One of the things that I love about museums that have blogs is how easy it can be is to get a hold of counterparts when you need something. In the most recent instance of this, we were able to film Valerie Hegarty talking about her work in 21 and her piece, Fallen Bierstadt, takes its inspiration from another work, Bridal Veil Falls owned by the North Carolina Museum of Art. One quick comment on the NCMA blog and we had a high resolution file to incorporate into our little video, yay!
If you read our blog, chances are you will really like the NCMA blog, which gives a behind-the-scenes look at the goings on direct from staffers—it’s definitely in my own feed reader and I love the opportunity to get to know the people working there. Chad is no exception—though we’ve never met, I know him well enough through his blogging to not be surprised at all when he, after seeing the above video, sent along a note that said “I’m now imagining our painting out in the wilderness, having adventures.” Nice : )
[edit! Valerie is taking questions via our blog. Leave a comment and she’ll answer when she checks in!]
Seher Shah recently stopped by the Brooklyn Museum to see her large drawing Jihad Pop Progressions 5 – Interior Courtyard 2, 2007 on view in the fourth floor Contemporary galleries.
Part of her “Jihad Pop” series, the layered imagery merges private imagery, iconic Islamic spaces, and universal geometric forms. Seher’s visit provided a wonderful opportunity to hear her insightful−and impromptu—comments about the piece.
Have you ever had one of those days where everything falls into place? When Eugenie Tsai blogged about Valerie Hegarty’s Fallen Bierstadt back in October, she mentioned we needed to do a follow-up post with our paintings conservator, Carolyn Tomkiewicz. Eugenie said we needed get her to explain the process of arranging the debris. This piqued my interest, but I got a little busy and forgot to follow-up with Carolyn. Last Monday, I was touring a couple of friends around the Museum, which was closed for the day, and as we entered 21: Selections of Contemporary Art from the Brooklyn Museum, I spotted Carolyn on the floor with the debris:
Luckily, we all had plenty of cameras to document the moment and Carolyn was gracious enough to give us a quick on-camera video interview about what in the world she was doing. So, now, meet the conservator:
Let’s take a look at the basic statistics. During the show’s four month run, visitors recorded 482 videos, 236 of which made it to our Black List Project YouTube channel. Of the 236 that were published on the channel, 96 made it to the Brooklyn Museum favorites playlist. We had 43,386 video views overall, but keep in mind one video (recorded by one of our security guards) was seen over 23,000 times when it was featured on YouTube during MLK day. Also, the channel was given non-profit status at YouTube which means auto-play is activated for videos featured on our channel and this will raise the view count.
Moderation
The project required a sizable amount of moderation. Videos went live throughout the day and were post-moderated in the evenings. Depending on how many videos were recorded, moderation took between 5-15 minutes per day. When we had higher volume at Target First Saturday, we’d see anywhere between 40-80 videos recorded and this moderation required an hour or two. Interestingly, we received some of our best comments during Target First Saturday and the ratio on those days was much more signal than noise, so even in the volume, it felt worth it. Moderated videos fell into three areas and I’ve left a few of these live so you can get a chuckle: 1) kids goofing off 2) adults goofing off 3) people who would press record and walk away. There were also more than a few instances of will our hardware make it out of this experiment alive!!??! Only one video was removed because it violated our comment guidelines. Typically, we don’t moderate this heavily, but on this particular project we decided to do so because wading through video content to get to decent recordings is a lot more difficult than scanning text comments for gold. As someone who did almost all of the moderation on the project, I can tell you it’s a time-consuming process and not one that I’d want to put our web visitors through. We toyed with the idea of letting the community moderate itself at YouTube (ratings were left on), but we ran into issues there. For starters, we didn’t have enough traffic to the channel to generate enough ratings on all the videos. You can see what happens when you look at most viewed. Some videos were seen a lot (due in part to our featuring the videos in different ways) and others were not seen much at all—had we left all the content, I have a feeling the view numbers would have plummeted out of sheer viewer frustration.
We ran into one significant issue along the way and this is something I was prepared for in my head, but perhaps not in reality. I was surprised by how many members of the community were sharing racist statements at YouTube (we have never had this problem on other platforms). *wow* can only describe some of the comments that were deleted because they were in such clear violation our comment guidelines. Only one video was deleted due to a violation in guidelines, but the opposite was true on YouTube, where in my entire career, I have never deleted more comments or blocked so many users. We have a very high threshold, so just know this problem was significant. There was something about the subject matter of the show, what we were asking and how people were responding, combined with this particular on-line community that generated a lot of issues in this arena. Now that the show has closed, we will go in and turn off comments on every video and that’s a first for us.
Technical Issues
We had a some technical trouble (crashing, sound mismatches, pixelated capture) in the early videos. We solved it by prioritizing traffic on that part of the LAN and enabling flow control at the switch side. So you need a strong LAN infrastructure where you can tweak a bit if you are seeing problems. I would not try this over a wifi connection. We also found lights were needed and we grabbed those at Ikea for very little money.
Archiving
I don’t have a great answer for this. Because the videos are uploaded directly to YouTube, archiving them becomes a manual process where we use free tools to download the files back to our systems. This is a time-consuming process, so we will probably only do this for the ones that made our favorites list. In addition, the channel and some of the videos with comments and ratings will be screenshot. The channel itself will stay up for as long as it can be there—we have no plans to remove it.
Success?
Yes, but there’s more we can do next time. This was a very simple system which cost us very little in actual dollars. As low-fi as it was, it worked well to provide something that we couldn’t have afforded otherwise. Staff time was needed for moderation, but other than the volume at Target First Saturday, the time needed to be accounted for, but was not overwhelming. I will never forget seeing more than one visitor in tears when expressing themselves at these kiosks. Browse through these videos to get an idea of why this was so great.
Given the amount of moderation, I don’t think we’d use these often, but when we have a really important question we want to ask, it will be worth considering. If I had to do it all over again, I’d make sure we had our favorites playing in the gallery alongside the recording area, so people could get inspired by what others had to say—closing the loop and bringing the voices back into the gallery. For the record, our Education Department was advocating this from the start, but given the time constraints we were under, we couldn’t make this part of the first round. Nina Simon also has some good reasons for it here that you may want to read. In a future instance, we’d ideally leverage the YouTube API to allow people in the gallery to comment on and rate the existing videos, but that’s a pretty large project for another day. For now, we were happy with and learned a lot from this first try.
So, the idea was pretty simple: the curators of Burning Down the House: Building a Feminist Art Collection wanted our visitors to hear directly from the artists in the exhibition, so we set out to create a series of videos that would play on iPod Touches in the gallery. As most people reading this blog already know, we don’t have a lot of resources here (read: staff time) to produce video, so we needed a way to do this project without putting too much of a strain on the department. We purchased a bunch of Flip Video cameras and the curators set out to film short interviews with the artists—check these out. We were impressed with the quality of these cams, so if you are looking for a cheap and easy way shoot some video this may be a good answer for your needs—worked for us!
The iPod Touch part of the project turned out to be a bigger problem. Why iPods? Well, they are cheap and small. We are all conscious around here that too much technology can compete with the work on view and the Touches were a good fit. Small enough to be installed in a way that does not overpower the visitor experience, yet large enough screens to watch the movies and built-in touch screens to navigate a list of movie files.
iPod Touch installed in Burning Down the House seen here with Marriage Bed, 2001. Edwina Sandys (British, b. 1938). Mixed media. Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Henry Luce III and Leila Hadley Luce, 2004.29.
We were hoping to find a Museum Mode that would work for the Touch, but it doesn’t exist yet. I guess this makes sense, it took Apple a really long time to release Museum Mode the first time around and it looks like we may be waiting just as long for a version to run on this newer hardware. Best answer we could find was to use the API to create an app, but that doesn’t work either—the API won’t let you lock down the device in a kiosk-like way. No Museum Mode? No API? What’s a museum tech department to do? Our solution is not perfect, but it’s not difficult to accomplish and if you drop us a line we can point you to some existing documentation on the web that helped us.
Now that we’ve got them in the gallery, we will be watching usability closely. Apple is pretty good about providing easy-to-use interfaces, but it remains to be seen how it will translate in a situation like this one. We’ve got a fabulous team of security guards to help get feedback. I’ll be doing some of my own observation in the galleries and will report back with our findings.
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