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Observation: The Bronx Museum of the Art’s Useless Machines Exhibition

Recently, I went to the Bronx Museum’s “Useless: Machines for Dreaming, Thinking, and Seeing” exhibition. The exhibition was created to highlight the opposite purpose of machines. Rather than creating machines to produce labor or fulfill a practical duty, the exhibition featured artists all over the world who constructed or depicted useless machines “to praise inutility.” The exhibition was a direct “reaction to the materialistic values promoted by capitalist society.” The artists created a collection of machines to stir dreams, feelings, critical thinking, and ironies. I thought this exhibition was interesting because of its purpose to create something useless and meaningless out of machinery. In class, we talked a lot about machine learning, artificial intelligence and how we currently live in a machine culture. And according to Sengers, machines are embedded into every aspect of our lives:

“We are no longer…simply supplied by machines; we live in and through them. From our workplaces to our errands about town to our leisure time at home, human experience is to an unprecedented extent the experience of being interfaced with the machine, of imbibing its logic, of being surrounded by it and seeking it out…” (Sengers, 2000, p.5).

Fernando Sanchez Castillo, Method on the Discourse, 2011, video screen shot

I thought that the exhibits at the museum highlighted what Sengers explained as the “shortcomings in technology.” The collection was a mixture of video, digital photographs, interactive sculptures and robotic machines behaving in curious ways. One exhibit by an artist named Fernando Sanchez Castillo displayed a video (pictured above) of a military robot that was originally designed to disarm explosives creating a painting in a slow, sarcastic manner. It was interesting how the artist inverted the function of the military robot by turning it into an artistic device. Technology is what we create it to be and as we rely on technology and machines to carry out dangerous or important tasks for us, the magnitude of its presence is felt even more when machines fail to (or are reprogrammed) complete the tasks we program it to do or they become useless. Transforming a machine so crucial as a bomb deactivating robot into a mere painting device changed the value of it as it was stripped of its former programmed task. This showed how machines can be used and recreated for other things than what it is originally meant for.

Unlike the artists, computer scientists are trained to identify these shortcomings and make solutions to those problems (Sengers, 2000, p.5). However, they are also blinded-sided by their myopic focus on improving machinery and not on the cultural context the machine is being made in (Sengers 2000). Thus, there can be unintended consequences of designing or creating a machine without discussing the need for it, the context it is being made in, and how it can be used in other ways if placed in a different environment.

I went to this particular exhibition with the intention to observe how visitors interact with the pieces within the space/ environment of the museum. But when I got to the museum, I found that visitors were not allowed to touch any of the art displays even though some of it incorporated interactive features for people to try out. I wanted to see if people were more inclined to go to the interactive exhibits which included displays of machines, video and robotic devices rather than the “non-hardware”/non-machinic ones such as photographs or drawings. Unsurprisingly, I found that people were more drawn towards the machine and robot displays. This brought to mind Norman’s Being Analog chapter, in which he explained why humans are inherently analog beings while technology and machines are created to be digital (2008).

According to Norman, “the world is not neat and tidy.” The world is naturally analog but with the advancement of technology and machines, people are forced to fit the world into digital models. Computers are logical and strict. Humans are unreliable and dramatic beings who are susceptible to making errors even if they are forced to behave in a machine-like way. Norman has described a world where technology destroys the mercurial essence of humans, but does not take into an account a world where both technology and humans are seamlessly integrated. Technology is no longer a separate entity of our world. AI and robots are becoming more human-like while humans are using advanced technology to enhance physical bodies and improve their health. In addition, AR devices are being created to integrate the real and the digital.

Algis Griškevičius, Toned photograph

We are constantly interacting with machines and technology that someday maybe we will become as one–a concept that artist Algis Griškevičius depicted in his photographs at the museum. The photograph showed a nude man with numerous tools stuck and screwed into his body as if he was a living magnet or a hybrid. Within the scope of the exhibition’s theme of depicting useless machines, I found this photograph very telling of the future we may live in. The tools on the man’s body seemed useless, placed in a illogical or unhelpful way. It’s there because it can be; they are tools without purpose. Soon, perhaps we will live in a future world where technology is not only all around us, but just another extension of our bodies.

The exhibition’s concept of “praising inutility” reminded me of how technology cannot be studied separate from its cultural context in which it is made in. Even though the exhibition wanted to depict the uselessness of technology and machines, I realized by doing just that they created meaning out of the displays by making it art. Thus, the machines and collection of pieces were useful in an artistic setting of a museum but they, of course, will not be useful in a non-artistic setting.

References:

Sengers, Phoebe. “Practices for a machine culture: A case study of integrating cultural theory and artificial intelligence”. Surfaces, vol. 1,  2000, p. 2-58. www.pum.umontreal.ca/revues/surfaces

Norman, Don. “Being Analog”. The Invisible Computer, 2008. https://jnd.org/being_analog/

Posted on by Olaide Ajomagberin 0

Observations of a User Experience MeetUp: UX For Change NY & The Immigrant Advocate Network

Group photo at the end of an energizing UX design hackathon.

On Monday, April 8, 2019 from 6 to 9 PM about 70 participants attended a workshop aimed to redesign how immigrants and advocates connect on immigrationlawhelp.org. The workshop was organized on MeetUp by the New York Chapter of UX for Change and was hosted by Convene (101 Greenwich St.). Additionally, members from The Six, an innovation and strategy consultancy, were present as well as team members from the client organization, The Immigrant Advocate Network.

According to the event invite, “One of their primary platforms, Immigration Law Help (www.immigrationlawhelp.org), strives to connect individuals with legal resources and advocates based on specific parameters such as detention centers served, type of immigration legal services, zip code, etc. While ImmigrationLawHelp.Org maintains the only national directory of its kind, there are opportunities to improve the current user experience and functionality. The vision is to provide a marketplace to connect users with legal providers leveraging dynamic content based on user-specific parameters.”

My intentions for attending the event was to learn more about how UX hackathon-type events are run and to observe the following:

  1. Structure of the event – Background, agenda, facilitators, participants, space, etc.
  2. Background research – Who did the research for requirements? What methods were used? How will designs be tested to ensure success with defined audience? Generally, how participatory was the target demographic engaged to gather requirements for improvements?
  3. How were teams divided and what tools were employed for the process?
  4. How were ideas/proposals generated within the group(s)?
  5. How were ideas presented?
  6. What was the level of success of the event and by what measure?

Upon arrival to the event, I was impressed how nice the space was and how many people were already there. Many attendees were talking and there was food and drinks so the atmosphere was very lively. The work tables had Post-Its, Sharpies, and stickers for each seat and a large projector screen displayed a PowerPoint presentation while portable whiteboards were scattered around the perimeter. There were some materials about current immigration issues posted in a couple places as a means, I assume, to generate empathy for the target users of the site we would be analyzing.

Our host, Kandis O’Brien, who co-organized the event spoke a bit about the mission of UX for Change, which “connects non-profit organizations with the UX community to raise awareness of how the discipline of User Experience Design can contribute to the goals of any organization.” Then she introduced a representative from the Immigrant Advocates Network (IAN) to speak a bit about their mission, products, and services, and to introduce the website for which there were seeking design help. Rodrigo Camarena, the Director of IAN, described how individuals who classify as DACA, people under temporary protective status, and asylum seekers are currently threatened by our current political climate and how IAN is a non-profit, legal, tech organization that seeks to connect their network of over 8,000 national members with immigrants who need legal and other types of help.

The website, immigrationlawhelp.org was created in 2011 and is not responsive, does not fully support all languages, does not meet accessibility standards, and is text heavy. IAN are pursuing a re-design that helps to increase empowerment and engagement among the immigrant site visitors and families who have a variety of languages and backgrounds. Rodrigo mentioned that, based on site analytics, it is mostly visited during business hours—with peaks during times of crisis, which signals that legal and non-legal advocates may be the primary users of the site.

After the introductions, each table of participants operated as a group and we began with created Lean Personas based on the information we received from the client. From that, we created “How Might We” Post-Its to try to narrow in on the key problem our group should aim to solve through design. Then we used the whiteboards to create a User Journey that might address the problem based on our Persona and HMW’s.

After the team work, we individually began a “Crazy 8’s” sketch session to ideate eight ideas for the translation of the User Journey into an interface. With that exercise complete, we each chose one of our ideas to then extend into three interfaces as a more developed feature. In our groups once more, we all voted with our stickers to decide which solution (or combination of interfaces) we would present as a group. We loaded images of our solutions into a Google Slide document and each group presented on their thought process and outcomes.

I was surprised at how similar each group’s solutions were given that we all had different personas (i.e. ‘immigrant’, ‘family member of immigrant’, ‘service organization’, or ‘legal advocate’). The client team members expressed gratitude for the help and seemed genuinely interested in the solutions that were presented. The organization was open to continuing the conversation after the event if anyone was interested in volunteering.

From a UX student perspective, I was encouraged that all of the activities we completed were mentioned (in some form) of Jentery Sayers’ “Before You Make a Thing” including: personas, user stories/journeys, wireframes, and paper prototypes. And the mission of IAN seems in line with the point about “resisting oppression” through engaging directly with the power of technology and to examine the “default settings” and for whom and by whom technologies were built.

Personally, I was impressed not just with how organized the entire event was, but also how diverse the UX participants were, which is encouraging in terms of how important participatory models for design should be in the field, as discussed in Sasha Costanza-Chock’s “Design Justice: towards an intersectional feminist framework for design theory and practice.” Having groups that are vested in helping non-profit organizations who have limited budgets while also helping students and other new to the UX field get experience and connect for future volunteer opportunities is a mutually beneficial situation and I’m glad for the experience.


References

Costanza-Chock, Sasha. (2018). “Design Justice: Towards an Intersectional Feminist Framework for Design Theory and Practice.” Proceedings of the Design Research Society 2018. https://ssrn.com/abstract=3189696.

Sayers, Jentery. (2018). “Before You Make a Thing: Some Tips for Approaching Technology and Society.” Retrieved from https://jentery.github.io/ts200v2/notes.html.

Posted on by Katelyn Mirabelli 0

Field Report: The Whitney Museum of Modern Art

On Friday, April 12th, I attended the Whitney Museum of Modern Art. The Whitney is an eight-floor contemporary art museum located in Manhattan, NY. Their focus is on presenting the full range of twentieth-century and contemporary art with emphasis on living artists. Aside from the exhibitions inside the museum, the building is beautifully designed. It is also located between the highline and the Hudson River. There is a view of the city or the river from any window or terrace. For the purpose of my observation, I was particularly interested on two artworks located on the sixth floor. These artworks seemed to be a combination of technology and art. 

Figure 1: “Baby feat. Kiera” by Ian Cheng

The first piece that I was found interesting was “Baby feat. Kiera” by Ian Cheng (See Fig. 1). In this piece, Cheng’s software enables audible conversation between three online chatbots whose voices then animate a swirl of debris. It does so by using Wi-Fi to query three different customize chatbots from different services to create the impression that they are “talking” to each other. The debris on the screen repeatedly coalesced and disintegrated, exhibits strange patterns on the screen. The chatbots are programmed to be “intelligent,” with basic learning abilities such as expanding their dialogue. However, because this piece queried responses from three different chatbots, the conversation was not cohesive. Instead, it was simply a series of words or sentences that did not have any particular flow. It was interesting to listen to some of thing that were said by these bots because sentences were incredibly complex.

In the article Fundamental Forms of Information, Marcia J. Bates provides a definition of information as being “all the patterns of organization of matter and energy,” which I thought was perfect for this piece due to the eccentric pattern of the debris as well as the incoherent conversation between the chatbots. This piece also prompted me to think of Don Norman and his idea of the human versus computers. In his essay, Being Analog, he says that “human languages still defies complete scientific understanding,” which I feel can be both supported and opposed by this piece. The chatbots in “Baby feat. Kiera” are programmed to be able respond to humans, learn from their responses, and expand their dialogue because of these responses. I feel that being able to learn from conversation is a humanistic element of conversation, which is emulated here. Moreover, the conversation that they are having is incoherent, representing a very non-human conversation. The visuals along with the audio represent artificial intelligence that is lifelike but also mechanistic, so I feel that the argument could go either way. 

Figure 2: “America’s Go No Talent” by Jonah Brucker-Cohen & Katherine Moriwaki

Another piece that I enjoyed was “America’s Got No Talent” by Jonah Brucker-Cohen and Katherine Moriwaki (See Fig. 2). This piece is a data visualization of Twitter feeds related to reality television shows such as American Idol, America’s got Talent, and America’s Best Dance Crew over a few years. The piece displays tweets that were sent and how much bias was gathered for each program based on retweets. By using horizontal bars in the shape of an American Flag, the visualization measures the success of TV shows linked to their social media presence. The artists for this piece successful connect the internet and the TV while clearly demonstrating the effect of a social media presence. 

I feel that this piece was relevant to our conversation on big data and algorithmic culture. I am not entirely sure of the method or tools that were used to make this visualization, but I know that it needs a complex sequence of computational analyses. The tweets that are used in this piece could be defined as “big data” due to the fact that it was a such a large volume of data that was growing exponentially in a short amount of time (“What is Big Data and Why it matters). 

There were several other pieces that incorporated technology as well but I choice to focus on “Baby feat. Kiera” and “America’s Got No Talent” because I found them most interesting. They were also the pieces that I spent the most time interacting with. I spent most of my observation simply observing and trying to understand the different patterns and conversations that were taking place in “Baby feat. Kiera.” I noticed that other museum attendees did not spend nearly as much time as I did with these pieces. Instead, it seems like attendees on this floor weren’t as interested in these pieces as they were pieces on other floors.

References:

Bates, M. J. (2006). Fundamental forms of information. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology,57(8), 1033-1045. doi:10.1002/asi.20369

Norman, D. (2008, November 07). Being Analog. Retrieved April 16, 2019, from https://jnd.org/being_analog/

What is Big Data and why it matters. (n.d.). Retrieved April 16, 2019, from https://www.sas.com/en_us/insights/big-data/what-is-big-data.html

Posted on by Devin Singh 0

The Optimistic Road Ahead

One section of The Road Ahead, with Cityscope (2018) in foreground

From December 14, 2018 to March 31, 2019, The Road Ahead: Reimagining Mobility at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum presented forty design projects, ranging from interactive platforms to urban design. Noting that “We are at an Inflection point”, the introductory text on the wall proposed that “the works presented here are meant to be catalysts for conversations about how we might live in the future” The attempt to start these conversations was framed by six questions that ran across the top of the exhibits including, most intriguingly for me, “How might shared data improve urban design?”

Having briefly visited the exhibit previously, I went in with a couple of questions at the ready myself (some of which I will combine to frame the comments below). The general goals were to observe both the exhibit itself and specific projects as environment and methods for gathering and presenting data.

In an attempt to observe a larger and broader population, I went on a pay-what-you-wish evening (and the second-to-last day of the exhibit), arriving early to review all exhibits and then stepping back to observe more of how they were experienced.

How did the exhibition itself collect and display data? How did an exhibit about mobility move visitors?

The visitor’s introduction to the data collection aspect of the exhibit actually started on the ground floor, with a display that asked “How was your commute to the museum?” The question was to be answered — and those answers collectively visualized — through the use of foam balls (Green = “Good”; Red = “Not too good”). This was the only interactive exhibit-specific wall graphic, but it did engage and prepare the visitor for the interactive world of touch screens and post-its in the projects two floors above.

However, this clever prelude was then undercut in the exhibit itself by framed infographics that seemed out of context or less effective than the projects exhibited. Some were predictive (Three Futures of Urban Transportation); some diagrammatic (Contested Curbs). Some were explanatory (How We Move); some illustrative (Letting go of the wheel). Collectively, they could have helped navigate a visitor through the exhibit, but instead they felt like projects of their own, ones that did not always rise to the level of the work with which they shared the space. Instead of directing traffic, they added to it, a congestion made all the more troublesome by the exhibit’s confusing start.

Upon arrival, and after reading the introductory text, viewers were presumably expected to move toward the opening section of the exhibit, which invites one to listen to experts and offer one’s own thoughts before diving into the projects on display. Instead, I watched visitor after visitor turn right to investigate a sound installation designed specifically for Cooper Hewitt called Sounds of the Future City (2018), which enticed them with bells, whistles and video projections, before depositing many of them out the other side — into the middle of the exhibit. This was a particularly unfortunate detour for an exhibit that states, just twenty feet from this misdirection: “Mobility is the movement of people, goods, services, and information.”

How did individual projects utilize data to tell a story? In an exhibit that aims to start conversations — that explores ‘convergence of data and technological innovations’  — to what degree do these presentations speak to and engage the visitor?

Here we come to the heart of the observation. These questions naturally overlapped in various projects and so will be addressed collectively here. Within such a dense and at times overwhelming show, the comments below will focus only on some of the projects that were most data-focused, sorting those into three areas I noted, with overlaps existing across them.

Data as Tool

As an awareness of the role of data becomes more prevalent in society, its visualization becomes an object of wonder, with the intermediary steps of the process presenting their own sense of “Look what they can do!”

The short video City Data Analytics: Modes of Travel and Commuter Walking Times (Zaha Hadid Architects, Habidatum, 2017) from the Walkable London Exhibit showed a clear visualization of data relevant to pedestrian and other metropolitan traffic. It proved a point, established patterns, but did not offer a specific ‘solution.’

The same might be said of City Scanner (MIT Senseable City Lab, 2018), a congregation of six sensors that sits atop the cab of a municipal garbage truck, gathering six kinds of data that are then visualized to show patterns and occurrences. The “think of what we could do with this” mentality was evident in the last line of its description: “City Scanner could be used to help inform decisions about public health, security, and overall better services for citizens.” Could be.

What differentiated the Los Angeles Mobility Data Specification (LADOT/ITA, 2018), however, was that this video actually spoke to how this ‘neat tool’ of data, in the form of a common vocabulary and standard, shared in real time as a software platform, could be used to efficiently manage issues of changing street capacity and public safety. This was a tool in use.

Data as Assurance

If the exhibit had a project that seemed the most fascinating to the audience the evening I visited, it was The Moral Machine (2016), an online tool created by the Scalable Cooperation Group at the MIT Media Lab to gather data related to human decisions as to which lives should be saved by a driverless car in various scenarios; a decision that was often made by one of a pair of visitors that commentated on each others’ judgments and processes:
“This is so funny… They die….”
“That was you. That was everyone else.”
“I don’t want to kill a cat…”
“This one you shouldn’t have to think about. Just kill the dog!”
And the almost unsettling: “I love judging…”

‘Assurance’ may not seem quite the right word for an interface that presents one with moral decisions, but at the heart of the project is the assurance that we are speaking with, and gathering data from, people ‘just like you’ as we make decisions about these autonomous vehicles.

Some issues arise at the end, when the machine evaluates your decisions and states whether or not a characteristic such as gender “matters a lot” in your decisions, when it cannot truly know, based on the limited data set. (It is worth noting that the original online version does offer more disclaimers, as well as a follow-up questionnaire asking one to explain their reasoning.)

The complement to all this judging was the Sensor Visualization video (Waymo, Google Creative Labs, Framestore, 2018), a very effective presentation that explains and visualizes how Waymo’s self-driving cars ‘see’ objects, pedestrians, lights and other factors to make one’s riding experience stress- and accident-free. Safe, clean projections of paths and labels for speed and distance from the car assure the viewer that Waymo has the data and as such has everything under control. It offers an assurance that there is measurement going on behind the scenes.

Data as Play

While the Moral Machine can feel like a particularly challenging game of Would You Rather?, Cityscope (City Science Group, MIT Media Lab, 2018) was Lite-Brite with building blocks, inviting viewers to redistribute structures on a street grid to visualize two possibilities of traffic density (shared vs owned driverless cars) on city streets. It was fun to move the structures around and note the changes, but it must be noted that despite its promise, and obvious ability to draw interest, Cityscope appeared to fail in communicating its intended message. This was one of those cases where the label for the project was behind the viewer. So everyone wants to play with it, but few understand it. This was exacerbated by the unfortunate choice of red (owned) and green (shared), which already tilts one toward preferring the latter, with the red definitely feeling like an indicator of intensity. All of this could be summed up in an exchange I witnessed at the table:
“Do you think red means…?”
“It’s congestion. Or something….”

Part of the ‘vehicle inspiration wall’

In contrast, The Future of Automobility (2014, 2017) from IDEO brought Design Thinking into the exhibit as a means of presumed research. This project invited visitors to contribute their ideas via Post-Its to a ‘vehicle inspiration wall.’ A kind of ‘free work,’ it excited the spirit of play and brainstorming in many visitors, who drew pictures and layered Post-It upon Post-It (ignoring the walls precisely drawn grid) with ideas fanciful and serious (e.g. ziplines; BAN ALL CARS).

So while acting as a tool and providing assurance, our interaction with data (whether in collection or review) can also be fun, which is a great way to engage visitors who might not otherwise consider these issues.

A Contrast

Of course, whether functioning as a tool, an assurance or a game, all of these projects were Good.

That is to say: collectively, The Road Ahead was largely about the solutions — or rather the possible solutions. It presented the problems of the world as mountains to be climbed through data and design and asked “How might we…?” In the terminology of Dan Geer shared in Terms of Service, the show’s “Tomorrow Questions” (Keller & Neufeld 8) are what-ifs of potential; “What will I gain?” Not “What will I lose?”

But, what if one combined the Moral Machine and Waymo, identifying certain members of society — those who ‘matter less’ — as it makes decisions?

The introductory text to the exhibit states “no one really knows where these mobility transformations will take us…” This is true. Before making a thing, Jentry Sayers asks us to envision “two dramatically different scenarios: one where the results are ostensibly positive, and one where the results are ostensibly negative.” (Sayers) This exhibit is only the first half of that equation. And if Cathy O’Neil, in defining ‘Weapons of Math Destruction’ speaks to the “authority of the inscrutable” which attempts to obfuscate and force acceptance (O’Neil), an environment such as The Road Ahead works through design and interactivity to make it more visible, providing, perhaps, an authority of the genuine.

It’s difficult not to look at an exhibit such as this and see in all these streets and cars the drawings from Terms of Service of car trackers and insurance premiums, pedestrian sensors and the internet of things — the connecting of dots from or by even the most (seemingly) innocuous, or even beneficial of sources to troubling ends. (Keller & Neufeld 13, 15, 23)

Yet in a world where suspicions of those connections are easier and easier to raise, The Road Ahead suggested a smoother ride than much of what we have been reading recently; an optimism and a welcome contrast to the data harms and big data that we know are the underbelly or other side of much of this technology. It offered assurances, tools, and a little bit of the play that makes any future seem a little more creative, and a little more promising.

– Michael Kelly, Info 601, Professor Chris Alen Sula

References:
–  Keller, Michael & Josh Neufeld. (2015). “Terms of service: understanding our role in the world of big data.” Al Jazeera America. http://projects.aljazeera.com/2014/terms-of-service/#1.
– O’Neil, Cathy (2015). “Weapons of math destruction,” Personal Democracy Forum 2015. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdCJYsKlX_Y.
– Sayers, Jentry (2018). “Before You Make a Thing: Some Tips for Approaching Technology and Society.” https://jentery.github.io/ts200v2/notes.html  

Posted on by Michael Kelly 0

Field Report – Exploring the Morris Museum

For my observation, I decided to go to the Morris Museum in Morristown, New Jersey to observe their current exhibit titled “Pen to Paper: Investigating Famous, Historical Letters.” When I saw this current exhibit online, I figured this would be the perfect exhibit to talk about the preservation of these letters and what this exhibit tried to tell the world about the famous people who wrote them. With that goal in mind, I went to the Morris Museum to view the exhibit. However once I arrived I realized that the museum also had a “traveling exhibit” about music boxes from the Guinness collection, which I found far more interesting.

One of my favorite pieces from this collection was the Plerodiénique Sublime Harmonie Cylinder Music Box and Writing Desk (pictured below).

Another one of my favorite pieces was the Hall Clock with Compound Music Movement.

What interested me about this part of the exhibit is that they showed a lot of artifacts that had dual purposes, such as the music box that is also a desk and the clock that is also a music box. It was interesting to see that these items were created to have more than one function.

Another aspect that I enjoyed about this exhibit was that it encouraged the viewer to interact with the collection. There were display stands that had a hearing device and buttons that the viewer could press to hear what music from the presented time would sound like.

There was a wooden roller set out with pins. This was how songs used to be played during the time that these music boxes were created. It is was explained that each pin represented a note and each roller represented a song.

There was even a game that could be played at the end of the exhibit. For this game, you would put your hand on a speaker and try to feel the different vibrations that the different sounds made.

One of the reasons why I enjoyed this part of the museum so much was that it showed a time where technology was much different than it is now. These music boxes are major technological advancements when they were first created in the 1700’s-1800’s, even though in current society music boxes may not be considered a technology to a general viewer.

While touring the museum, I was surprised how small all the other exhibits were compared to the Guinness collection. I think this showed the emphasis that the museum wanted to place on this collection. I believe this is also the reason why I was much more fascinated with the Guinness collection over the other exhibits.  But even though the other collections were smaller, it seemed that the museum still made a conscious effort to show the comparison of older technology to newer technology.

In the picture below, you see that the museum showed how writing has changed throughout time in their Paper to Pen collection. When I was reading Jentery Sayers article on technology throughout time, I couldn’t help but think about the collections that I saw at the Morris Museum. Originally I thought about the music boxes and how they could be considered “technology instrumentalism”m which means that they were a neutral technology. But then I realized that the Pen to Paper collection could be an example of “technology determinism” which is technology used for social progress. As Sayer mentioned most of these pieces from these two collections would be considered “symbols of progress, modernity, efficiency, and mastery over nature” (Sayers).

In this picture it shows elements that could have been used to make different colors of ink that would be used to write or draw, it shows a few ink wells, different types of quills and calligraphy pens, a typewriter, laptop, and cellphone.  As the picture implies, these all became means of communicating. Just in this one picture, we can see the progress and change of technology throughout time.

What I found most interesting about this exhibit was its incorporation of current technology into the collection itself. It almost felt like the current technology used for this collection overshadowed the idea of the collection which was looking at old letters from famous people in history. I say this because in the room, just below one of the displays, there were two pairs of headphones and IPads that were showing a short film. Then on the wall, there was a television that told about the making of quill pens and how society portrays old quill pens wrong in movies since most of the time the hair of the feather is cut off to make it easier to hold. It just seemed like the focus was mostly on the current technology since the letters left a lot of white space on the wall, while the television area took up a lot more space and the museum had changed the color of the wall to draw attention to it (which you can see in the picture with the display of past/current technologies that is above). Also, the short film and the television were both a form of white noise in the room, which grabbed my attention and probably the attention of a general viewer, which took my attention away from the famous letters.

In the end, it was nice to see the different exhibits that the Morris Museum had on display. It was interesting to see their way of incorporating technology into their exhibits as a way to attract the audience to engage with their collections. Because of my experience with museums and my interest in continuing to work in a museum, it was interesting and educational to see how other museums use technology. 

References:
Sayers, Jentry. (2016). “Technology” in Keywords for American Cultural Studies,” ed. Bruce Burgett & Glenn Hendler. NYU Press. http://keywords.nyupress.org/american-cultural-studies/essay/technology.

Morris Museum. Morris Museum. morrismuseum.org/.

Posted on by Hannah Bauer 0

Practical Learning and Identity in an International Context

A field report by Peter K. Defenderfer

I attended a few panels at the Early Child Development Symposium at Scandinavia House, where I already work, held in conjunction with Sarah Lawrence college. The event’s full title is actually quite long, and includes a clause at the end about expanding the Nordic-American dialogue on early education. So, in the foundation’s terms this was not a “rental” event for them, but the panels were not exclusively reflective of issues centered in the Nordic countries either. One speaker with many perspectives was from northern Italy, another Danish and Turkish, and some American. It was general in international connections, about migrants, identity, pyschology and their negotiating in practical and positive teaching. 

I gathered a lean in almost all the panels (roughly three or four total, in full or in part) toward practical learning, that is deconstructing essentially xenophobic biases, and toward inclusive and possibly origin-revamped image maintenance. Early in an anthropology class, where I was my first semester of college, you might quickly learn the terms (and difference between) ‘cosmogony’ and ‘cosmology.’ When studying a culture as we could parallel in any classroom setting a cosmogony or origin story would seem constant and important. Just as say the Aborigines traditionally represented almost all abstract facets of their life through a concept called the Dreaming, which they represent in art, it might seem unfair that other cultures are grazed with narratives that are not as vibrant or affirming. The presentation of origin stories and heartened images in multicultural settings via somewhat autonomous and probably always equivocating teachers seems to be acknowledged as a point of constant debate. 

And somewhat collusive with diffusing threadbare and inconsistent narratives, the stated goals of the Sarah Lawrence Early Childhood Development Center—long name, but from what I can tell it’s basically a preschool and kindergarten school with an research branch—have much to do with practical learning; and this emerged as one of the encompassing if not satisfactory lights at the end of the tunnel to most of what the panelists discussed. The mission statement near the top of the Sarah Lawrence center’s website for example readily dishes anecdotes of having children make applesauce in an age when they might otherwise be adept with a microwave, etc. But aside from flippant examples, the question of the right level, and nature, of stimulation and identity presentation feels compelling.

There were two Sarah Lawrence students (undergraduates, I guess) helping with the event and also a table outside the main auditorium covered in academic papers from the center’s past researchers or teachers, bound in soft color covers and often with a sub-labeling “occasional paper series.” Not all these papers were terribly recent either. They were freshly printed for this event but some were from 1999 or 2000. To make a few notes about attendance and composure, it was mostly all women in the auditorium (audience varying slightly panel to panel) and this was even acknowledged at one point, one of the women said something like “we’re all women here” in a tone and impression I guess would call maternal since other comments were made about mothers’ instincts for these issues, but “thank you to any men who are here.” Aside from that there was a chatty, inclusive and rarely slightly feisty tone to the audience comments. With regard to the two Sarah Lawrence students assisting, I did catch one memorable exchange between them and one of the Scandinavia House building managers. The in-house restaurant had made generous and upscale box lunches for the entire event, including vegetarian options, but the two Sarah Lawrence students claimed there was hardly anything in these for them, and asked if their outside lunches could be paid for because one of them was vegan and the other was gluten-free. The building manager with lightly tugged patience said the restaurant would be able to handle it. I needed to include this because I don’t know how it is either relevant or irrelevant, and Joan Didion wouldn’t be remiss to include it. 

The event’s deplorable title

One of the consistent themes I certainly connected with was the role of pathogenic environmental factors, or harm, overstimulation and chaos, be them either racially-originated or from circumstantial direct and indirect human factors. This seemed essentially like one of the points that branched to multiple subjects throughout the symposium, such as migrant and refugee identities and media coverage, and government intervention. For example some time was spent on the role of media in refugee coverage. Gary Evans, an ‘environmental and developmental psychologist’ from Cornell, was talking about human interest stories as portraying refugees as in need of support, which is claimed as a turnoff to “western” people, but moreover I had the impression of a confluence of both image and identity maintenance with domestic environmental factors as incredibly predictive and affecting of children, or on people any of age for that matter. 

One way to state the connection it seems to me is they are both curated, ‘soft’ factors in way—not inherent, and not a specific teaching instruction that could be theorized about in an either successful or unsuccessful gauge. Evans also mentioned IQ tests (setting aside the problems with that) as less predictive of grades than pathogenic environmental factors. The question of what is an inherent trait or temperament practically feels like it could be connected to direct teaching styles, or rather intended learning outcomes, while the effect of implied outcomes and environmental impositions that are not intentional in the same way (dysfunctional family members, stimulation breaching to chaos and anxiety) mount a second, comparably invisible force which holds much to bear on productivity.

Similar to my idea of implied image and environmental factors as invisible, Evans from Cornell commented on the role of “involuntary attention” as integral to motivation for voluntary attention or rather intentionally instructed tasks. The image on the involuntary attention slide was a typical fountain the plaza of some building. Evans suggested that this didn’t require the same kind of attention as an instructed task, but a child’s ability or freedom to engage with it, as an environmental factor but one that isn’t overbearing, was facilitative of them being able to tackle an intended task more at will, or less emerging from a place of clutter. 

This stretch of that panel also allowed them to reemphasize motor skills as the obvious and crucial way we learn and become familiar with the world. As tooling with objects around the house (provided they are safe) is substantiating, so too we might gather is the freedom to loosely focus on a fountain, or whatever else is innocently present in urban or natural settings. 

And with regard to deconstructing these other, human-implied factors, it seems to me to reach the core concerns of the Information Science field: Intersectionality, design, and also I would say a crucial and structural address of the question “what is productivity?” or “what is creativity?” Along with certain design approaches, a reasonably abstract answer to that starts to feel as predictive and perhaps in a better and more open way than unattended implications from existent axises people may just incline to rely on. 

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Activity Theory in Young Users of Digital Technology: an observation of the iGeneration

Introduction

A field study observing the digital interaction of young users was conducted on a second-generation, three-year-old boy of Afro-Indo Caribbean descent. The observation was conducted in the observer’s home.

The purpose of the study was to better understand the intuitive use of young children. How do they know to navigate and interact with features as they do? How do they learn these behaviors in unsupervised environments? How are their behaviors reinforced and applied across devices?

Many of these questions were a result of the above curiosities and a desire to better understand the cognitive processes at play as noted by Kuhlthau:

“A model representing the user’s sense-making process of information seeking ought to incorporate three realms of activity: physical, actual actions taken; affective, feelings experienced; and cognitive, thoughts concerning both process and content. A person moves from the initial state of information need to the goal state of resolution by a series of choices made through a complex interplay within these three realms (MacMullin & Taylor, 1984). The criteria for making these choices are influenced as much by environmental constraints, such as prior experience, knowledge, and interest, information available, requirements of the problem, and time allotted for resolution, as by the relevancy of the content of the information retrieved” (p. 362).

The structure of this field report was a combination of interview and observation. The purpose structure was due primarily to the subject’s age.

Disclosure

The subject of the observation is the observer’s nephew. Alluded to below, one of the many reasons why this observation was informally conducted was due to general curiosity. This initial curiosity began when noticing the subject’s use of mobile devices but, most recently, when he began sending nonsensical messages. The messages were initially thought to have been a prank by the subject’s mother but upon further inquiry, and frequent occurrences, the messages were a combination of drawn shapes or autocompleted phrases that were illogically constructed.

Screenshot of chat messages sent between the subject and the study's author.

Observations within the scope of this study included 1) how interaction changed or remained the same across an iPhone and iPad 2) interaction with specific features and implicit restrictions imposed on the user (e.g., inability to read or write).

“Motivation for doing the work”

According to “The Ethics of Fieldwork” by PERCS: The Program for Ethnographic Research and Community Studies – Elon University, listing motivations for conducting such studies better align the researcher with the outcome of the intended study and the benefits to the research field as a whole.

For many reasons, this study was not formally conducted. However, there are two reasons worth noting within the scope of this report. The first reason is due to the little experience the observer possessed in field studies containing child subjects. Leveraging practices from the readings within the study resulted in applying generalized techniques and procedures intended for adult subjects to a child subject.

Outlined later in greater detail, this posed many issues as one would expect the application of techniques and procedures reapplied in very different circumstances. However, motivation for pursuing this study prompted an attempt and a review of not only this study but also the review of unique requirements for child subjects. Hence, the second reason why the observation was not formally conducted: to better understand at what scale technology impacts early childhood development.

Possible Harms: skewed results due to the misuse of techniques and procedures.

Possible Benefits: generated interest to pursue, rectify, and advance this study.

Techniques

General tasks were assigned:

  1. Interact with a mobile feature
  2. Find and watch your favorite YouTube video
  3. Play an educational game
  4. Play a non-educational game
Subject playing the mobile app game "Grom Skate" on an iPhone.

As the subject worked through each task, some intervention and rewarding were required. Having known the subject, the tasks created were short in length–sufficient enough for possible naps or breaks–and the entire observation spanned across several hours. Snacks were rewarded for good behavior and for completing a task without interruption.

After completing the above tasks, the subject was closely observed to document any behavior which didn’t occur while completing those tasks.

Questions and notes from the observation

  • Activity Theory: in-practice
    • How would his actions change if the technology changed as Nardi claims, “Activity theory holds that the constituents of activity are not fixed but can dynamically change as conditions change” (p.38)?
  • Attention span: what does his actions say about the effect of technology on youth users’ ability to focus?
    • Never completes viewing of videos and tends to navigate to either the search bar or another video within 30 seconds to 2 minutes of viewing.
    • Viewing videos of greater interest last longer than 2 minutes but are never fully completed.
    • When a task was issued, the subject wanted to continue on longer for all tasks but the educational game. For the educational game, the user became frustrated unless there was sufficient guided intervention.
    • Voyeurism and the gaming culture: the subject’s attention was only kept when watching YouTube videos of others playing videos games or playing with toys.
  • Distributed Cognition (Nardi, p. 38): pattern recognition?
    • Participant cannot read nor sufficiently write. However, he is able to search YouTube videos he’s previously watched but is unable to search newly watched videos. To return to new videos, he taps the arrow icon to return to the video.
    • How he searches is by typing in the first few letters he remembers from the videos he’s views frequently. For retained previous search results, he reviews the list and selects which is most recognizable. He watches and then returns to the search bar if the video isn’t what he wanted. If the video is what he was looking for, he scrolls to the recommended videos to find new content and selects those items or searches content from the same channel of the video he’s currently viewing.
  • Signifiers and affordances
    • Participant understood the significance of the hamburger menu, toggles, touchscreen interface features such as swiping, device volume control and locking mechanisms, and other navigational signifiers such as the back/forward and up/down arrows.
  • Interaction
    • iPhone and iPad
      • YouTube and either a mobile app/feature.
    • No major differences in interaction other than the subject’s level of comfort and which device he preferred to use when.
      • The iPhone was generally used when sitting up.
      • The iPad was generally used when laid back.
  • Intervention
    • The study would be better conducted in a more controlled environment/location, without the mother nearby and by an individual with a balanced relationship.
    • Observer’s relationship with the subject was unbalanced. This required swapping between the mother as an instructor to guide him through exercises.
      • With the mother, the subject was at ease and felt less intimidated by the instructions and how they needed to be carried out.
      • The subject preferred guided instructions as opposed to unguided instructions. While guided instructions were more successful with the observer, they weren’t as successful as with the mother.
      • The subject enjoyed general instructions with sufficient freedom to navigate and course-correct by intuition than delegated navigational instructions.

Conclusion

The above study would do well with well-controlled environment, an unrelated observer with sufficient trust, and a well-vetted plan of tasks.

Additionally, prior to an observation containing child subjects, it would be helpful to know positive and negative triggers, learn what they like and what they dislike, review popular content for that age group and test the level of interest on the subjects, provide ideal rewards for completed tasks, and create a balance reward system.

Overall, this observation did provide an opportunity to analyze the subject’s behavior more closely and to develop a thoughtful hypothesis. Nardi explains that “activity theory recognizes that changing conditions can realign the constituents of an activity” (p. 38).

My original assumption that technology results in specific behaviors in young users has shifted to a hypothesis which accounts for the bidirectional relationship between any user and technology: technology reinforces or redistributes behaviors in young users which may predict their usage of other technologies and platforms, and related social behaviors.

References:

Kuhlthau, Carol C. “Inside the Search Process: Information Seeking from the User’s Perspective”, “Journal of the American Society for Information Science 42(5): 361–371. https://ils.unc.edu/courses/2014_fall/inls151_003/Readings/Kuhlthau_Inside_Search_Process_1991.pdf

McGrath Joseph E. “Methodology matters: doing research in the behavioral and social sciences”. https://lms.pratt.edu/pluginfile.php/876402/mod_resource/content/0/mcgrath-methodology%20matters.pdf

Nardi, Bonnie A. “Studying Context: A Comparison of Activity Theory, Situated Action Models, and Distributed Cognition”. https://lms.pratt.edu/pluginfile.php/876415/mod_resource/content/1/nardi-ch4.pdf

PERCS: The Program for Ethnographic Research & Community Studies, “The ethics of fieldwork”. Elon University. http://www.elon.edu/docs/e-web/org/ percs/EthicsModuleforWeb.pdf

Wilson, T. D. (2000). “Human information behavior.” Informing Science 3(2): 49–56. https://www.ischool.utexas.edu/~i385e/readings/Wilson.pdf

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Cultural Production & Social Movements: Exploring the Interference Archive

The word interference typically has negative connotations; in today’s capitalist landscape it can invoke the disruption of efficiency and streamlined workflow. In the context of activism, interference is necessary for dismantling oppressive structures. The Interference Archive in Brooklyn operates under this ethos: “to use the collection as a way of preserving and honoring histories and material culture that is often marginalized in mainstream institutions.”  Their standards align with ML Caswell’s idea of archival representation—as posited in “’The Archive’ Is Not an Archives: On Acknowledging the Intellectual Contributions of Archival Studies”—as “an ongoing collaborative process that welcomes diverse input, not an end-product (such as a finding aid) that presents an authoritative or definitive voice” (Caswell, 10).

Founded in 2011, the archive is located in an unassuming gallery space at the intersection of Park Slope and Gowanus. It is an entirely open-access, open-stack archive, meaning that anyone from the public is free to enter during operating hours and browse the endless shelves of ephemera. For the easily distracted and endlessly curious like myself, the space is a dream. There are flat file shelves of posters, newspapers, stickers, buttons, and pamphlets from various activist movements, as well as a whole library of books and records in the back, and a shared work area with the independent publishing company Common Notions. The archive is open four days a week and is entirely volunteer run. Whoever is staffing at a given moment acts as a de-facto catalog, in addition to assisting in collection processing, stabilizing, and creating finding aids.  

One of the first boxes that I browsed through contained records of anarchist infoshops from the Beehive Collective, an anarchist group located in Washington DC in the 1990s. In addition to their open stacks, the Interference Archive also curates exhibitions open to the public. A collection of Australian political posters from 1979 to 2019 is currently hanging in the front hall. The posters run the gamut of environmental activism campaigns to art festivals. The next exhibition, also posters, will be curated in partnership with The Poor People’s campaign, an organization for income equality founded by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

I had the fortune of being able to wander the Interference archive—no appointments are necessary—and speak to one of its founders, Kevin Caplicki. Kevin, whose background is actually in graphic design elaborated on the accessibility fostered by the archive. “Our collection policy is anything that’s produced in multiples, via grassroots social movements, that communicates their demands. The materials are international on scale and the idea is to provide a public space where all of these materials can be accessed by anybody because we, as a counter-institution, to engage with this material to understand radical history.” His description also brought to mind John Gehner’s hope for the future of libraries, “The promise of the social exclusion/social inclusion framework is that we don’t have to dwell on one particular aspect of a person or community—their income, age, gender, race, ability level—but simply on the fact that many people are forced to live on the margins and cannot participate in society as equals. Remedies are rarely immediate or easy, but libraries are well-equipped to do more and better” (Gehner, 45).

In the current political landscape, the archive serves as a space of dynamic conversation, where ephemera collected from past movements can enrich activism today. “We want these materials to inspire people to reproduce these kinds of resistance and organizing,” Kevin says. “Ideally, browsing the archive will inspire people to get organized now or create graphics now. Hopefully we can progress to a world that we want to live in.”

Kevin also elaborated on the manifold challenges that come with maintaining an entirely volunteer run community archive. For one thing, only a small portion of the archive is digitized just because resources for that equipment and manpower are limited (the archive is entirely donation based and community supported as well). “Labor and time are the biggest limitations. We do have monthly sustainers that donate that covers overhead costs.” As a horizontally run space, there are different groups that run different projects, but there is always a shortage of volunteers.

The archive often gets researchers, which Kevin says is a good excuse to figure out new points of access to the archive. The process of working with researchers usually starts by finding out what topics they are interested in, if they are interested in working with different formats. From there, the volunteer and researcher will just start pulling boxes and exploring.

“We try and find different new ways to create finding aids to guide people through the materials. As a staffer, I am here to go on the adventure of exploring the archive with visitors.”

The space itself is meticulously organized. I was able to look through a finding aid of posters, organized in flat file cabinets in the back of the archive. “We want people to be able move from specific to general and vice versa whenever they need to,” Kevin says of the archive’s finding aids. On the poster finding aid, the posters are arranged into folders, which are listed by subject and geographic location. There are also finding aids for documents, stickers, and buttons.

The staff is a mixture of archivists, librarians, artists, activists, and others from the community. When I arrived, a group was in the process of stabilizing issues of the Globe from the 1960s. Some used gloves to handle the papers.

The space is truly dynamic: in addition to exhibitions, the archive also features film screenings, workshops, panel discussions, and can serve as a political organization space. As I left, I immediately began looking forward to when I could return again. The archive is always in need of volunteers and a simple email is all you need to get started. There are no library science or archive work prerequisites. In a neighborhood of rapid gentrification, the Interference Archive stands out as elevating the communities that have been overlooked in development.

Citations

Caswell, ML. “Archives on Fire: Artifacts & Works, Communities & Fields.” Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture, vol. 16, no. 1, 4 Aug. 2016, pp. 1–21.

Gehner, John. “Libraries, Low-Income People, and Social Exclusion.” Public
Library Quarterly, vol. 29, no. 1, 2010, pp 39-47.

By Sarah Goldfarb, Info 601-01 (Structured Observation Assignment)

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Observation at the Whitney Museum of American Art – Programmed: Rules, Codes and Choreographies in Art, 1965-2018

(Photo credits: Christopher Ku, Instgram: cawriskoo)

On March 29th 2019, I visited this exhibit and was transfixed by the main installation, which is a floor to ceiling panel of television sets. It is important to note that when I visited the exhibit, the museum was also showcasing its final weekend of their Andy Warhol exhibit. There was also an organized protest that was taking place at 7pm during the museum’s pay-as-you-wish period. The museum was jam packed with ticket buyers, members, and security staff. Although it was a high capacity evening, my access to the museum’s Programmed exhibit was smooth and calm.

The content in this exhibit celebrates art through programmable codes (or instructions) and how these codes can be used to manipulate the artists’ medium (computerized program or image sequence). All of the pieces in this exhibit were created through various types of computer programs, which were used to establish the structure and color of the piece. They are grouped in one of two sections: “Rule, Instruction, Algorithm”, which focuses on the rule-based conceptual art practices prior to digital art technologies and “Signal, Sequence, Resolution”, which focuses on the coding and manipulation of the moving image. Walking through the exhibit it was hard for me to differentiate between these two groups since nearly every piece has some sort of tech-based manipulation applied to it.

This exhibit is very open and full of content.  Navigating the exhibit can be overwhelming because there was music playing from the main attraction, Nam June Paik’s Fin de Siecle II (pictured above) and other installations around it. Adding to the noise from the installations are the human noises produced by the visitors and employees. I also noticed many people gravitated towards the multimedia content more so than a piece that did not openly appear to have a tech component to it.

Photo credits: Whitney Museum of American Art

Tilted Plane (pictured above) is a great example of one installation receiving more “people time” than other pieces. I think a big part of why this installation attracted more visitors than others is because of how “instagrammable” it looked. Jim Campbell created this piece in 2011 to project a two-dimensional image into a three-dimensional space. To do this, he placed modified LED lights at specific locations on a circuit board to mimic pixels in a low-resolution display. The viewer would enter at the spot Whitney staff has sectioned off as the entrance, which allows you to see the initial sight of birds taking off and landing. But as the viewer moved along, the image becomes distorted, and random, creating the illusion that you are no longer looking at a specific thing, but something abstract.

Being immersed in Tilted Plane not only gave me a serious case of dizziness (a warning sign was placed outside the installation about this) but also immediately reminded me of Bates (2003) and her discussion on natural and represented information. According to Bates, these forms of information allow for organization of knowledge and representation of this knowledge through other means. When applied to how the pieces in this exhibit was created, I can’t help but think about the process in which each artist came up with their initial concept (encoded information), their process of creating such pieces (embodied information), and the completion or exhibiting of their piece (exosomatic information).

Another piece from the exhibit that I found interesting is The Interactions of Coloreds by Mendi + Keith Obadike.  It is important to note that this installation was not as popular as Tilted Plane, but exhibited some important themes that should be looked at. This interactive piece invited the viewers to look at the conceptual website created by the artists to see how skin color has effected online commerce and ad-targeting. However, as the gallery attendant for the exhibition explained to me when I had trouble figuring out how to use the installation, the website built by the artists is not updated in real-time and tends to lag. Their website can be accessed here

Their “product” is a system that can help companies judge their customers or employees based on their hexadecimal color (the HTML equivalent of color). To add an interactive component to their website, they include a link that brings their viewers to a Google Doc questionnaire, which is to be filled out to compile the hex code for the viewer. Compiling this information is no different from Big Data firms collecting information from their users to better direct ads towards them to sell a product or sway them towards voting for a specific party or person. On the darker side of things, sometimes even limiting our access to important resources is a flaw in the types of systems offered to us in the real world. Costanza-Choke (2018) argues about these design injustices, where dominant groups oppress those who are often underrepresented because of their lack of access to resources that will help voice their concerns.

This installation reminds me of Sephora’s Color iQ, a “beauty service” tool that scans the surface of your skin to match makeup users to a host of foundations appropriate for their skin tone and color.  Each Sephora customer that has used this service is then matched up with a 4-digit and letter combination code that is linked to specific shades in the brands they carry. From a consumer point of view, this tool is useful since it gives me a curated look at products from brands that are guaranteed to work for me. But looking at it from an information science student’s point of view, I wonder how that information has been used since then.

Overall, Programmed is an exciting exhibition looking at alternate forms of art through digital manipulation. While pieces that had great aesthetic appeal harnessed more attention from visitors, other pieces had more alluring underlying themes that provoked viewers to look at them more closely.

Tiffany Chan, Info 601 – 01

References:

·           Bates, Marcia J. (2006). “Fundamental forms of information.” Journal of the American Society for Information and Technology 57(8): 1033–1045.

·           Costanza-Chock, Sasha. (2018). “Design Justice: Towards an Intersectional Feminist Framework for Design Theory and Practice.” Proceedings of the Design Research Society 2018.

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The New York Public Library of the Performing Arts

On the first warm day in April, I decided to visit my favorite branch of the New York Public Library, the New York Public Library of the Performing Arts, Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center (LPA). One of Manhattan’s research libraries, LPA is tucked between the Metropolitan Opera House and the Vivian Beaumont Theater at Lincoln Center Plaza. Upon entering, visitors can stop at the front desk for information about other NYPL research libraries’ locations and business hours and to pick up some LPA publications. Only feet from the entrance, I was already getting a sense of the knowledge infrastructure of cultural and educational activities that both reinforces and is reinforced by LPA’s commitment to performing arts (Rubin, 1-2). I flipped through a booklet of Spring 2019 LPA Programs and Exhibitions, excited to see what was in store. Unfortunately, the latest exhibitions had been removed in late March, the upcoming exhibitions would be ready in mid-April, and no performances or workshops would be taking place that day. Lucky for me, the front desk administrator informed me that I could still catch an exhibition about Uta Hagen, an actress and teacher, on Level 3 and provided a brochure of Hagen-related LPA events taking place in April.

Behind the front desk, the Donald and Mary Oenslager Gallery, a large exhibition room, stood empty and the Plaza Corridor Gallery, a wall exhibition space, stood blank as well. Further down on Level 1, I found self-service copier rooms, a circulation desk, biographical circulation items, and public Internet stations. Most visitors on this floor were sitting at the Internet stations to view or listen to reference materials. The main reference materials on Level 1 are Song Index, Scores, and Recorded Sound items, ranging from Madrigals to Yiddish Songs. The Song Index shelves feature an interactive audio installation exhibit, Archives of Sound. Signs instruct visitors to put on headphones hanging from the shelves and to flip nearby switches in order to hear snippets of archived sheet music. I couldn’t take advantage because the exhibit was temporarily unavailable, but I was instantly reminded of Karim and Hartel’s designation of music information retrieval, and art in general, as a “higher thing” in information science. I was curious to see if LPA would live up to Karim and Hartel’s vision to recognize the “informational facets of higher things in life” (Karim, 1133-1137).

Most of LPA’s circulation items can be found on Level 2, including books, scores, CDs, DVDs, videos, and reviews. Each aisle presents staff picks of books related to the performing art on the corresponding shelf. At the circulation desk, I found two useful handouts. “A Guide to Circulating DVDs” lists the types of DVDs found in each aisle. For example, DVD Biographies C-Z can be found on Aisle 7. It also includes a guide to DVD types (“DVD 782 encompasses opera and musicals”) and how LPA organizes  DVDs. I was surprised to find out that LPA alphabetizes most DVD types by letter, but not within letter. The second handout, “Circulating Scores Chart”, lists the types of scores, their call numbers, and the aisles where they’re located on Level 1. The circulation desk also provides a request form for visitors who are interested in viewing or listening to audiotapes, videotapes, or other media from LPA’s Jerome Robbins Dance Division. Most visitors on Level 2 were either browsing items in the reading room or using the computers.

Finally, I headed up to Level 3, where visitors can really take advantage of one of the world’s largest collections of performing arts materials. LPA’s special collections are the Billy Rose Theatre Division, the Jerome Robbins Dance Division, the Music Division, the Rodgers and Hammerstein Archives of Recorded Sound, and the Reserve Film and Video Collection. Their contents inform and expand the debate surrounding Buckland’s question, “What is a document?” (Buckland, 4-5). In addition to things like manuscripts, photographs, and published and unpublished work relating to performers, the Special Collections also boast objects such as set models, audio recordings, and phonograph cylinders of live Met Opera performances from the early 20th century. Bags and outerwear are not allowed on Level 3. To enter, I had to go through a mandatory coat check and leave everything except the items I would be using: my pen, notebook, and phone. Once inside, visitors can check out items to their library cards for the duration of their visit – items are not allowed to leave the walls of Level 3. Black cabinets of subject specific card references for Music, Recorded Sound, Dance, Film, and Theatre line the walls. Visitors can use these card catalogs, the online catalog, or the archival materials search portal to identify and request items for research. Most Special Collections items are housed offsite and need to be requested in advance to allow for transportation. I observed many visitors studying books, magazines, and microfilm in the reading section nearby. Delicate items, such as rare books, clippings, and sheet music are only released in the Special Collections Reading Room, where I saw a number of visitors conducting research. Special Collections visitors are required to submit a registration form and adhere to the Special Collections Photography and Photocopy Policy.

Towards the end of my stroll about Level 3, I found the Uta Hagen exhibit that I had heard about at the front desk. I also happened upon smaller, more niche exhibits, like one about music in the time of Jane Austen. As I was exiting Level 3, I noticed that the wall across the coat check had been transformed into a large bulletin for information about upcoming performing arts events. I expected to find ads for major performances at Lincoln Center, but was pleased to see that there were mainly posters hung by visitors who were both publicizing their own forays into the performing arts and contributing to the knowledge infrastructure that props LPA. Overall, I was impressed by LPA’s institutional support for a focus on higher things in information science, how it highlights the information value of pleasurable things like the performing arts, and the way it invites visitors to participate in the city’s performing arts culture.

References

Buckland, M. (1991). Information as Thing. Journal of the American Society for Information Science. Jun1991, Vol. 42 Issue 5, p351-360. 10p.

Karim, J. & Hartel, J. (2007). Information and Higher Things in Life: Addressing the Pleasurable and Profound in Information Science. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 58(8), 1131-1147.

Rubin, R.E. & Janes, J., (2016). The Knowledge Infrastructure. (1-30). Foundations of Library and Information Science. Fourth Edition. Chicago: ALANeal Schuman.

INFO 601-02 – Observation



Posted on by Vella Voynova 0