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Field Report: MoMA PS1 Printed Matter New York Art Book Fair

Moma PS1 is one of the oldest and largest nonprofit contemporary institutions in the United States. It regularly organized an event to promote the museum. In this fall, MoMa PS1 hosted the New York annual Book Fair — Printed Matter. The event was held at MoMA PS1 sprawling campus from September 21 to 22. Printed matter’s is one of the biggest book fair of each year, which is a leading international gathering of artists’ books, celebrating the full breadth of the art publishing community. This annual book fair event draws thousands of book lovers, collectors, artists, and art world professionals. This year is the fourteenth year for Printed Matter to present the NYC art book fair. 

Before I went to the event, I had several questions in my mind, which requires me to find the answer. 

  • Why printed matters?
  • What is the age range of people who go to the book fair?
  • How the exhibitors profit from their issues?
  • What is the reason for people choosing to issue printed books over digital books?
  • How they define “Archive”?
Scene outside of PS1 during the book fair

Regardless of the various digital reading products in the market, such as Amazon Kindle, the population of reading printed books has been descending year by year. Even textbooks are gradually going paperless nowadays. Also, among the teenagers in the 21st century, fewer and fewer teenagers are willing to read printed books. On the one hand, the price of books is always high, which is not friendly to book-lovers. On the other hand, a printed book is harder to carry around than a simple reading tablet.

This year, the Printed Matter event held over 350 booths. It’s a spectacular parade of art, fashion, zines, culture, subculture, color, sound, food, and various performance. At first, this extravaganza made me feel a little overwhelmed because of the dazzling booths. It’s really hard to find the specific exhibitor, ranging from artist collectives to antiquarian booksellers, offering unique publications. In the place of the Fair, there were visitors from different age groups and with different skin colors, but people who purchased the issues, the works, and the books mostly looked older and more knowledgeable. Younger people or teenagers were more thinking of the book fair as a weekend entertained event. 

After finishing browsing most of the booths, I entered a booth with name “The Classroom”. The name was attracted me to walk into the space since I wondered what I might learn from this so-called “The Classroom.” This space is presented by a dutch artist, Ruth van Beek. She walked around and elaborated on her thoughts behind her practice in “The Classroom” to the visitors. The exhibit was a dedicated space that provided reading, screening, informal lectures, and other activities by artists, writers and designers. The program highlighted exciting new releases at the Fair and fosters dialogue around important themes for contemporary art publishing and the broader community. ‘That foster dialogue around important themes for contemporary art publishing and the broader community.’ Ruth described bookmaking as an inverse to creating an exhibition. “Making a book is more democratic. They’re for everyone.” After the talk, one of the audience asked a question that I was about to ask, “Will you ever considered making a digital book?”. Then the response from Ruth really touched my heart. “No”, she replied, “It’s the tactility of the book object.”

“Tactile” is a very appropriate word to describe the fair, and visitors were always encouraged to touch, interact and communicate with makers and exhibitors. After I walked out of “The Classroom”, my attention was attracted by a booth, “Queer, Archive, Work”, with slogans on the banner “This publication is a loose assembling of queer methodologies, with a particular view towards network culture, failure, and refutation.” The keywords, Queer and Archive, made me walk towards the booth. I asked the exhibitors Paul Sollellis who is also the co-publisher of this work, about how does he define “Archive” in his publishes from the view as freelance artists. He told me that archive is a process of gathering and collecting memories from different individuals then putting them together. Paul elaborated the issue he was selling on his booth to me that one package contains works from multiple Queer artists. There are journals, photographs, paintings and collages inside. Following his words, I asked him why he chose to do physical copies instead of a digital one. He gave me a short talk on the philosophy level by saying that this is all about the sense of existence and the weight of things. Everything has its own weight, you will know it only when you feel it. I remembered his face looked very serious, not like a seller who was trying to promote his product. I felt that he really believed that the meaning of existence is all about the feeling, or the “tactility”. 

Paul’s definition of “Archive” reminds me that what make archive so significant to our lives is those archives are always meaningful to someone in the world. Like Archill says in his article, “however we define archives, they have no meaning outside the subjective experience of those individuals who, at a given moment, come to use them.” (Mbembe, 2002) Only the things we are doing contains meaning then there is the significance of existence. So is “Archive” and the printed books. Books have different meanings for different individuals. For Ruth, printed matters because of the facility of the book object. And for Paul, printed matters because the weight of the books is the proof of existence. Then I cannot help but think does printed matter to me and why. This is a question that I haven’t found out the answer.References:

References:

“Paul Soulellis, Editor – QUEER.ARCHIVE.WORK.” Printed Matter. Accessed November 3, 2019. https://www.printedmatter.org/catalog/53190/.

Mbembe, Achille. “The Power of the Archive and Its Limits.” Refiguring the Archive, 2002, 19–27. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-0570-8_2.

Posted on by sofia ni 0

We Are Brooklyn Event Blog

As fall comes, two things turn my mind towards the idea of immigration. One is a Thanksgiving tradition of my aunt having a few too many glasses of wine and tearfully recounting the story of how my great grandparents ended up in New York from Ireland (if it is as she tells it, it is a good story, with my great grandfather running from the British because he drunkenly signed up for the IRA and being told by my great grandmother that men were after him and he had to flee the country, and then rescuing her when her fiance refused to sponsor her through Ellis Island a year later because he had fallen in love with another woman) while we all nod along. The second is a much less charming reason- fall means elections, and elections mean debates about immigration, especially immigration from countries in South America and the strife our current administration seems to be intent on putting them through, as well as the scare mongering about these same people some political entities drums up for their own gain in election and legislative or monetary support.

With these two things in mind, I spent an afternoon in the New York City Hall of Records, checking out the “We Are Brooklyn: Immigrant Voices” exhibit that they originally premiered at Guttman Community College, put together by the Brooklyn College Listening Project. It was smaller than I had expected, but the information was denser than I had expected as well. The posters generally told either pieces of legislative history of immigration reform or the stories of individual immigrants, and there were QR codes that people could use to listen to full interviews online. There was also a board where you could put pins in a map to show where your family had emigrated from, and what year range they came to America, which was a fun bit of interaction with the visitors. I would love to visit the display closer to the end of it’s run and see what some of the demographics that were visiting the exhibit were, and try and see what information can be found from that. This brought to mind our discussions our class had at the very beginning of the school year, about how people interacting with a text or with a set of information changes the set of information itself. 

Because I went on a weekend and spent a while there listening to the multimedia presentations, I ran into a few more people who were also attending the exhibit. On the whole, most of the people there were not first generation immigrants themselves, which I found interesting. I was not extremely talkative with them (this was not a space conducive to lengthy conversation), but it seemed was primarily a group of people who were curious about hearing others speak (or reading summaries of the stories that other people gave, more on that in a minute) on things they had never experienced. It seems to be reaching a small group of people who are interested in local history and immigrant stories, which is not particularly unsurprising. 

       This exhibit really made me think of both the idea of archiving immigrant experiences and how that is best done, as well as the idea that there is no true neutrality that we have been discussing in class. I thought it was interesting that the main exhibition pieces were 6 foot tall boards with stories printed on them that were not the story of each person’s immigration as they said it. They were instead written in a third person narrative form, each following a fairly clear line and ending with the person living happily in Brooklyn to this day. These posters had some quotes from the interviewees sprinkled in, and they were a purely text based experience unless you went through the extra step of scanning the QR code and listening or visiting the website after the exhibit. This was obviously not done with malice, but I wonder how much that changed the story being told. It is rare that someone’s story is that open and shut or that narratively satisfying, and I wonder how much was left out in order to make the story fit both the narrative and the posterboard. The interviews are short but go into more depth, they feel a little less like a story and a little more real, but again, fewer people are going to go through the extra steps to listen to them. I wonder how much conscious choice went into that, the making of these experiences into neat little written stories. Is it in order to package them for people who are not direct immigrants and who grew up on stories of family histories of moving to America like my family (and many families like us) did? Is there a desire from the people being interviewed themselves to make their own narrative fit into the molds of the accepted immigration stories that are passed down in a lot of european households? Was the purpose of this exhibit simply to document stories, to act as a snapshot of an archive of more recent immigrant experiences? Or was there a political agenda as well. 

There has been much discussion in our class through almost the whole semester about the fact that there is no real neutrality. In archiving, in organizing, in the management of information, there are always biases and there are almost certainly individual or group motivations that are not always stated. The last few posters in this exhibit talked directly about this presidential administrations’ acts against immigrants from South American countries, specifically. In that space, there was no attempt to be neutral or to try and defend the heinous actions of the administration, just a statement of what had been done as facts and what the consequences of those legislative moves have been for immigrants and migrants (and some US citizens who have been detained or threatened). The lack of an attempt at neutrality here, I think, is both the greatest strength of the exhibit while also being what will keep many people away. Stating the facts here is not neutral, putting a face to and humanizing what some are calling the “migrant threat” in order to justify what is happening to them is not neutral, but it is something that needs to be done. Not many people know about this project, it is not particularly well advertised. Those who may need to see it are in some ways the least likely to go to see it, precisely because it is not interested in playing both sides and maintaining an idea of neutrality by masking facts. 

Posted on by Michaela Donahue 0

Person, Place, Thing- Dr. Rabina

Person: Iddris Sandu

Iddris Sandu is a 22-year-old architectural technologist entrepreneur paving his own way in the field of technology. Raised in South Central Los Angeles, technology always sparked his interest as a child. At the age of 8 years old, while visiting his home country of Accra, Ghana with his family, his father abandoned him in the village and returned to the States with his passport. Abandoned for almost 9 months, he was finally able to get in contact with a non-governmental organization that was able to assist him in returning back home. 

Upon his arrival back to the States the first iPhone had just been released. So inspired by the iPhone and the possibilities of what it could do, he began teaching himself every program language. For the next 2 years he spent most of his time at the Torrance Public Library, teaching himself how to code in C#, JavaScript, and Python. While checking out books in 2011, a Google designer noticed him and offered him an internship with the company. At 13 years old he was contributing to the development of Google’s social network. 

Sandu created an app for his high school that provided students with navigation directions to their classrooms at only 15 years old. The application received a great amount of notice, including President Barack Obama. Sandu was invited to the White House to meet Obama and was presented with a commendation certificate. He then wrote an algorithm that he would eventually sell to Instagram and began consulting for Snapchat by the time he was 18. At 19, he worked for his last major company, Uber, where he developed a collision detection interface for the autonomous vehicle program. After his work for Uber, he stopped working for major companies to focus on work that would impact kids that looked like him and create accessibility that would increase diversity in the field of technology. His mission since then has been to bridge the gap between the informed and uninformed. 

Sandu has also been focusing on merging hip hop culture and technology. His most notable work has been in the collaboration of the Marathon Clothing store with late rapper, Nispsey Hussle, which is also the world’s first smart store. He created the iOS app that enables visitors to unreleased music and video content by scanning the pictures on items of clothing, unlocking augmented reality experiences. The store received much acclaim from other big names in hip hop such as Kanye West, Jay-Z, and Jaden Smith and is currently collaborating on projects with them.

Place: Museum of the Moving Image

The Museum of the Moving Image is an institution which expands the appreciation and understanding of art, history, technique, and technology of film, television, and digital media. The museum collects and preserves moving-image relation artifacts while presenting exhibitions along with education and interpretive programs. The exhibits encompass notable audio and visual elements that are designed to assist the public in grasping the history of the industry and comprehension on its evolvement. 

Located in the Astoria neighborhood of Queens, New York, the institution was originally opened in 1988 as the American Museum of the Moving Image. It underwent an expansion in March of 2008 and reopened in January 2011. The museum is so remarkable due it being the country’s only museum that is devoted in the preservation and exhibition of the “moving image” in all its forms. The Museum screens more than 400 films each year, ranging from a diverse mix of classic and contemporary films. Many public panel discussions also take place at the museum such as the Pinewood Dialogues, which is a continuous series of conversations with the creative professionals in film, television, and digital media. Also maintaining the nation’s largest and extremely comprehensive collection of artifacts in relation to the moving image, the museum holds a great amount of pivotal history amounting to over 130,000 artifacts from every stage of producing, promoting and exhibiting motion pictures, television, and digital media.

The institution holds many noteworthy exhibitions each year that receive great acclaim. The Breaking Bad exhibit creates access to the props, costumes, schemes, more behind-the-scenes material that contribute to the transformation of Walter White. The Magnificent Obsessions exhibition showcases the little pieces that contribute to the bigger picture, such as set design and actor’s research. For example, the exhibit displays the notes of the production designer from Catch Me If You Can. The museum also has a theater which is one of its main attraction. Seating 267 people, it features classic films, filmmaker interviews, and live events.

Thing: Levi’s Smart Jacket

A collaboration between Google and Levi is resulting in a line of tech-infused denim jackets. The Levi’s Trucker Jacket was originally released in 2017 but now features Google’s Jacquard technology, making some notable upgrades. The tech features are installed on a now smaller Bluetooth-enabled tag that acts as a touchpad. Clipped into the jacket’s let cuff, one can control their applications by swiping on it. One is capable of setting which apps you want to function with different gestures: a swipe up, swipe down, double tap, and cover. Jacquard has also been upgraded to be compatible with more apps. Utilizing the gestures, one is able to take a selfie from their cellular device, overlook their calendar and traffic conditions, and activate Google Assistant. There is also an “Always Together” feature which alerts you if become separated from your phone while wearing the jacket. The jacket has all these tech features while being fully washable.

Unlike the original jacket, cost is significantly lower due to the Jacquard Bluetooth. The original jackets had touch-sensitive Jacquard threads weaved into the sleeve itself which made them costlier. The new and improved jackets are created normally and are then inserted with a small Jacquard fabric weave inside the cuff of the sleeve.  Initially costing $350, the cost dropped to $198 for the standard jacket, and $248 for the Sherpa Jacket, which included insulation for weather. The only difference physically between the originals and the new jackets are the left cuff being a tad stiffer due to there still being some electronics in there despite Jacquard being able to work with touch sensitive threads. 

Sources:

About. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://movingimage.us/about/.

Bell, K. (2019, September 30). Google and Levi’s introduce a new smart jacket that can answer calls and snap selfies. Retrieved from https://mashable.com/article/google-levis-jacquard-trucker-jacket/.

Bohn, D. (2019, September 30). Google’s Project Jacquard is available on new Levi’s jackets. Retrieved from https://www.theverge.com/2019/9/30/20888909/google-levi-project-jacquard-available-trucker-sherpa-jackets-price-design.

Iddris Sandu is Going to Change the World. (2019, September 24). Retrieved from https://www.surfacemag.com/articles/iddris-sandu-is-going-to-change-the-world/.

LaScala, M. (2014, August 11). Why the Museum of the Moving Image is the Coolest Museum Ever. Retrieved from https://www.cntraveler.com/galleries/2013-09-12/photos-museum-of-the-moving-image-exhibits-queens-new-york.

Museum of the Moving Image. (2019, October 15). Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Museum_of_the_Moving_Image.

Oteng, S., Oteng, S., & Oteng, S. (2018, December 23). Meet Iddris Sandu, who was once abandoned by parents’ in Ghana but now the brain behind Uber. Retrieved from https://ghnkomo.com/meet-iddris-sandu-who-was-once-abandoned-by-parents-in-ghana-but-now-the-brain-behind-uber/.

Ramalho, C. (2019, October 21). Iddris Sandu worked for Uber, Google and Kanye. Now he wants to fix tech’s diversity problem. Retrieved from https://www.wired.co.uk/article/iddris-sandu-tech-diversity.

Posted on by lizaburroughs 0

Race After Technology

“Remember to imagine and craft the worlds you cannot live without, just as you dismantle the worlds you cannot live within”

RUHA BENJAMIN

Ruha Benjamin, an Associate Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University, founder of the JUST DATA Lab, author of two books – People’s Science and Race after Technology, gave an eye-opening talk on the racist practices of technology. She began by giving a trailer of her latest book Race after Technology, moving on to provide some real-life examples of how racism in technology is exercised. She finally talks about the ‘New Jim Code’, also mentioning the various approaches undertaken in order to counter it. I was also able to identify correlations with the various readings done for the class, addressing it where relevant.

TRAILER OF THE BOOK “Race after Technology”

As Ruha Benjamin gives a brief of her book Race after Technology, she brought forth her three provocations. The provocations, as she puts it, are as follows:

1.           Racism is productive or is it?

She states that racism is productive, not in the sense of being good, but in the literal capacity of racism to produce things of value to some, even as it creates havoc on others.

2.          Social inputs make some inventions appear inevitable.

According to Ruha Benjamin, when we think about how racist technology shapes us, we tend to limit this thinking to the social and ethical impacts of technology, but we fail to remember, how all this existed prior to the birth of technology. So, it’s not just the impact of technology, but the social inputs that make some inventions appear inevitable and desirable.

3.          People are forced to live in someone else’s imagination.

As Benjamin declares, imagination is not the afterthought where we have the luxury to dismiss or fantasize, but it is a resource, a battleground that involves the input and output of tech and social order. In fact, she states that most of the people are forced to live inside someone else’s imagination. In other words, racism among other axes of dominance helps produce this fragmented imagination, misery for some and monopoly for others.

EXAMPLES OF RACIST TECHNOLOGY

•           Citizen app

Ruha Benjamin continues to talk about the real-life practices of racism in technology. She gives an example of a relatively new application called Citizen. This app sends real-time crime alerts based on a curated selection of 911 calls. It also offers a way to report, live-stream and comment on a reported crime act. It shows incidents as red dots on a map so you could avoid supposedly dangerous neighborhoods. According to Ruha Benjamin, the Citizen app gave people the privilege to avoid crimes, rather than stopping it. Likewise, Citizen and other tech fixes for social problems are not simply about technology’s impact on societies, but also about how racial norms and values shape what tools are imagined necessary in the first place.

•           Racist Robots

Further, Benjamin talks about Racist Robots another apt example of how racism works in technology. There were a series of waves that seemed shocked at the idea of how artifacts can have politics. In contrast, some declared, technology inherits its creator’s biases. According to Benjamin, one of the challenges we now face is how to meaningfully differentiate technologies that are used to differentiate us. This coded bias and imagined objectivity is what she termed the ‘New Jim Code’.

THE NEW JIM CODE

Michelle Alexander’s analysis of the New Jim Code considers how the reproduction of racist forms of social controls and successive institutional forms entails a crucial sociotechnical component, that not only hides the nature of domination but allows it to penetrate every facet of social life under the guides of progress. Benjamin provides an example of a targeted ad from the mid-20th century, which entices white families to purchase a home in the particular neighborhood of Los Angeles. Developers were trying to do this by promising them beneficial restrictions, that restricted someone from selling their property to Black people or other unwanted groups. Followed by the rise of the Black Power movement, Fair housing act of 1968, that thought to protect people from housing discrimination when renting or buying a home. She states the four conceptual offspring of the ‘New Jim Code’, around which the chapters are organized. The offsprings of the New Jim Code, as she declares are:

  • Engineered inequity
  • Default discrimination
  • Coded exposure
  • Techno benevolence

There have been some strong restrictions on the New Jim Code. One of the most heartening revelations is that tech industry insiders have recently been speaking out about the most outrageous forms of corporate collusion that involves racism and militarism. She elaborates by citing an example where thousands of Google employees condemn the company’s collaborations on a pentagon program that uses Artificial Intelligence to make drone strikes more effective. This kind of informed refusal is certainly necessary as we build a movement to counter the New Jim Code. However, according to Benjamin, we can’t wait for the workers’ sympathy to sway the industry. Initiatives like Data for Black Lives and the Detroit Community Technology Project offer a more far-reaching approach, the former brings together people working in a number of agencies and organizations in a proactive approach to tech justice, especially at the policy level. One of the concrete collaborations that has grown out of Data for Black Lives was last year when several government agencies, including the police department and public support system, formed a controversial joint power agreement called Innovation Project, giving agencies broad discretions to collect and share data on young people with the goal of developing predictive tools to identify drug use in the city. There was an immediate and broad-based backlash from the community with the support of Data for Black Lives. In 2017, a group of over 20 localizations formed what they called “Stop the cradle to prison algorithm”. This coalition asks for a better process moving forward, and structural input into advancing upstream interventions. In “Finding Augusta” Heidi talks about how people are getting accustomed to Google which in return of their free service, stores your data and history in order to track users’ preferences and interests to get targeted ads, as the one mentioned previously by Benjamin.

CONCLUSION

She concludes by talking about Harvard Professor Derick’s radical assessment of reality through creative methods and racial reversals insisting “To see things as they really are……you must imagine them as what they might be”.

All in all, the talk was a great one with enlightening thoughts about technology’s racist side, something I had usually overlooked. Her thoughts were strong and to the point with solid examples to back them.

Posted on by Divya Thomas Chuttiparavilayil 0

Blog: Person, Place, and Thing

Heidi Klise

Cultural Heritage Preservation

Cultural heritage and heritage preservation are significant components of information studies. A beautiful line from the movie The Monuments Men does a good job of explaining why it is important to preserve heritage. George Clooney’s character Frank Stokes declared, “You can wipe out an entire generation, you can burn their homes to the ground and somehow they’ll still find their way back. But if you destroy their history, you destroy their achievements and it’s as if they never existed. That’s what Hitler wants and that’s exactly what we are fighting for.” (1) The protection of heritage has been tasked to the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). UNESCO divides heritage into two categories, tangible (physical items, monuments, geography, etc.) and intangible (oral stories, traditions, events, etc.). My research paper will delve into examples of heritage preservation by refugees in new communities. For this assignment I want to highlight non-refugee related examples of tangible heritage: the Hawaiian mountain Mauna Kea, the journal of a WWII prisoner of war, and Swiss archaeologist Paul Collart.

Person: Paul Collart 

This coming Wednesday at NYU there is a talk called, “Heritage in Peril: Digital Approaches to Preservation.” I will be unable to attend due to class but I wish I could as it is a topic of particular interest. The keynote talk will be presented by a professor from the University of Lausanne (Unil), which, according the the event invite, “is home to the Collart Collection, the world’s most comprehensive archaeological archive of the Temple of Baalshamin in Palmyra, Syria.” (2) The temple was destroyed in 2015 by ISIS. The collection is named in honor of Paul Collart, a Swiss architect and professor at Unil, who UNESCO entrusted with the inventory of the cultural property of Syria and Lebanon. (3) Collart also led the excavation of the Baal Shamin temple in the 1950s, which was classified as a UNESCO world heritage site in 1980. It’s a mark of the 50s that a Swiss man and not a Syrian was entrusted with the cultural property of two Middle Eastern countries. However, the photographs that he took during the excavation are even more important now that the real temple has been destroyed. In a video from Khan Academy, Dr. Salaam al-Kuntar and Dr. Steven Zucker discuss Palmyra. Dr. al-Kuntar says, “[A]nd then we start asking ourselves, what is the meaning of a world heritage site if that site cannot be protected?” (4) This brings up an interesting point about heritage sites, they are protected from development but what resources does UNESCO have when sites are at risk? And if militaries are entrusted to protect sites, that leads to a larger conversation that is somewhat addressed in The Monuments Men, is a life worth sacrificing for art or architecture?

The image of Collart is from archnet.org. (5)

Place: Mauna Kea

Mauna Kea is the peak of a dormant volcano on the Big Island of Hawaii. From base to top, it is the highest mountain in the world at 32,696 feet, of which 4,205 rise above sea level. (6) The summit is sacred to native Hawaiians and is believed to be a home to the gods. There has been a long-standing struggle between builders and locals since the first telescope was built by the University of Hawaii in 1970. (7) This past summer, protests stopped construction of the proposed Thirty-Meter Telescope (TMT), which would be the 14th built on the summit. 

Since mid-July, native Hawaiians, transplants, celebrities such as Jason Momoa, and others have set up camp and blocked the access road to the telescope area. Organized largely on social media, the “we are Mauna Kea” protests have even taken place in cities such as Las Vegas and New York City. I read an instagram post from actor, local, surfer, and business owner Kala Alexander that said something to the effect of, ‘we’re not anti-science or against learning more about the stars, what we’re against is the further desecration of our sacred Mauna Kea.’ What’s interesting is that the University of Hawaii has largely been at the forefront of observatory construction. Information about a lawsuit by the Office of Hawaiian Affairs explained, “the state and the University of Hawaiʻi have continuously neglected their legal duties to adequately manage the mountain. Instead, they have prioritized astronomical development at the expense of properly caring for Mauna Kea’s natural and cultural resources.” There have been rumors of another equally appeasing TMT location in the Canary Islands of Spain, but not much has been reported. 

(image from Kala Alexander’s instagram page)

What is also interesting, is that two of the other volcanoes and sacred locations on the Big Island, Kilauea and Mauna Loa, lie in Volcanoes National Park and are under protection due to their dedication as UNESCO world heritage sites. Why was Mauna Kea not included? Remember the ‘S’ in UNESCO stands for ‘scientific.’ Mauna Kea Observatory is listed in the category of astronomical heritage, “The smooth shape of the isolated mountain, along with its high altitude, produces astronomical image quality that is among the best of any location on Earth.” (8) So, who decides for what purpose something should be preserved? In this case it was the UN, but in other cases it could be information professionals and archivists. I am reminded of Shwartz and Cook’s article about archives and power, “records are also about power,” they wrote, “They are about imposing control and order on transactions, events, people, and societies[…]” (9) The discrepancy between the Hawaiian volcanoes’ protection is an example of the potential bias within preservation, and how the bias can be directed by the controlling body that funds preservation. The “We are Mauna Kea” movement 

Thing: Secret Journal

            During research for my undergraduate thesis about my grandpa’s WWII story, I found a unique and rare book: a collection of journal entries and sketches by a man who was in the same prison camp as my grandpa. I use the word rare because the only new copy on amazon.com is selling for $860 (there’s also a copy for sale on Etsy.com). In the archives of the Air Force Museum on Warner Robins Air Force Base in Georgia, I also found scans of the pages, and other drawings and handwriting, in a folder about my grandpa. 

            Prisoner of War: My Secret Journal, (10) was written by Squadron Leader B. Arct from 1944-45, during his time as a POW at Stalag Luft I in Barth, Germany. It is a compilation of artifacts including handwritten journal entries by Polish Air Force Officer Bohdan Arct, hand-drawn maps, a detailed list of the contents of Red Cross parcels, weekly rations from the German guards, and an illustrated chart of how those rations and parcels depleted towards the end of the war. There are also lines written by the other men in Arct’s bunk room that include poems, journal entries, songs, and notes much like those at the end of a school yearbook. The many instances of cartoons and different men’s handwriting alone make this book a precious source for preservation. Sure, this book exists but who knows how many copies were made, those that I’ve found are difficult to acquire, and as the 90-year old former POW’s pass on it becomes harder to find more information. For example, one man wrote his Canada address for Arct to find him later, it’s doubtful if the man or his family still live there. There’s also a note from a New Zealand soldier named Kai Ora, all of the time I’ve spent researching WWII over the years and I had forgotten that New Zealand was involved. 

The image seen here is from my Grandpa’s folder in the archives and is similar to the drawings in Arct’s book.

I feel the heavy sense of information overload from this one book alone. It is such a unique and precious resource, but I don’t know what to do with it. In the spirit of information sharing, I’ve wanted to create a website to upload research from my thesis and bits of my interview with my grandpa so that others searching for information about their ancestor might find a little more. However, the copyright for this book is strict and I don’t know how to contact the rights holders-Arct’s descendents. The following poem is from the book and was also written in a small notebook that my Grandpa made while at Stalag Luft I (covers from butter tins and pages from cigarette packages). I remember that he became choked up when he read it to me during our interview. 

High Flight by John Gillespie Magee Jr., 1922-1941

“Oh I have slipped the surly bonds of earth And danced the skies on laughter silvered wings, Sunward I’ve climbed and joined the tumbling mirth of sunsplit clouds and done a hundred things you have Not dreamed of—wheeled and soared and spun high in the sunlit silence. Up, up the long, delirious burning blue I’ve topped the windswept heights with ease Where never larks or even eagles flew, Hovering there I’ve chased the shouting winds Along the footless halls of air, And while with silent lifted mind I’ve trod the high untrespassed sanctity of space, Put out my hand and touched the face of God.”

1. Clooney, George (Producer & Director). (2014). The Monuments Men [Motion Picture]. United States: 20th Century Fox. 
2.  Heritage in Peril: Digital Approaches to Preservation. (n.d.). Retrieved October 20, 2019, from http://as.nyu.edu/ancientstudies/events/fall-2019/heritage-in-peril–digital-approaches-to-preservation.html
3.  Paul Collart. (n.d.). Retrieved October 20, 2019, from https://archnet.org/authorities/8232
4.  Palmyra: the modern destruction of an ancient city. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/ancient-art-civilizations/palmyra/v/palmyra-destruction
5.  Exhibition from the Archive of Paul Collart Includes Previously Unpublished Images of Palmyra | Aga Khan Documentation Center. (n.d.). Retrieved October 20, 2019, from https://libraries.mit.edu/akdc/2018/02/07/exhibition-from-the-archive-of-paul-collart-includes-previously-unpublished-images-of-palmyra/
6.  Society, National Geographic. (2013, April 8). Mauna Kea. Retrieved October 19, 2019, from http://www.nationalgeographic.org/media/mauna-kea/
7.  Mauna Kea. (n.d.) Office of Hawaiian Affairs. Retrieved October 19, 2019, from https://www.oha.org/maunakea/
8.  UNESCO Astronomy and World Heritage Webportal – Show entity. (n.d.). Retrieved October 19, 2019, from https://www3.astronomicalheritage.net/index.php/show-entity?identity=44&idsubentity=1
9.  Schwartz, Joan M. & Terry Cook. (2002). “Archives, records, and power: the making of modern memory,” Archival Science 2: 1–19.
10.  Arct, B. (1988). Secret Journal: Life In A World War II Prison Camp. Great Britain: Webb & Bower.


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Event Review: NYC Media Lab Summit

On September 26, 2019, I attended the NYC Media Lab Summit held in downtown Brooklyn. The mainstage program took place at the New York City College of Technology (City Tech CUNY) for the first half of the day. The second half of the day was dedicated to interactive demos and workshops and took place at both City Tech and the New York University (NYU) Tandon School of Engineering.

NYC Media Lab describes itself as dedicated to “driving innovation and job growth in media and technology by facilitating collaboration between the City’s universities and its companies” (About – NYC Media Lab, n.d.) Pratt Institute is part of NYC Media Lab’s consortium with goals “to generate research and development, knowledge transfer, and talent across all of the city’s campuses” (About – NYC Media Lab, n.d.), which also includes The New School, School of Visual Arts, Columbia University, NYU, CUNY, IESE, and the New York City Economic Development Corporation. Member companies of NYC Media Lab include Bloomberg LP, Verizon, The New York Times, and NBCUniversal, to name a few.

The Media Lab Summit held itself like a typical conference, where you check in to receive your name badge upon arrival and are treated to coffee and pastries. Then everyone takes their seats before the main program begins in the auditorium where the Executive Director of the program, Justin Hendrix, makes his welcome address and does introductions.

Innovation Panel discussion

Up first was the Innovation Panel, which featured speakers Yael Eisenstat, R. Luke Dubois, Desmond Patton, and Tony Parisi. The panel featured a mix of academics and professionals who all addressed the topic of artificial intelligence, or AI. It was interesting to hear that everyone agreed that AI is the future but that they all held concerns about whether it will be accessible to all. Another potential issue that was brought up in relation to AI is what seems like our current overdependence on data. One panelist raised serious concerns about this overdependence and worried whether this could lead to the complete disregard of an innate human characteristic, which is critical thinking. All panelists agreed that critical thinking is essential and sees it playing a key role throughout the use of AI and other technological advancements.

What I ultimately took away from this Innovation Panel was that critical thinking is needed now more than ever. I think we have always understood that critical thinking is crucial as it is what keeps us human. AI is capable of making decisions for us, but the ability to be able to critically think about the potential impacts of our decisions and asses our judgments remains entirely human. This emphasis on critical thinking reminded me of the Phoebe Sengers reading in which she also discusses machine culture but stresses that science and the humanities need “to be combined into hybrid forms” as “neither is sufficient alone” (Practices for Machine Culture, n.d.). Like the panelists, Sengers recognizes the strengths in both and how each can complement the other, especially in AI.

Next up were the showcases. The showcases were meant to present and demonstrate projects, prototypes, and startups created by students and faculty from NYC Media Lab programs. Two of the showcases that stood out to me the most were a subway accessibility app for the blind and a retina technology startup.

Access to Places presentation

Students from NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program created an app called Access to Places with the goal to make subway stations much more accessible for the blind. The app utilizes iOS’ text-to-speech voiceover technology to provide information such the location of entrances and exits, service delays or changes, and arrival and departure times. Notifications also help the blind to navigate around station layouts.

Retina Technologies presentation

Retina Technologies was formed by medical students at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. The startup aims to change the way people access ophthalmologists in both urban and rural areas. Through the use of virtual reality headsets, the startup hopes to increase access to ophthalmologists for those who cannot easily visit one in rural areas while also improving the patient experience for those in urban areas.

Access to Places and Retina Technologies both stood out to me the most because of the users that they were designing for. Instead of creating a product that catered to the majority of the population, they reached out to those with specific needs that often get neglected in the startup and tech conversations. I immediately thought of the Sasha Costanza-Chock paper on “Design Justice” and the discussion on who designers are actually designing for. The majority of startups and apps tend to assume the average user is able to access or use a product without any accommodations, much like how Costanza-Chock discusses that designers “assume” that “a user has access to a number of very powerful privileges” (2018). Visiting an ophthalmologist or getting onto the subway without any trouble are privileges that most designers tend to assume users have. Access to Places and Retina Technologies decided to instead focus on the needs of these specific user groups rather than create another app or startup that assumed they were just like every other user.

Many innovative and creative projects were demonstrated, and I was in awe over it all, but it was the discussions that were held that enlightened me. What I took to be the overall theme of the Media Lab Summit was accessibility and the continued mission to make this collaboration between media and technology available to all. I still believe that technology has this amazing potential to change and impact lives, but we must make it available to everyone to see it happen. The Media Lab Summit and our class discussions and readings only continue to highlight this necessity and how we as information professionals cannot simply ignore it as technology advances.

References:

About – NYC Media Lab. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://nycmedialab.org/about.

Costanza-Chock, S. (2018). Design Justice: towards an intersectional feminist framework for design theory and practice. DRS2018: Catalyst. doi: 10.21606/drs.2018.679

Sengers, P. (n.d.). Practices for Machine Culture: A Case Study of Integrating Cultural Theory and Artificial Intelligence. Retrieved from http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/usr/phoebe/mosaic/work/papers/surfaces99/sengers.practices-machine-culture.html.

Posted on by Jennifer Song 0

IBM Design Thinking Workshop Report

On Oct. 4, 2019, I attended a Design Thinking Workshop held by IBM CIO Design and Pratt Institute for Pratt students. The purpose of this workshop was to introduce the concepts of Design Thinking and conducting some applications on user experience(UX) design.

8 Facilitators from IBM CIO team in this event: Chelsea Calhoun (Content Designer), Dana Chang (Manager), Kelly McGowan (Visual Designer), Shannon Andrea (UX/UI Designer), Soo Yun Kim( Visual/UX Designer), Veronica Moyer (Visual Designer), Youn Lee (UX Designer).

Soo Yun Kim was the principal lecturer, and she started with an ice-breaking activity: attenders were asked to design an alarm clock in 3 minutes and displayed and introduced their works. In the second task, attenders were asked to design an alarm clock for waking people in the morning. This time, when people talked about their designs, they were more confident and spoke with more logic reasoning. This event led us to think about how to design and who we design for, which inspired more innovative outcomes.

 Discussed the definition of design with attenders, she declared that design was a discipline that required education, work, and practice to reach proficiency, demanded clarity of vision, blended science, and arts, entailed iteration with real users, and thrived with collaboration. After introducing the IBM company, she illustrated their CIO Mission, “We Make Work Better”: leading with design to drive simplicity and ease of use, engineering the systems that run the business, and innovating to transform the business. Design thinking was the key for them to achieve the mission. She elaborated that design thinking was a framework for approaching problems through collaborative activities. It required a focus on user outcomes, diverse and empowered teams, and restless reinvention. As they mentioned, these principles could guide them to see problems and solutions as an ongoing conversation. The interesting part of these principles was that they use an “infinite” symbol to represent a model Loop, a continuous cycle of observing, reflecting, and making. Repeating this process could help the design team to think about any design problem in multi-direction and through periods.

Design and develop process is always dynamic since the information in this world is transient, and people change their needs every second. Still, the design is key to people’s collective liberation, but most design processes today reproduce inequalities on the matrix of domination. Therefore, the idea of design thinking to collect diversity and repeat the Loop cycle with more participants with intersectionality involved could definitely empower the community, not merely on one single product.

The next part of the workshop was to let attenders practice design thinking through a task. We were offered with the problem to solve with design thinking, “Design a better way for students to find the right classes and professors”. Before we found a partner to start interviewing each other about our experience in choosing classes, we were offered several interview tips: 

  • Don’t suggest answers to your questions, 
  • Don’s be afraid of silence, 
  • Be aware of nonverbal cues, 
  • Stay on the same path of a question, 
  • Ask “WHY”. 

Those tips extracted from abundant field research experiences with ethics and techniques are very important. To get valuable results from research and interview, it’s essential to concern about the formation, conduct, and communication. Developing the proposal and conducting suitable behaviors are the foundations to build trust with and receive proper feedback from the interviewees.

For the interview, we ideated interview questions, paired up with another person, and interviewed each other in 15 mins. With the interviewing results we got, all attenders were separated into six groups. Each group got one IBM facilitator to help with building up the solution, and our group worked out the procedure with Kelly. First, we needed the empathy map to gather the ideas from the interview into four sections: say, think, does, and feels. During this process, the lecturer explained what made a good empathy map:

  • It is based on real research, 
  • It explores multiple user dimensions, 
  • It is verified with users or even co-created with them, 
  • It captures both the positive and the negative.

Based on those guidelines, we noted the top pain points on sticky notes and placed them on board. Then group the similar ones, we found some big ideas, the main concern, and pain points.  Next, we used the green and pink dot stickers to vote the most valuable and feasible one. To sort out the solution for that big idea, every group needed to discuss a scenario and storyboard it. Finally, each group should make a presentation to show the result. Our group focused on the pain point that new students hardly had access to class feedbacks from the fellow students, the big idea our group valued most, and made a storyboard of how a new student forum could help through Q&A, while other groups with their big ideas offered solutions like visualizing more professor information and providing the class syllabus and requirements more directly.

This workshop was short for students to finish all the steps and run out a solution, but it gave us an overall idea of how to use design thinking in the application. At the end of this 3-hour workshop, there was the question period. Dana Chang, the design manager reasserted the importance of design thinking not only in design but all through the industry. Also, she talked about the shift of the methods and techniques of research, design and develop, and the excellence of using qualitative research and quantitive research cooperating together with the addition of the new schism based on design thinking. Although those design methods are innovated through time, design thinking is always important. Other designers also shared their experiences in this design industry, and many of them had changed their positions once or twice. It seems that this industry is really dynamic and exuberant, and people are always willing to adjust to new challenges.

Through this workshop, I could understand design thinking in the context of fundamental principles of research, which collects the true needs of the target users. The research is a vital process to learn a certain topic you are working on, both in general and in detail. How to get the information now and in the long run is a problem that leads to the request of ethical jobs. Showing respect, asking for consents, and building trust should be assured if researchers want to protect an interview-friendly environment for both interviewees and interviewers.

Reference

  1. https://www.ibm.com/design/thinking/page/framework/loop.
  2. Costanza-Chock Sasha, “Design Justice: towards an intersectional feminist framework for design theory and practice”, 2017.
  3. PERCS, The Program for Ethnographic Research & Community Studies, “The Ethics of Fieldwork”.
Posted on by Yilan Ye 0

Event: “Apollo” at NYPL Performing Arts Branch

On Thursday, October 10th, I attended an event at the Performing Arts Branch of the New York Public Library called “Apollo.” The event was part lecture part film, and it was led by two leading scholars on dance, Alastair Macaulay and Robert Greskovic.

A little bit of background first. The ballet “Apollo” is a lesser-

known ballet. It’s an obscure work that is known for having very famous collaborators, Igor Stravinsky and George Balanchine. Both of these names are very recognizable in the classical music and ballet world, respectively. However, “Apollo” as a work is not. I personally had never heard of this particular ballet, and I consider myself to be pretty well versed in the world of dance. It premiered on April 1928 with original choreography by Adolph Bolm but was later reworked by Balanchine. Bolm’s choreography is pretty much usurped by Balanchine’s, and no one uses choreography that wasn’t originally created by Balanchine.

The story of the ballet is centered on, no surprise here, the god Apollo. Apollo comes to life and is greeted by three Muses, Calliope, Polyhymnia, and Terpsichore. Each of the Muses gives Apollo a different gift. They give him the gift of poetry, rhetoric, and dance respectively. They dance with him both as a group and individually.  At the end of the ballet, Apollo ascends back to Mount Olympus in the heavens with the Muses being left behind.

According to one of the presenters, Macaulay, this ballet is simultaneously about making art and the creation of art. It’s about the “growing up” of art. He talked in-depth about how in later iterations of the ballet, Balanchine would say that he wanted to get rid of the narrative entirely. Thus, in the production of the ballet with Mikael Barisnikov dancing the role of Apollo, he eliminated the Prologue section of the ballet and also changed the ending. According to MacCaulay’s lecture, Balanchine was apparently known for saying that in his mind, Apollo was always meant to be a work in progress.

So how does this fascinating obscure piece of dance fit into what we are dealing with as information professionals? For me, I found this event and piece of ballet history fascinating because of the way that the information about it was being cataloged and collected and later on, archived. Prior to this event, there was a three-day seminar with NYPL employees, the two men leading the event, and also some of the dancers who danced in the various productions that the show has been through throughout the years. Their information was collected via the archival video that was taken. The people who couldn’t be there at the seminar i.e. other dancers such as Mikael Barishnokov who contributed their information via one on one interviews with MacCaulay and Greskovic.

So the ultimate question is, how is all of this information being cataloged and then archived? I noticed before the lecture started, a video camera was set up in the back of the auditorium where the lecture was taking place. The employees running the lecture must have planned in advance for this archival footage to be taken. They must have wanted to save the presentation as a whole. However, how are the lecture itself and the interview material from the various collaborators being saved? For example, some people might not think it’s important to have the lecture notes that MacCauley wrote saved, cataloged and archived but some may. I personally would be interested in seeing those notes, but I know that many people wouldn’t. It relates back to some of

our earlier readings that dealt with archiving, such as Schwartz’s article, “Archives, Records, and Power.” The article deals with whoever is archiving the material at hand is the one with the power. If I was the one taking in this collection of information (video, lecture notes, PowerPoint slides), then I would ultimately have to create a narrative about the materials at hand. I would be able to organize the information in a certain way and make a certain narrative around the materials. Schwartz says,

“Whether over ideas or feelings, actions or transactions, the choice of what to record and the decision over what to preserve, and thereby privilege, occur within socially constructed, but now naturalized frameworks that determine the significance of what becomes archives.” (3)

In looking at this particular ballet and how these two scholars were recording what was important, I thought it was interesting that they chose certain images and certain video clips over others. I know that I clearly missed a bunch of material in the three-day symposium that took place weeks prior because we only saw short clips from it, but I do think it’s interesting on what was preserved and what was not. Obviously, this is a lesser-known ballet, but it has big important names in the dance and classical music world. If this was a lesser-known ballet with no big names attached, would it still be archived in as much detail? Would anyone care to have a three-day symposium on this material? I’m not really sure. Schwartz also says that “control of the archive – variously defined – means control of society and

thus control of determining history’s winners and losers.” (4) Would we ultimately classify this ballet into the winner category because these two dance scholars ultimately deemed it important to one, host a three-day symposium on and two, host a public lecture on it?

In conclusion, I feel that going to this lecture prompted me to think about a variety of issues in terms of being an information professional. It makes me think about how we’re archiving material and how we’re using it to move forward in our profession. I stand by my question of who wins here and who loses? Do we have an answer to what is getting saved, cataloged and archived or is it ultimately just random? I still feel that this ballet is one of the more obscure ones, and I know that I’m glad that I know about

it and its’ history but I’m not one hundred percent sure that I would choose to save the information about this ballet over another one that is also obscure but with less famous collaborators.

Sources

NYPL Performing Arts Lecture series. Attended on October 10th, 2019.

Sponsored by the NYPL Performing Arts Branch.

Cook, Terry & Schwartz J.M (2002). Archives, Records, and Power: The Making of Modern Memory. Archival Science. 1-19.

Apollo (ballet). In Wikipedia. Retrieved October 15th, 2019 from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_(ballet)

Posted on by Nicole Marconi 0