became a series of events and relationships-both online and in the galleries–between the Museum’s staff, the artists in its collections, and its members. Because the benefits of 1stfans are different than (and not as plentiful as, I might add) regular Museum membership, we wanted to come up with a way to make renewing membership fun and rewarding those who supported 1stfans in its first year. We looked back at the success of the Swoon printing event last January, and decided that it would be great if the second year of 1stfans could start with some art as well. To that end, we have partnered with artist Valerie Hegarty and the awesome folks at 20×200.com to make a benefit print for 1stfans. Valerie, whose work is in our permanent collection and currently on display, was suggested to us by Eugenie Tsai, our John and Barbara Vogelstein Curator of Contemporary Art.

Asher B. Durand (American, 1796-1886). The First Harvest in the Wilderness, 1855. Oil on canvas, 31 5/8 x 48 1/16 in. (80.3 x 122 cm) Frame: 43 1/2 x 59 1/2 x 4 3/4 in. (110.5 x 151.1 x 12.1 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Transferred from the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences to the Brooklyn Museum, 97.12

When we got in touch with Valerie, who lives in Brooklyn, she agreed to make the artwork and decided she wanted to create a piece based on a painting in our collection, Asher B. Durand’s First Harvest in the Wilderness. Coincidentally, this painting was commissioned in 1855 by one of the Brooklyn Museum’s founders to serve as a cornerstone of its collection. Now, in 2010, it’s serving as inspiration for a new artwork that will be used to help grow the Museum’s membership program.

Valerie Hegarty. First Harvest in the Wilderness with Pileated Woodpecker, 2010. 10 x 8 in., ed. of 200. © Valerie Hegarty. Image courtesy of the artist and 20×200 | Jen Bekman Projects

The only place Shelley and I ever hoped to produce the prints with was 20×200, which is a remarkable and successful site that offers curated, limited-edition prints and, occasionally, does benefit editions for non-profit institutions. 20×200’s motto of “Art for Everyone” is perfectly aligned with our goal of creating 1stfans as a way of making museum membership more accessible. Jen Bekman, who founded 20×200 and heads up their operations as part of Jen Bekman Projects, generously agreed to produce and donate all of the prints and any profits to the Museum.

The prints will come in three sizes: small (8″x10,” edition of 200), medium (11″x14,” edition of 500), and large (16″x20,” edition of 20). The small prints, which would normally sell for $20, will only be available from 6-8 p.m. at the Museum during February 6^th Target First Saturday to anyone who signs up for or renews their 1stfans membership. The medium and large prints, which will sell for $50 and $200 respectively, will be sold beginning the week of February 8^th. People who are signed up for the 20×200 newsletter will have the first (and possibly, the only!) opportunity to pick up a print before they are released on their website, 20×200.com. The medium and large prints will each come with a coupon code to get a free year of 1stfans membership. The real benefit to the museum, then, will lie not in the money earned for the museum but in the members acquired and renewed via this print. I think that is fitting start to the second year of 1stfans, since our goal with this program is to grow relationships with people, not with their wallets.

1stfans is a year old (more on that to come), and we thought it fitting and affirming to start the new year of the 1stfans Twitter Art Feed with one of our own. Last January 1stfan An Xiao generated lots of responses when she tweeted in Morse code for a month. This month’s artist, Nina Meledandri, sent in a proposal via the open call called “ArtDialogue” that capitalizes on the conversational aspects of twitter as well as the desire to use an image to capture a thought or emotion. Nina’s proposal for ArtDialogue is below:

dear friends: nina… via Bruce Grant on Flickr.

One of the most democratic and engaging art phenomena on the web has been the proliferation of photo memes where participants respond to a weekly topic by posting a link on a communal web page to a related photograph of their own.

ArtDialogue will bring this concept to twitter, engaging the 1stfans community by tapping into our (presumably) common desire to give a greater voice to art. Taking its inspiration from mail art, ArtDialogue is intended to be a collective work; an image based virtual conversation. Since a driving force behind both making art and social networking is communication, this seems like a natural union.

Each week, 1stfans will be asked to tweet images in response to a new theme, creating an “ArtDialogue.” As the project evolves, so will the opportunity to create different conversation “threads” as participants continue to answer each other’s responses with more image replies of their own.

This month, Lori Hepner’s project for the 1stfans Twitter Art Feed has prompted a great response from 1stfans with interesting and thought-provoking @replies, but there also seems to be a curiosity about how she goes from a response on twitter to a digital portrait. I think now is a good time to reveal these portraits for the public to see as well as dive in a little deeper with Lori about the project and specifically about her artistic process. Her answers to my questions appear below:

Artist Lori Hepner shows off Status Symbols during HackPittsburgh.  Photo by Matt Mets via Flickr.  All rights reserved.

How do you choose which @replies to work with?

I have been attempting to photograph each of the @replies that I have received for the project, which so far has been manageable due to the number of responses that I’ve had for each one.  I like the idea of making art from whatever the response happens to be and not having curatorial oversight on the responses.  The replies have ranged from very thought-out answers that have taken some reflection time, such as the post from @jenniferwyng, “@1stfans I’m constantly between cultures east & west. Too asian for the west, too westernized for the east. That gives me an edge over both.” To some very quick responses such as, “@1stfans rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr” from @ranjit and, “@1stfans a little tired, wanting to hibernate, all “talked out” ,” from @_randomthoughts.  If I’d receive a response from every @1stfans follower, I would have to start making choices of the @replies to photograph, just due to time constraints.  If that would happen, I would most likely go back to the ones that I did not get to after the month was over.

What happens next? Could you take a photo of the custom hardware that you use?

The actual photographing uses a custom LED array and a device, called an Arduino that is an open-source microcontroller that is programmed using the Arduino programming language (based on Wiring) in the Arduino development environment (based on Processing).  Since I am a photographer by training, I had some help developing the LED array and initial Arduino program by Matt Stultz, who is president of HackPittsburgh, a community based non-profit group of inventors, engineers, scientists, programmers, artists, and crafters interested in creative projects.  It was at one of the classes that HackPittsburgh was holding that the initial idea for this work popped into my head and the development started to get rolling.

So to start, each tweet goes into a piece of custom software that gets turned into code for the Arduino and lights up the array of 8 RGB, LED lights into a pattern specific to that tweet.  The pattern is coded so that each letter, digit, or symbol in the tweet gets turned into an 8 digit sequence of ones and zeros that turn on or off one of the LEDs in the array: one is on; zero is off.  This sequence references ASCII binary code, which is what computers use to read keystrokes.  It’s one of the things that I’ve been referencing in my work for the past 7 years, so you might call it a bit of an obsession.

After the program is uploaded onto the Arduino microcontroller, the process goes lo-fi, as my Arduino is currently stuck to a record player with some electrical tape, which is what makes the array spin and gives the photographs the circular look.  During the winter months, I will be creating a sculptural device that wirelessly transmits tweets to the LEDs and spins via a wall-mounted motor and is gallery appropriate.  Right now, though, the lo-fi version suits my photographic needs, as it allows me to photograph the spinning, blinking LEDs as multi-second exposures on film.

Why do you feel that actually developing the photos (as opposed to creating them digitally) is important?

Conceptually, my work has always dealt with mixing the analog and digital worlds in some way. In my past series, Code Words, the analog was a physical degradation process that was photographed digitally to make the imagery, which was then placed into layouts of binary code translations. Since Status Symbols is much more direct in the use of the digital in concept and process, I wanted to add in a level of analog, which is where the film comes into play.  A fact equally important is that I can’t get the colors that I want using a digital camera; the build-up of light turns into white much faster while photographing digitally than it does using the color negative film.  The film allows all of the rotations of the LEDs to be captured and I can use the scanning process to pull out the colors, which have built up on the negative like watercolor washes on paper.

These really are portraits in the sense that they are a representation of a person’s statement about themselves. And yet because they are created using a very methodical and mechanical process, what people end up getting in return is something that they might have trouble relating to. What do you think about that?

In coming up with the project, I was initially inspired to create abstract portraits because of the fact that these small status updates that are posted on Twitter can only really be a small window into an individual.  I’ve been fascinated by how many people that I “know” only through following on Twitter.  The online persona becomes who they are to me.  Last week, in fact, I met a woman who I follow and have had conversations with on Twitter for the first time in real life while waiting for an art event to start.  The additional knowledge that came with hearing the inflections in a voice and seeing a face that wasn’t pixels made the overall picture a bit more complete than before I had met her.

Lori is uploading the resulting portraits of 1stfans to Flickr along with their accompanying tweets.

The portraits end up working for me in a similar manner; they add a bit more information about a person, but in this case, the information is an aesthetic experience that isn’t linked to their physical likeness.  I hope that the portraits create some moments of reflection for those viewing them about how virtual identity is being created through many disjointed updates over time.  As the project goes along, I will be tweaking the code to create different aesthetic experiences for the each of the questions that I’ve asked.  There will be some visual surprises ahead, so stay tuned for the rest of the month!