Portrait of Sarah Palin

Sarah Palin is all over the news today for some reason. And somehow I came across this magnificent portrait of her in the L.A. Times, originally taken by Brian Adams for Runner’s World:

Sarah Palin - portrait, or still life?

I am not really sure why the L.A. Times chose this image for the article, but as an art historian, this photo fascinates me. The props are spectacular – check out that hideous sconce on the wall behind her head, and the fuzzy moccasins on the window sill behind her. What does this mean?! Look at the blackberry in her hand! (Wait, are there two of them?)! And the flag (omg – I think it’s plastic!) casually placed on the chair for her to “lean on.” I posted this to my FB page and my friends started to analyze too. One person pointed out that the electrical outlet near the floor has a safety cover only on one of the two plug holes. Another was nauseated by the U.S. Army banner; using her son’s deployment as a prop. If you look closely at the carpet, you can see her tennis shoe marks on the freshly vacuumed carpet. You can almost imagine additional poses for earlier frames in the film.

The image is so carefully composed, and reminds me of Thomas Eakins’ 19th-century portraits of the learned men and women of his day (many of them very peculiar), depicted at work in their professional lives. Compare her to this painting by Eakins of Frank Cushing, who was one of the first anthropologists to “go native” by living with Zuni Indians in the southwest. Cushing was a bit of a rogue–and a maverick–in his day, too. Is it just me? Or is there a freakish resemblance in these compositions? On the other hand, of you turn Sarah’s portrait clockwise 90 degrees, it starts to look like an odalisque. Ouch – did I just say that?

Frank Hamilton Cushing by Thomas Eakins

5 types of user experience, by John Falk

This week the OCLC held a Digital Forum West mini conference/symposium at the Getty. I noticed that John Falk was the keynote speaker and weaseled my way in to see his talk, since I am a huge fan and was very curious how his influential theories about free-choice learning in museums might be applied to the problem of digital access.

His talk this morning was especially interesting because his theory about user experiences dovetails with newer approaches to thinking of web visitors in terms of the kind of experience they want, rather than as more traditional audience types (teacher, mom, family, businessman, retired person) and demographics (age, sex, race, location).

Falk argued that looking at traditional demographic info and quantitative measurement of “traffic” (to our physical and virtual sites) is pretty meaningless and doesn’t help museums and libraries achieve their goals. For example, knowing how many 30-year-old Hispanics come to the museum/library is not going to help us figure out how to get more 30-year-old Hispanics to come. Also, knowing someone’s demographic info doesn’t tell you anything about their needs–what they want from us when they come here.

Instead, he thinks we should start to think about our users in terms of their needs, which dictate the kind of experiences they are seeking from us. Based on his almost 40 years of research in the field, he has come up with 5 “experience types” which he says are pretty much universal in all people, regardless of demographic. These describe basic human needs. They are:

Explorers–motivated by personal curiosity (i.e. browsers)
Facilitators–motivated by other people and their needs (i.e. a parent bringing a child)
Experience-Seekers–motivated by the desire to see and experience a place (i.e. tourists)
Professional/Hobbyists–motivated by specific knowledge-related goals (i.e. a scholar researching a specific topic)
Rechargers–motivated by a desire for a contemplative or restorative experience

One person can experience different experience types at different moments. So, one day I may go to a museum with my family because I want to show them something (Facilitator), another day I may go there because I am researching a painting and need to see it (Professional/Hobbyist), and another day I may just want to go there with no specific goal except to discover what’s on view and be surprised (Explorer). Falk argued that this is information we can really use to develop new methods for evaluation.

Another part of his argument (he has authored many books on this) is that a visitor’s experiences with us is just a tiny blip in the larger trajectory of their lives. How does this experience at a museum or library affect that trajectory? And isn’t that what we really want to know? How are we affecting people’s learning? How can we be better perceived as useful to them in fulfilling their needs?

He talked about the research he’s done with the California Science Center here in L.A. He’s been doing visitor surveys for 15 years and, in one example, has been able to show that one exhibition at the science center actually did teach visitors a science concept (biostasis) that they remembered 2 years later.

A friend told me his newest book covers this theory: Identity and the Museum Experience

Visual Literacy for College Freshmen

At U Penn this year, incoming Freshmen are taking a twist on the old classic summer reading project. Instead of reading a novel together, they are looking at a painting, Thomas Eakins’ Gross Clinic. This painting is rich with historical and cultural meaning, and opens the door to study of many topics, from American history, to medical practice and history, to psychological studies, and oh yeah, art history too. I love this painting and spent weeks in an art history seminar in grad school (ehem) dissecting it.  The university is using the project as a way to create community bonds between the local arts organizations and the students, between campus and community.

But I love it because it foregrounds the importance of visual literacy, something that I have always felt is ignored in our culture (it’s not one of the three Rs), yet which is becoming increasingly important in our world where we’re swamped with imagery. Learning how to evaluate what you see and interpret meaning from images is not innate; it is a learned skill. Reading, in my mind, is no longer just about interpreting the syntax of  spoken and written language. It’s heartening to see a major university embracing a visual expression as a way to explore and read about larger historical and cultural issues.

PSA’s through cell-phone texting in China

This summer while visiting China I rented a cell phone (through yoyoor.com, excellent service btw). Almost immediately I began to get text messages in Chinese, which I assumed were advertising and spam–based on my minimal vocab of Chinese characters. But one day, I was on a plane to Beijing with a Chinese-speaking friend. When we landed we both received text messages on our phones at the same moment. My friend looked at his message and turned to me, waving his phone, “Welcome to Beijing!” I showed him my phone, “what does it say?!” The same exact message. All of my American sensibilities about privacy and personal space shuddered. Not only do “they” know where we are, and that we just arrived in a new city, but they were letting us know about it.

A few weeks later in Beijing, a few days after the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square “incident”, an American friend of mine who teaches at Tsinghua University told me that the day before the anniversary her students received text messages wishing them luck on their exams and telling them to “be good.” Clearly this message was targeted–only students received it–and was intended to influence public behavior through broadcast. Creepy.

Indeed, using text messaging to send out broadcast messages like this seems to be the norm in China. Just today I read about a text message the police in Urumqi sent out to the city’s citizens, warning them about recent attacks with syringe needles.

Really, this makes perfect sense. If you have a population that don’t all have TV, or radios, or access to the Internet, and a high penetration for cell phones, it is the perfect medium for broadcast. (Of course it helps that the government owns all the cell phone companies in the nation.) And yet to Westerners, getting direct text messages to our cell phones seems like an invasion. Our cell phones are so personal and intimate that getting messages from our government, uninvited, seems too personal. And yet, I wouldn’t be surprised if this begins to happen eventually in the West too. It will just take some time for us to get used to it.

NYT Reverses Paper-to-Web Workflow

Today, I was a little blown away by the Frugal Traveler’s article in the Sunday New York Times about ways to use new technologies to keep in touch with friends and family by voice while on the road. The content of the article was great.

But that’s not what struck me.  What struck me was a departure from the traditional print-to-web order of publishing an article–this article, Calling Home for Even Less, was originally published as a blog post by Matt Gros on the NYT Web site on August 18, where it has garnered 69 comments to date. In the analog version of the story, which landed on my doorstep this morning, the article was re-published in an abridged form along with a note that the “full” article can be found on the NYT web site. And that’s not all. A selection of the comments left on the blog were published in the paper edition alongside the article.

Shazam! Web publishing now drives print in newspapers. See? That wasn’t so hard, was it?

fanfou, twitter, blogs, nciku.com, and google translator working together

I am leaving or China in 5 days and thought I would check to see how possible it would be to post to Twitter from China. I will be renting a cell phone, but text messages to the US are expensive, and texting to Twitter from China means sending an SMS to the U.K. A quick google search turned up this very helpful workaround from Pandapassport: sign up for Fanfou.com, China’s version of Twitter, then send the feed to Twitter using Twitterfeed. Nifty. But fanfou is all in Chinese! I managed to sign up for fanfou (jolifanta’s fanfou page) by deciphering some basic Chinese. Fanfou’s UI is exactly like Twitter, so I could pretty much guess what the text was based on placement on Twitter. I had some help in this with nciku.com, my favorite online Chinese dictionary, which lets you DRAW the characters! You just need a basic knowledge of stroke order rules and voila, you can look up any word without knowing those pesky radicals.

Signing up for twitterfeed was easy in comparison (although I have yet to see my fanfou upodate appear in my Twitter feed…crossing my fingers). Next problem–how to verify my Chinese phone for fanfou?? Crap, my Chinese isn’t good enough to tackle this: despite the photos, I have no idea what this is saying. It is way too much for nciku translation, one character at a time. So I tried Google agian. I googled the url for this page and in google search results hit “translate” – voila! “No plug rice blog!” Well, yeah, it’s not the perfect translation, but it was enough for me to get the gist. And I could even navigate within the translator to other pages, where I found the SMS phone number that I will (hopefully) be able to use to send updates to fanfou. Phew…we’ll find out in a few days if all this works.

Managing Expectations in Museums

Following on the Museums and the Web conference last week, Nina Simon made an excellent observation in a great blog post Avoiding the Participatory Ghetto: Are Museums Evolving with their Innovative Web Strategies?:

“Are participatory activities happening on the web because that is the best place for them? Or is the web the dumping ground for activities too messy or uncomfortable to do onsite?”

She goes on to describe the disconnect she felt when visiting the Indianapolis Museum of Art, after visiting their super-Web 2.0 Web site. It was just a normal museum, not what she’d expected from a museum with such a participatory Web site, famous for its transparency that lays bare the inner workings of the institution. There’s a great conversation in the comments to her post among Museum technologists and staff about the nature of participation in museums (it’s a good read!). I feel like we really need to ask ourselves, What do we expect visitors will do on our virtual and real world sites? Do they have to do the same types of activities in both spaces? On one level, Nina’s right. There is a disconnect. But is it fair to compare? I also have a similar disconnect between my real-world home and my FaceBook home. The real one is decidedly quiet. It’s where I study, and eat, and sleep, and play with the dog . While the FB home is really loud with tons of people streaming through, taking quizzes, and posting photos *all the time* because I have friends all over the world. I am not saying that museums don’t have anything to learn from online social media. I just ask about what we expect from these different spaces. As the comments on Nina’s post show, it is very instructiveto think this through , but is it fair to compare?

The Zine Goes Glossy

HP’s new MagCloud service allows anyone with a computer and some design skillz to publish glossy magazines. This kind of self-publishing was the realm of hand-crafted zines. (Check out the cool new NYT slideshow+audio presentation too!). View the slideshow.

Read the article at NYT.com.

Art in the Crack of the LAC (MA)

Went to LACMA’s late Night Art event last night. They made very good use of the space between the Ahmanson and BCAM buildings, behind the Urban Light installation—a space I started to call the “crack in the Lac” with my friends. DJs pumping out the German techno and outdoor seating with bar created a very pleasant outdor hangout space. The best part though was behind the projection screen, where some LACMA staff (perhaps education staff? They always have the most fun) were there with art-making supplies for making puppets and photocopies of Franz West’s face for mask-making, and a mini installation of liquor bottles plastered a la Franz West (hidden treasures for sure).

The art was a bit difficult to see due to the crowds, and the readings in the galleries, which sometimes blocked the art from those of us who didn’t want to listen to the spoken word. Franz West was not for me (except as a cut-out puppet I made), but the Art of Two Germanys exhibition was quite impressive. It was huge though, and although the art was a bit depressing, you got the sense of something that must be important. Highlights included some great still photographs of performance events, including artists like Josef Beuys and Nam June Paik; and some monstrous Anselm Kieffer paintings. In one room, a chocolate sculpture by Dieter Roth proved how experiencing art through unexpected sensory information can make you take a second look (see object on left in image below). I had dismissed it on first glance, but then smelled chocolate and had to find the source of the smell. Those little terracotta monkeys are actually chocolate (and lions). One well-placed performance inside the gallery was a musician playing a leaden sounding composition on a double-bass in a room with a glasnost-era oil painting of Ronald Reagan looking skyward, and a red carpet leading away from him across the room.

Gallery installation shot of LACMA’s The Art of Two Germanys/Cold War Cultures.

Elias Sime :: eye of the needle, eye of the heart

Made a quick visit to Santa Monica Museum of Art yesterday to visit a friend who works there and was taken aback by their wonderful exhibition of work by Ethiopian artist Elias Sime. It’s presented like an installation, with stuffed and decorated goat skins, and thrones carved from wood and animal horns arranged around the floor of the room, which they opened up to one big room with the high warehouse ceiling opened up.

Elias Sime at SMMA, image from http://micheleguieu.blogspot.com/

I was reminded of Ethiopia, probably because of the colors and materials. The brown and earthy tenor of the whole room, highlighted with bright colors of plastic and threads within the larger pieces are the colors of Ethiopia, where mud and rocks prevail. The goat skins and thrones, along with mud and straw sculptures of monkeys in one corner, are made from the materials traditionally ised forbuilding traditional tukuls ( before eucalyptus was introduced in the 19th century!). A video in the back room, narrated by an enthusiastic Peter Sellars, gives a great view of the artist’s life within his community in Addis.

Although the goat skins and thrones dominate the room (I love the wooden carved feet emerging from some of the thrones!), the stitched canvas paintings hung on the walls are surreal and impressive in their craftsmanship. The imagery is pure modernism–heroic and masculine, but every line is stitched into the canvas (by hand? I think so.). You get close and you can feel the tenacity required to manually create the broad strokes of color one 1/4-inch stitch at a time.

My favorite part of the installation is video that you can control, taking you through the streets of Addis. They simply attached a camera to a car and drove around. It really gives a sense of this city, which my dad calls an “overgrown village.”

Check out this blog, which has loads of great photos, including Peter Sellars’ gigantic face from one of the the videos.

See some of my own photos from Ethiopia, and read about my travels there by choosing the “Ethiopia” tag on this blog, or visit my Flickr page.