Collaborations for Experimental Audience Experiences

     So far, we've looked at collaborations that have mostly focused on the experience and needs of institutions and participants, but not audiences. There are some cases when institutions use collaboratory platforms to push the boundaries not of the participant experience but of the audience experience. Just as some contributory models give museums license to include more personal voices in institutional content, collaborative models may be used by institutions that want to take a less precious view on museum artifacts and collections.  This section explores two projects from art institutions on opposite sides of the US.

     The first is the Sculptural Travel Bugs project, which was introduced in Chapter 4 as an example of sharing museum objects with people around the Seattle area. In 2008, exhibit developer Seth! [delete ! unless that's really his name - how cool would that be! LG] Leary collaborated with the Bellevue arts coordinator and local teens to incorporate the teen’s work into the larger ecosystem of geocachers, people who picked up the sculptures in defined caches and took them on travels around the region. Each sculpture had a goal written on a tag, explaining that it wanted to go to the Seattle Aquarium (a whale sculpture), a cathedral (a sculpture of "death in a box"), and other landmarks in the Seattle area. The tags also stated that the sculptures hoped to return back to Bellevue City Hall by the end of the summer for a final exhibition. In this way, the Sculptural Travel Bug project was a collaboration among an institution, a group of teen artists, and a diffuse network of geocaching enthusiasts.

     The sculptures traveled and were tracked through the geocaching network. Hundreds of people handled, moved, and hung out with the sculptures, sharing photos and stories on the web. Some people even documented time they spent fixing parts of the sculptures that had been damaged in travel. Taking this approach connected the sculpture program to a new and very different audience (geocachers) and sent art out into the community rather than closing it inside City Hall. The people who found and traveled with the sculptures engaged with them emotionally and personally, and these were not necessarily people who would have ever visited the sculptures on exhibition.

     Of course, the reason that the Bellevue Arts Commission felt comfortable exposing the sculptures to potential damage, harm, and even loss was the fact that they were produced by teens in a city program instead of commissioned by professional artists. The city staff felt (very reasonably) that they had to protect the professional art in certain ways that made travel impossible, but they didn't feel that way about the art created by the teens. Fortunately, the teens were aware of the project plan from the outset, so no one was tricked into sending out a sculpture that he or she wanted to preserve, though there were likely teens who were not thrilled when sculptures returned worse for the wear or not at all. Hopefully, the 2008 teen sculpture experiment helped the Bellevue arts team think more expansively about other ways that they could share art with the public in innovative, flexible ways. (QUOTE FROM TAMAR) (Need some observations of people who participated, and institutional observations as well. What were intentions for the experiment? Was it called a success? Did it get good press, YouTube posting, etc. for the institution,the program, Bellevue City? Did people who participated then come to local museums or Aquarium? Was there a link for any participant to go free for a day? What percentage of the pieces were returned? Lots of questions left on the intent and outcomes. SB)

     Click! A Crowd-Curated Exhibition was a collaborative project at the Brooklyn Museum of Art with the ambitious goal of creating an exhibition that was about a data process rather than a collection of objects. The Wisdom of Crowds, a book by social scientist James Surowiecki, argued that large groups of non-experts could be collectively "wise" if individuals in the group were able to make decisions without overly influencing each other's choices. Click! was a project meant to test how Surowiecki's theory might bear out in the subjective experience of judging art. Click! was an open call photography exhibition, in which people submitted photographs on the topic of "the changing face of Brooklyn." These photographs were judged in terms of quality and adherence to the theme on a sliding scale by citizen-curators using an online platform optimized to reduce the influence users could have on each other (no cumulative scores, no comments, a forced random path through the photos, etc.). In the end, the photos were displayed, both virtually and physically, sized relative to their rank in the judging scheme. In the physical exhibition, the sizes of the prints were fixed, but on the web, audience members were able to resize the photos contextually by changing data criteria, looking at the photos resized based on geographic location or self-reported art knowledge of judges. Interestingly, the top ten photos selected by judges of all levels of self-reported art knowledge included eight of the same images, suggesting that "crowds" of people with little art knowledge are likely to make comparable choices to those made by experts.

     Click! was a collaboration between an institution, crowd theory researchers, local photographers, and museum website visitors/curators. Its goal was not to find the best photos submitted by photographers; there were no prizes awarded nor preferential treatment granted to top winners beyond the size of their prints. Instead, the goal was to perform a public research project about crowd-based decision-making. As Shelley Bernstein, organizer of the show, put it, “it’s a conceptual idea put on the wall.”

     Conceptual ideas don't necessarily make pretty exhibits in a traditional sense. The Museum's contemporary art curator Eugenie Tsai commented that, “[Click!]’s about data, and making the data visual. It’s not really a photography show in the way I would curate a photography show.” Shelley and Eugenie were both explicit about the fact that they made decisions in favor of the research and against the most beautiful exposition of the art. All the photos were printed with the same process, and their sizes were determined by the judging process, not aesthetic preferences. Both the New York Times and the Washington Post commented that the resulting show was not that visually impressive, but they were comparing Click! to photo exhibitions, which Shelley and Eugenie would deem inappropriate. It would be more correct to compare it to data visualizations like tag clouds or spark charts—whether visitors wanted that or not.

     For participants in the Click! process, the exhibition provided affirmation and community. One participant, Amy Dreher, coordinated with a group of ten local photographers to go on photo walks and develop their approach to the competition together. They explored the city, critiqued each other's work, and ultimately, when only Dreher's photo was selected for the final exhibition, shared their disappointment and happiness for Dreher. Dreher visited the exhibition several times, noting that, "I felt ownership over what was on those walls because I  had been involved in it from the first walk we took to the last photo I ranked." She also observed that the exhibition space itself was popular and very social; as she put it:  "There always seemed to be a discussion going on in front of the photos." (Exhibitionist Fall 09) [NS]

     Click! was a deliberate attempt by the museum to test something and present the results, saying, “don’t judge this as art.” Not everybody believes or wants to hear that. Some of the photographers who submitted their work to Click! were not thrilled to learn that they would not be able to control the way their photos would be printed, and some were skeptical about the validity of the public curation platform. To some, the collaboration was a force fit to institutional goals. Fortunately, according to Shelley, her team's open and clear communication with the artists about the project helped keep the participants feeling positively.

     Some participants didn't care if their work was being exhibited as data; as one photographer commented, for her, the thrill was about having her photo in the museum. The various collaborators--staff, photographers, and citizen curators--all got different things out of the exhibition process. For visitors, the experience in the Click! gallery was appreciably more social than in other parts of the museum, due both to the publicity around the exhibition and the fact that so many people came to see the photos they had helped judge or create. Click! may have generated dynamic tension between what the museum wanted to present and what participants, visitors, and reporters wanted to experience, but the institutional team stood by their initial goals as a valuable experiment. Ultimately, experimenting with the questions of how collaborators can be engaged in curatorial process and whether crowds of visitors can be "wise" evaluators of art were the most important parts of the Click! experience from the institutional perspective. The exhibition was just an output of that research. ( This example is more full in terms of intent and outcomes. SB)

(Looking for a summary statement here of lessons learned about this form of collaboration. SB)

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