Cabinets: wk 3

Jewish Museum
The plaque on the outside of the building notes that it was donated by the wife of Felix Warburg, a turn of the century banker, after his death, but unlike the frick, this is a museum, not a home. The imposing exterior gives way into an official entrance hall. Large bags must be checked and all guests must pass through a metal detector. A large information and ticketing desk, manned by three chatty women, stands before the hall to the galleries.

The first floor exhibit is delightfully accessible. Entitled “They Called Me Mayor July,” the collection includes over 80 paintings by Mayer Kirshenblatts. Each piece represents a memory of the artists childhood as a Jewish boy living in a small village in pre-war Poland.The exhibit explores the resilience of memory, narrative, visual, and cultural. The museum has placed descriptive captions to the right of at least one third of the collection of paintings, but the expositive voice is unidentified. They combine Kirshenblatt’s memories with factual information about the Jewish community in Poland. Storytelling, an important cultural tradition, merges with historical fact to create a hybrid (auto)biographical form. A small room with a table, chairs, and computers marks the end of the exhibit. The left wall is peppered with small pieces of paper upon which previous visitors have written and drawn memories. The table contains both exhibit guides and pieces of paper and pencils. Guests are encouraged to write down or draw their own memories and enter them to be displayed on the wall or museum website.

I get the impression that the museum has a very active community. The number of perspectives embedded in the exhibits is astounding. Orthodox, reform, zionist, conservative, liberal. The third floor of the museum attempts to express them all, their relationship to one another, and their importance in the construction of Jewish identity. The wording and arrangement within the permanent exhibits reflect the tension and struggle of satisfying the museum’s constituency. I leave the museum better informed, but as confused as ever.

As I entered the fourth floor and walked into the permanent exhibit, I encountered four large columns, literally pillars of Jewish identity, placed prominently at the entrance. They had an intentionally ancient quality to them, and served to up the drama of the exhibit. Within the room itself were backlit captions, darkened area lighting, and dramatically illuminated artifacts. The ceiling was constructed like a theatrical lighting grid, allowing curators to increase the unsettling effect of the space.

Asia Society
The museum faces very different challenges than the Jewish museum. Instead of attempting to represent all the facets of a single culture, the Asia Society represents many cultures and places. The entrance reveals beautiful, water-inspired architecture, including a curved information and arcing walls. I peeked in the gift shop and was completely overwhelmed. Objects of different types and nations of origin were mingled together. I found an area that I thought held the book collection, only to discover two others in other corners of the shop. There seemed to be no organizational method. I hoped the exhibition would be different.

I headed upstairs to the one open gallery for an exhibit on Pakistani art. The first thing I noticed was the enormous effort that the curators took to provide context for the show. An enormous, wall-sized timeline stood just before the entrance. It contained information related to both post-1940s Pakistani history and Pakistani art. Once inside the gallery, captions outlined the context of the piece in the artist’s work, Pakistani art trends, and Pakistani history. There was also a dial-in, cell phone-based audio tour that I tried a few times. In my opinion, the audio was a little bit longer than i wanted and too closely related to the text, but i appreciated that i could spontaneously opt for more information on a particular piece without having to have made the premeditated decision to get an audio guide.
The gallery was fairly small, quiet, and empty, so I was able to enjoy lingering in front of the work for quite some time. I thought the exhibit was wonderful, and truly felt like the curators had taken time to guide me through the works within.

ITP 30: Build a show in a day (Part III)

Michael Doherty
2011

What are you working on?
I’m part of a group of people working on TweetGrass. People can send in twitter messages about things that they do that are related to sustainability, something as simple as recycling a bottle, for instance. They add a hashtag and the messages are picked up by our processing application. The application makes a cloud which grows with more and more tweets. When it gets big enough it turns into rain on the screen, which them turns into physical rain under the screen that waters wheat grass. There are is also gold leaf that users can put on the wheat grass box. By putting the gold leaf on, they are making a pledge to support sustainability. When they tweet, they do something sustainable. One is a pledge, the other is actual action.

So if no one tweets, the wheat grass dies. Is this a play on guilt?
Sort of. If you recycle a bottle you don’t see the benefit of recycling the bottle, you just know there is a benefit., This creates a feedback loop. It’s not immediate, but you know that if the wheat grass is still alive, you’re doing something. Also seeing other people’s tweets might give you guilt about not doing something yourself.

How long have you been working?
-We’ve been working since around 10am. We had a few hang-ups with wrong parts but I think that’s all being resolved.

When do you think you’ll finish?
It’s almost 2 now? I’m hoping by midnight, but that’s probably a very hopeful estimate.

ITP 30: Build a show in a day (Part II)

Name:
Adam Parrish (2008)

What are you doing?
I’m using google search results to make a computer player for the game Apples to Apples. The computer will have a hand of cards and I will input the hand into the computer. It will then use google search to find the most common combination of occurrences. I’m planning on trying out three strategies, most common result, least common result, and choose randomly. Later on I’ll do a play test to see which strategy works best.

How long have you been working on this?
About 3 hours.

How much longer?
I think I’ll have a prototype that works in 2 or 3 more hours

How did you pick the project?
I had the idea a couple of weeks ago and I figured it would make a good 1-in-1 project.

*apologies for the nonexistent photography skills

ITP 30: Build a show in a day

The 1-in-1 is here! I’ve been helping to organize the ITP 30th Anniversary version of a 4-in-4 (see here, here, and here for background). Instead of doing four projects over four days, participants will attempt to complete one project in one day. After the 24 hour event, the projects will be put into a gallery on the ITP floor. .: ITP show in a day.

I have class during the day today so I didn’t plan on doing a project, but attempting to do homework amid the flurry of 1-in-1 activity proved impossible. Instead, I grabbed a camera and began to interview people about what they’re working on. Here is the first:

Name: Jeff Gray (2006)

What are you doing?
I’m making a little scrubbing sampler for multiple sounds that you can scrub across the wires.

When did you first come up with the idea?
I did a simplified version of this at ITP a while back and I’ve been thinking about working on it again for a while,but I just didn’t have the time. This was kind of a good excuse.

How are you doing on time?
I’ve been working for a solid hour, and I probably have at least six more hours. More like 10 if I really want to make it great. But if I just want something that functions minimally, somewhere around 6.

Learn more about Jeff and his audio scrubber here.