The first thing that I think makes Click! so intriguing for the future is the way the voting system worked. One of the reasons why group judgments are often so mediocre (or so volatile) is that they often rely on very crude evaluation processes, processes that foster bandwagon effects—when things get more popular simply because they’re already popular—and that are often easily gamed. A classic example would be American Idol, where members of the voting crowd generally register their opinion on only one contestant —the one they vote for—and where people can vote as many times as they want for the same person.

Click!’s system, by contrast, was designed to get around these problems. Because people could only rate each picture once, and because they couldn’t go directly to a given photo, the system was hard (if not impossible) to game. Even more important, because people didn’t know how others had voted, each person’s rating reflected his or her own judgment, uninfluenced by the opinion of others. That independence of judgment is key to the wisdom of crowds. And since the contest was run over the Net, it was also able to tap the knowledge of a relatively diverse crowd, both in terms of location and expertise. It’s true that not every person who voted looked at every picture in the contest (in fact, no one outside the museum may have done that). But because the crowd was diverse enough and big enough (so that a sizeable number of people did look at each photo), and because the selection that each person looked at was random, this probably had little or no effect on the final outcome – effectively, the result is similar to what it would have been had everyone looked at every picture. Unlike most attempts to measure popular taste, then, Click! reflects the real collective judgment of the crowd.

But is that collective judgment wise? Well, there’s no real way to answer that, since there’s no objective standard to measure the crowd’s judgment against. (That’s one reason I deliberately avoided writing about art in The Wisdom of Crowds.) But I do think it’s intriguing that there was so much overlap in Click! between the crowd’s judgment and the judgment of the experts. I think if you’d asked most people before the show, they would have said that there would have been a massive difference between the favorite choices of a diverse crowd of people and the favorite choices of people with artistic or art-historical backgrounds. But when you look at the top ten favorites of voters as a whole, and at the favorites of the different subgroups, what you find is that they’re actually not that different. Many photographs show up on all or most of the lists. To me, this is really the most striking result of the show, because it suggests (though it doesn’t prove) that at least in some mediums, the gap between popular and elite taste may be smaller than we think. It also, I think, suggests that the places for tapping the collective intelligence of diverse crowds are wider than we might imagine.

So if the crowd juried the images, how was it curated? And what was the idea curated? The theme of the photographs submitted was “The Changing Faces of Brooklyn,” but that is not the theme of the installation that is presented in our galleries. Although the changing faces of Brooklyn is an idea that underlies each of the works of art in the exhibition, the exhibition itself is about the notion of selection, and, specifically, selection by the crowd. Both visually, and in terms of its written didactics, the installation supports that primary idea, put forward—that is, curated—by Shelley Bernstein. And that is what makes it such an unusual and thought provoking exhibition. It seems to me that an exhibition that was only about the changing faces of Brooklyn in photography might be interesting, but an exhibition that is also about the nature of selection, and all the questions it raises about taste, background, interpretation—and a myriad of other issues—creates a richer discourse. In Click! the theme of the work and the selection and installation process complement and mutually reinforce one another, forming a compelling snapshot of who we are and how we chose.

I am interested to know what others think about this, and I will be taking questions on the subject this week.

Cover: Marcia Bricker Halperin. Dubrow’s Cafeteria, 1979.
Softcover: 86 pages, 7 x 7 inches.
Details, including a special $3-off coupon from Blurb.com, can be found here.

It may seem strange that in the third millennium, we still communicate by pressing pigment against the pulp of crushed trees. And yet, although we live in an age of digital data flickering on a screen, people remain deeply attached to books—to the way books look, the way they feel, even the way they smell. A book is, after all, a physical object, with an outside and an inside, and it invites you to enter its inner world and explore it, page by page. This remains an exciting adventure, not only for those of us in the publishing business but for the many millions of the dedicated book-reading public as well.

But how do you produce a publication appropriate to the special nature of Click!, an electronically generated project in which the curatorial shaping of content was designed to take place outside the walls of the Museum and be conducted by the public, in cyberspace? Instead of following the traditional publishing route and working with an established trade publishing company, it was decided to shape the catalogue, like the contents of the show, via the Web—using open book-making software and site resources that are readily available to ordinary users, not only Museum professionals. It’s the kind of project plan often described as “self-publishing.” Although it wasn’t possible to have the public at large create the bound book to the same extent that they had curated the show, it was possible at least to acknowledge the show’s distinctive method by producing this book the way any person with access to the Web would make their own, self-published book—by using easily accessible online resources. Stepping outside the Museum’s conventional way of doing books, which are usually formal ventures with mainstream publishers, the idea was to make this particular book in basically the same way anyone with a computer would go about it.

This meant that the Museum would be making its first foray into the growing business of print-on-demand publishing. Instead of producing thousands of copies of a given book and then storing them in a warehouse or a bookstore backroom until stock is needed, in this new form of publishing, a book is printed when, and only when, someone actually orders a copy, which is then individually output, bound, and shipped. To put the book project into the works, its creator, Shelley Bernstein, worked with Blurb, one of the best-known firms in the self-publishing field, and uploaded the Click! pictures, captions, and text into Blurb’s graphic-design software (while consulting with the Museum’s own editors and designers to choose type fonts and graphic treatments consistent with the institution’s standards). As a result of her innovative thinking, anyone can order a copy of the exhibition’s accompanying book, available directly from Blurb. Now you can experience Click! not only as an array of online images, or as a set of printed photos affixed to the walls of a Museum gallery, but also as a material object you can hold in your hands and keep.

There are those who feel that creating books through “assembly” software online represents, potentially, a revolution in bookmaking almost as significant, in its way, as Johannes Gutenberg’s invention of movable type around 1439. Part of Gutenberg’s genius lay in chopping up words and sentences into their individual letters as separate pieces of wooden or metal type, so that those atoms could be easily assembled into new, unique pages of text ready for printing. Breaking information down into those tiny “bits” actually made it easier to put the necessary pieces together to create something new. In our era, with the resources of the Web, the components of a book can be assembled for printing as freely as Gutenberg assembled the letterforms of words for his press, but now working in the unfettered realm of electronic impulses rather than solid type. You can imagine Gutenberg looking down from his cloud in the great beyond, surveying the world of digitally created books, and saying, “Aha! Not just movable type, but incorporeal type!”

The Click! book serves the same purposes as the online and gallery exhibition, but in its own way. For instance, since the book is, essentially, a photo album in which each picture has its own page, this volume restores the pictures to the egalitarian same-size-for-everyone format in which they were submitted during the open call, instead of following the vote-based larger-versus-smaller sizes assigned to them in the gallery. And it puts the images back into a truly impartial order: alphabetical, by artist name, which is about as nonhierarchical and seemingly “random” a sequence as you can get. Although neutral in itself, the book’s nonjudgmental sequence does make for some surprises: Since by their very nature books are made up of two-page spreads, in our book every image has a random alphabetical companion on the facing page, which produces some astonishing accidental juxtapositions that would have warmed the heart of John Cage. Supposedly unrelated images on two facing pages speak to each other in ways that no one could have predicted. Sometimes the impromptu encounter between two unlikely companions really clicks.

Photo by Donna Aceto, who saved the day when my camera battery died. Thanks, Donna.

I couldn’t help but laugh last Saturday night. Click! was packed—clearly, there was an information cascade happening on the second floor of the Brooklyn Museum. Now that we are open, we are happy to have a cascade like that. Thanks for turning out for such a fun night. It was wonderful for me to get the chance to meet so many of the Click! photographers and evaluators and a lot of folks who were finding Click! for the first time.

In other Click! news, I wanted to note that we’ve just posted a podcast from the panel discussion. I couldn’t have been happier spending a morning with this group and hope you find it worth a listen.

Lastly, I was poking around Flickr this past weekend and this photo by mercurialn (a.k.a. Nate Dorr) brought a big smile to my face, so I had to share. BTW, Nathan Kensinger (pictured bottom right) has a exhibition up at Brooklyn Public Library. Be sure to catch it before it closes August 30.

There’s been overwhelming positive feedback about the idea of a Click! meetup during the upcoming Target First Saturday, so let’s do it! I’ll be giving a Click! gallery talk at 8 p.m., so I’m planning to be around from roughly 7-9 or maybe even a little later. If you participated in this process, come on by this Saturday, July 5th. It would be nice to say hello in real space :) This is also the last Target First Saturday to catch the ©MURAKAMI show before it closes on July 13. Should be a fun night! Full schedule here.

As silly as this seems, it’s just not real until the signs go up and here they are. I will admit, I was more than a little giddy seeing these unwrapped and going into the lobby case and Mary Jane (pictured above) was humoring me a bit by letting me take pics.

Jook Leung (above) from 360vr came in yesterday to shoot a virtual tour of the gallery. For all those who helped curate from lands far away, you can tour from your computer if you can’t make it to the Museum. But, if you can come…do it! Christine and Sarah from our Digital Lab made a wonderful set of prints (the photographers will be very happy) and Lance and Tomoko designed and installed a rockin’ gallery.

Enough already, right? Click! opens today and the panel discussion is at Figment tomorrow :)

All 389 images are on the website. In addition, the 78 images that will be in the gallery can now be viewed—see “In the Gallery” on the Click! menu. Keep in mind, the sizes on the website are more variable than the sizes in the gallery, so if you see your image in that 78, the sizing in the gallery will be slightly different.

Coming up we’ve got more guests writing for the blog, including two of our consultants, James Surowiecki and Derek Powazek. Our own Chief Curator, Kevin Stayton, will be posting in the coming weeks and we may have a few more surprises along the way. For now, check out the website. The results button on the right side of the page will take you there. Bear with us if you find it slow, we are expecting a bit of traffic today. Need a little introduction? Check out the lo-fi screencast. Click! will be on view beginning this Friday (June 27) and we are making good progress installing the show (see below)!

And now, one quick note of thanks about this website. I count myself lucky that I work with an incredibly dedicated and talented team who loved this project as much as I did and made sure Click! was awesome via the web. Mike, Paul, Jen – I can’t say this enough: you are awesome, you rock my world and this site is rockin’ because of your dedication. Jessica, Joe – you make life around here fun, easy, and accurate to boot. It’s a pleasure to come to work every day—thank you.

Lance and Tomoko hanging the show. We are about half way through.

As with many things for Click!, we’ve made life a little difficult, but for good reason. This Saturday (June 28) we’ve organized a great panel discussion that will be held on Governors Island. Yup, you read that right: Governors Island. A little while back, I was contacted by the peeps running Figment 2008 and asked to present something there. Figment is billed as a “celebration of participatory art and creative culture” and I couldn’t think of anything more appropriate than a panel discussing the participatory nature of Click!. If you want to know a little more about Figment, check out this article from the NYT about the event last year—I just love the “Burning Man East” reference.

This part is seriously awesome: Panelists include James Surowiecki, New Yorker financial columnist and author of The Wisdom of Crowds; Jeff Howe, contributing editor of Wired magazine, who coined the term “crowdsourcing”; Eugenie Tsai, Brooklyn Museum’s John and Barbara Vogelstein Curator of Contemporary Art; and me. The panel will be moderated by Nicole Caruth, Brooklyn Museum’s Manager of Interpretive Materials and a freelance writer and curator based in Brooklyn.

Now for the hard part: June 28 on Governors Island and the panel starts at 11 a.m. In order to make the panel on time you must take the 10 or 10:30 a.m. ferry. Ferries are free and depart from South Ferry, but seating is very limited. When you get to the island, start looking for Perkins Hall.

OK, ouch, we know that’s early on a Saturday, but Figment should be *fun* and I’m couldn’t be more excited about sharing a table with Jim, Jeff, Eugenie, and Nicole. Have an extra cup of coffee, come take a boat ride and join us!

The exhibition is being held in an intimate gallery space to allow the viewer to be immersed in the images of the “changing faces of Brooklyn.” Because of the gallery’s space constraints it was determined that of the 389 images submitted, the top-ranked 20% of images would be printed for display. Of this 20% (or roughly 78 photographs) a distinction was required to reflect the crowds selection process; for this reason some photographs were printed as large as 20” x 30” and some as small as 5” x 7”, depending upon the crowd’s rankings.

Rough layout of one of the gallery walls. Full layout: click_full.jpg.

When these images of varying size are displayed in a random arrangement it serves to illustrate the crowds’ selection process not as linear, but rather a diverse response with certain ideas or, in this case, photographs rising to the front of a collective conscious in much the way a tag cloud uses text to visually illustrate how within many voices certain responses carry varying degrees of impact.

Cloud tag from Flickr.com

The exhibition promises to be interesting on many levels, and I hope all that participated both in submitting photographs and those involved in the selection process can make it to see the results.