This was the message on palm cards that our ASK Ambassadors distributed to Museum visitors throughout June. As a special engagement activity for Pride Month, visitors could take an ASK-guided tour of our galleries and learn more about gender and queer identity in art. 

The card featured a detail of a work by Amaryllis DeJesus Moleski, on view in the exhibition “Nobody Promised You Tomorrow.”

This tour could be taken as a complementary activity to the special exhibition Nobody Promised You Tomorrow: Art 50 Years After Stonewall or as a standalone activity. And, as with all our ASK engagement offerings, we kept things responsive and personalized —every visitor could set their own pace and tone.

Visitors could begin their experience in the Museum lobby at a painting by Kehinde Wiley.

As we envisioned it, this app-guided tour would include a few very popular works from our collections (like Kehinde Wiley’s Napoleon Crossing the Alps) as well as some lesser-known works. They could be works by artists who identified as LGBTQ+, portraits of LGBTQ+ individuals, or works that touched on broader themes of gender identity.

The ASK Team collaborated to select ten works of art with a range of dates and media, from Donald Moffett’s Lot 043017 (Multiflora, Radiant Blue) to a coffin in the Ancient Egyptian collection, from Aaron Ben-Shmuel’s stone bust of Walt Whitman to Deborah Kass’s neon wall-piece After Louise Bourgeois. They compiled information about these works into a reference document and they strategized about giving directions to help the visitor navigate from stop to stop.

Elizabeth of the ASK Team tracked these tours (which accounted for about 22% of our app traffic) throughout June , and she noticed an interesting split. Visitors who began engaging with us on the Museum’s first floor were more likely to invest in the total tour experience, following our cues to visit works on the third, fourth, and fifth floors of the Museum. They often spent more than a half-hour with us for this itinerary.

Special labels with Pride flag icons were placed beside the “tour stops.”

Meanwhile, other visitors encountered individual works with our ASK Pride Month labels in the galleries and sent questions about them. These visitors were usually satisfied with learning about that particular work and might move one more stop nearby when we invited them to continue chatting. However, they were less interested in experiencing the complete tour.

The ASK Team also received a few requests from visitors who were ready to go even further. For example, when one visitor asked whether they could see anything by LGBTQ+ artists in the new special exhibition Rembrandt to Picasso: Five Centuries of European Works on Paper, we added a drawing by Rosa Bonheur to our list.

It’s been two years since we first tailored an ASK activity to a specific show or event, during Georgia O’Keeffe: Living Modern, and we continue to learn from each iteration. Next up? An engagement option related to the special exhibition Pierre Cardin: Future Fashion. More about that soon!

We hope our partnership with Tiny Cards will allow us to reach new audiences.

Although the idea of asking people to spend time memorizing things (with only a broad educational purpose in mind) might at first seem unusual, it is in fact similar to what we do daily as a modern, encyclopedic art museum: Our visitors are invited to explore curated displays of a very wide variety of objects and to learn visual and textual information about them, and perhaps build up their competence and comfort level in a particular area. Engaging with visitors through the ASK Brooklyn Museum app, we experience first-hand the pride visitors feel when they successfully identify a Frank Lloyd Wright chair, Kehinde Wiley painting, or Dogon sculpture by sight alone.

So far,we have already published our first two decks: Famous Faces of Ancient Egypt and Seven Common Buddhist Gestures (Mudras). The ASK team will continue to work with curators to provide a variety of content for users of different educational backgrounds and interests to enjoy. We will publish new decks every two weeks, so follow us on Tiny Cards and get memorizing!

As with building any infrastructure, a disaster plan should also be in place to make sure people know what’s happening when something goes wrong. Part of the alphabet soup of Amazon Web Services, Route53, is configured with the ability to automatically route web visitors away from a server having—or about to have—issues to a static placeholder page hosted in an S3 bucket based in Oregon, independent of website assets or server-side code. This is called a DNS Failover. The switch is triggered by an AWS health check which we’ve set up on our production server to check for whether a web or database server is unavailable. If that’s the case, the health check, a simple PHP page that only returns an HTTP header response, returns an HTTP 503 error, otherwise it returns an HTTP 200 OK response. The end result is a “fail whale” page that shows up when the site is going down or already there.

Aside from letting site visitors know when things are amiss, the same AWS health check triggers an email notification to our developer team, which is then picked up by their smartphones (or, in my case, a Nokia 515 which happens to have Exchange support). At the office, we’ve created a glowing 3D printed status indicator based on the 3D scan of Emma-o, King and Judge of Hell aka Yamma aka 閻魔 who we scanned for a 3D printed chess project some time ago.

Emma-Ohnoes, King and Judge of Cloud Computing uses an Arduino Yún and Temboo to connect to the same health check page that Route 53 uses. Like the DNS failover setup, it connects to the health check page every minute, however, if a 200 OK is detected, it glows blue, otherwise it pulses red using one of the Arduino’s analog inputs with pulse width modulation (PWM).

Our health check page is pretty specifically catered to just our systems, but Amazon has put together a neat guide on how to create one for your own architecture. The Arduino sketch and schematic and 3D files for Emma Ohnoes, however, can easily be adapted to any website by changing the targetUrl to either your own health check page or the website URL directly to see if it’s up or not.

Download Emma-Ohnoes’s Arduino sketch and schematics (MIT license) on Github

Download Emma Ohnoes’s 3D models (CC-BY-3.0) on Thingiverse

Since April we’ve learned quite a bit about what makes an ideal scan and have spread that knowledge to our resident camera wizard, Bob Nardi, who I teamed up with for this project. We already had scans of the Lost Pleiad and the Double Pegasus, so we added them into the mix as the Queen and Knight, respectively. We also found the best candidates for the remaining pieces:

• Pawn (Egypt): Lion-Headed Gaming Piece
• Rook (New York): Rook [from a Wedgewood chess set]
• Bishop (Japan) : Emma – o, King and Judge of Hell
• King (Egypt): Senwosret III

We worked with our conservation staff to get access to the pieces which weren’t on view, including the roughly 3,000+ year-old Egyptian gaming piece Bob and I were a little nervous around. Using the same software combination of 123D Catch and Meshmixer, the scanned models were then generated and cleaned up and made watertight for printing.

Having the 3D models ready to print, I worked on resizing them as chess pieces, making sample prints with some unsightly lime-green PLA we had laying around. Chess pieces have been remixed a lot over it’s history, varying from the small magnetic sets you would find in travel stores to the more elaborate Frank Gehry set. By and large there’s no universal standard for the size and proportions, but the US Chess Federation has some guidelines on the proportions relative to the board which were [partially] adopted in the final design of the set.

In the past, we’ve only printed pieces on a one-by-one basis. Since there’s 16 individual pieces to a chess set, that method quickly became impractical. Using the software for our Cube printer, we were able to add multiple models onto the platform and have the software automatically space them out. Marveling at the efficiency of this plan I made a test run and walked into the room our 3D printer resides in only to find that I made glitch art.

The aforementioned room is generally great due to it being more or less soundproofed from the rest of the office, but due to other equipment which share the space, it’s kept at a crisp 60F degrees. Since there’s not much movement happening in the room’s air that doesn’t tend to affect the prints, but it does seem to make the glue used to stick the prints to the platform and the plastic web between the pieces when they’re being printed stiffen faster, so some individual pieces would be just attached enough to each other to cause them to be yanked off the platform mid-print and eventually turn into Katamari Damashi.

I managed to work around the temperature issue by turning on the raft option in the Cube Software settings. A raft in this case is a grid which is printed on the platform before the models are printed on top of it.

A raft keeps smaller pieces from detaching from the platform since it expands it’s connection to the platform beyond its otherwise tiny base size. The grid needs to be manually cut off around the edges after the print is complete, but that’s usually a quick process akin to peeling or shucking a really plasticy fruit or veggie.

After peeling it makes for a nice set ready to be shipped a whole three floors down! Sadly, I won’t be on this side of the Atlantic on Saturday due to other fun stuff, but if you want to see 3D printed chess in action, stop by and have fun in my place!

Just like our previous scans, we’re releasing the latest models under a Creative Commons license which you can download and print on your own 3D printer.

Download all models used in our chess collection (CC-BY-3.0) on Thingiverse

Saul Bolton in front of the Brooklyn Museum. Photo: Ruby Washington/The New York Times

We believe that the new Saul at the Brooklyn Museum will become an exciting destination for dining, and a thrilling opportunity for us to affiliate with an iconic Brooklyn institution with a mission so aligned to our own–together we will champion both Brooklyn artists and the vibrant Brooklyn food community. The new restaurant, a partnership among the Brooklyn Museum, Chef Saul Bolton, and Restaurant Associates, will provide seated lunch and dinner service in the newly renovated restaurant space on the first floor adjacent to the Café, which will continue its informal self-service, both now enhanced by the new outdoor Terrace. Access will be available through the front of Museum (come by subway!) and through the South Entrance (come by car!).

As with the acclaimed menu on Smith Street, Saul will utilize seasonal and artisanal ingredients to create his signature à la carte and chef’s tasting menus, which will now be expanded from only dinner also to include lunch and brunch. Come fall, the restaurant will open for lunch and dinner on Wednesdays through Sundays and for brunch on the weekends.

Our community is like none other, and we hope you will enjoy this amazing new addition. Please join us in welcoming Chef Saul and Lisa Bolton, and their exceptional staff to the Brooklyn Museum. We’ll keep you posted over the next few months on our exciting progress towards the opening in the fall!