Chryssa's Cents Sign Traveling From Broadway to Africa via Guadeloupe on view in Seductive Subversion: Women Pop Artists, 1958–1968, October 15, 2010 through January 9, 2011 (Image: DIG_E2010_Seductive_Subversion_04_PS4.jpg. Brooklyn Museum photograph, 2010)

In January of 2005 we contacted David Ablon at Tecnolux a neon specialist who has worked with many artists who work in neon, including Chryssa herself.  It was at that point we determined that the neon was in great working order.  The outer box on the other hand was a problem.  Before considering undertaking an extensive conservation treatment on a work of art by a living artist, it is necessary to consult the artist on possible treatment plans so that the conserved work will remain true to the artist’s intentions.  Chryssa was born in 1933 and luckily for us was alive in 2005.  Through a very circuitous route, (a Greek man in my Spanish class), we managed to find her contact information in NYC.  We gained permission to have the outer box re-made so that the artwork could be exhibitable.

Photo shows the missing sides of the original box. Chryssa (American, born Greece, 1933). Cents Sign Travelling from Broadway to Africa via Guadeloupe, 1968. Neon tubing and plexiglass, 43 x 35 x 28 1/2 in. (109.2 x 88.9 x 72.4 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Sidney Singer, 85.290. © artist or artist's estate

When Catherine Morris Curator for the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art put the Chryssa on the Seductive Subversion: Women Pop Artists, 1958–1968 checklist, the project was a go!  Grewe Plastics, Inc. was contracted to remake the neon box.  They have worked with conservators from MOMA, and other artists in fabricating and re-fabricating precise plastic elements.  The very difficult part in undertaking this conservation treatment was coordinating and communicating the work and the needs of the two specialists—the neon fabricator and the plastics fabricators—to ensure that the neon would fit inside the new box.

I first worked with David to disassemble the neon from the damaged box.  A nerve racking process as Chryssa’s three dimensional neon tubes are extremely fragile.  David can be heard in this video describing the colors of the neon before we begin the disassembly process.  The difficult part for the plastics fabricators is that they had the original box, but had to replicate all of the holes, and transfer the internal shelves with extreme precision so that the neon tubes could be reinstalled inside the new box.  Although there was a few moments of nail biting, both specialists were excellent and the end result is a completely transformed, exhibitable work of art.

We wanted to provide a way of reading Wikipedia that could be passed from person to person without anybody getting really lost. A big problem with mouse- and keyboard-based interactive kiosks is that sitting down at a computer can create a situation where one person is in charge of what happens and everybody else is just along for the ride. This is a serious problem when it comes to engaging groups of users; one can’t just pass a mouse and keyboard around from person to person. Hand-held touch devices like the iPad do a lot to get around this problem. They can move from person to person, and they make being a backseat driver a lot more fun. We settled on the idea of a sliding frame with buttons for each artist which, when tapped, would load the Wikipedia article for that artist in a content frame above.

To minimize distraction and maximize fun, we also decided we needed preserve the feeling of using a native iPad application. To this end, we built our first open source software release: BklynFlow. BklynFlow is a MooTools class for creating Coverflow-like user interfaces for the web. It’s easy to use (check out BklynFlow on GitHub for an example), and has has several features that we hope make it particularly appealing: thumbnails can have captions, it supports both touch and mouse interaction, and click/tap behavior isn’t prescribed ahead of time — a click or tap can call any JavaScript function.

BklynFlow makes use of hardware accelerated 3D transforms, so right now it only works in Safari and Mobile Safari. It was in large part inspired by Zflow. Please let us know what you think!

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This post is part of a three-part series on Wikipop.

An initial search on Wikipedia revealed that only 14 of the 25 artists featured in Seductive Subversion had existing Wikipedia pages. Of those pages, at least three qualified as “stubs” (short article in need of expansion).  The remaining 11 artists had no Wikipedia presence at all, except Barbro Östlihn, about whom there is a small paragraph featured on Swedish Wikipedia.

I certainly wasn’t expecting to find Wikipedia entries for all the artists in Seductive Subversion. After all, a good number of them, such as Mara McAfee, Dorothy Grebenak, and Kay Kurt, have been virtually forgotten over the years.  But I simply couldn’t believe that many celebrated artists, including May Stevens, Dorothy Iannone, and Lee Lozano, had no Wikipedia presence whatsoever, while Pauline Boty, Britain’s reigning “Queen of Pop,” had one paltry paragraph dedicated to her brief but stellar life.

So I knew I had my work cut out for me. Over the summer and early fall I created and expanded pages for the artists who needed them most.  In so doing, I learned a great deal about their lives. Who would have guessed, looking at Evelyne Axell’s psychedelic nudes, that she had learned to paint by taking private lessons with René Magritte?  Or that Rosalyn Drexler, in addition to being a Pop artist, was also an award-winning playwright and one-time Mexican wrestler? The more I learned—of Letty Eisenhauer’s rousing performances at early Happenings, Boty’s friendship with Bob Dylan, McAfee’s hilarious illustrations for National Lampoon—the happier I was to know that the biographies of these remarkable women would soon be widely available.

Of course, getting all these great anecdotes to appear on Wikipedia presented somewhat of a challenge.  After a few meetings with Shelley, and with the patient help of several Wikipedians over live chat and page discussions, I mastered the basics of WikiMedia editing.  I learned how to create sections within articles, make bulleted lists, insert block quotes, and, most fun of all, hyperlink to other Wikipedia articles.

Creating hyperlinks led to a fair amount of insight into the Pop Art landscape on Wikipedia.  It was interesting to see which personalities of the 1960s art world were well represented, and which were not.  I was hard pressed to find a male Pop artist who didn’t have a Wikipedia page.  Even the gallerists who represented them, men like Leo Castelli, Sidney Janis, and Arne Glimcher, merited their own articles. Meanwhile Jill Kornblee, a New York City art dealer who represented women artists like Drexler and Kurt in the early 1960s when male gallerists simply would not, remains without a page. Even the Wikipedia entry for Pop Art, which traces the style’s evolution in five different countries and tells of myriad male artists’ accomplishments, makes only passing reference to two women artists—Niki de Saint Phalle and Marisol.  On this page, I added several more women to the list of “Notable artists” included towards the end, a small and admittedly insufficient remedy for the glaring omissions in the text above.

The artists featured in Seductive Subversion deserve to be better integrated into the narrative of Pop Art, in text books, on museum walls, and, yes, even on Wikipedia.  What I’ve done is simply lay the groundwork for their presence on this popular site, in the hopes of generating deeper interest in their lives in work amongst visitors to our exhibition and the general public alike. The pages featured on the iPads in our galleries, like all Wikipedia pages, are continually being updated.  Already Wikipedians have begun contributing to the pages I created just a few weeks ago.

I encourage you all visit these articles, but more than that, I hope you will join us in the project of revising Wikipedia to be ever-more inclusive and mindful of its lacunae.

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This post is part of a three-part series on Wikipop.

Where’s the technology in this gallery?  Nicely hidden on the column (at right) with the iPad installed on a shelf so visitors are not drowned in mounted screens upon entry.

Let’s start with Wikipedia.  To get the research into the hands of the biggest audience possible, updating Wikipedia made the most sense.  After all, more people go there for information than any other source, so why not take the information we have and make a contribution where it will count? Over the past several months, Rebecca Shaykin, has been working to update the Wikipedia articles on the 25 artists featured in the exhibition.  Rebecca is going to talk a little bit more about this process in the next post.

iPads are installed on shelves in several locations throughout the exhibition and two units are provided in a seating area as well.

Once we updated the Wiki, the question became how to get that back into the gallery in an unobtrusive way.  For the first time, we’ve installed iPads in the gallery and we are using the Wiki API to grab the appropriate data and bring it into the in-gallery interactive.   iPads are installed on shelves (much like what you see at the Apple store), so visitors are not surrounded by potentially distracting mounted screens.  Hardware is installed in various locations throughout the exhibition, so people can stand near the works and browse the Wiki.  In addition, we’ve got a couple of iPads in a lounge-like seating area for a more comfy browsing experience.

For some technical nitty-gritty, we are using the wKiosk app on the iPads to kiosk-ify the browsing experience.  We custom designed and manufactured pieces to sit over the home button and power buttons, so visitors can’t accidentally break out of the kiosk environment.  We are using the same alarm system (SK-T6X-W from Se-Kure) used in the Apple store to prevent theft, but still allow the devices to be picked up and played with.  Beau Sievers worked to create an iPad-like browsing experience using HTML and is going to post about the technical ins and outs and release some code we think may be helpful to others.

Wikipedia on the iPad using Beau’s BklynFlow to retain iPad-like navigation.

So, what are we looking to learn from this?  First, we’d like to see if visitors want this much information in an exhibition setting.  The interactive uses the 25 artist articles as a starting point, but visitors have access to the entire wiki from there.  Most educators and interpretation staff will say less is more and tend to favor a more guided learning experience, but that’s counter to the web.  When providing a web resource in the gallery, do visitors want more control over the information they browse? Second, we’d like to see how visitors react to this type of hardware and how we’ve installed it.  Does this provide a better user experience both for the people who want to use it and those who’d rather not be distracted by tech in the gallery setting?  Should we be using this type of low-impact equipment in more places throughout the museum?  Third, we are going to be looking at browse statistics and how they differ when people are standing near objects versus when they are sitting.  Does a seating area mean visitors spend more time with the devices or do people really want to have the information near the works of art?

We’ll report back on our findings after the show closes.  In the meantime, come see this fantastic show, play with this new system and tell us what your own experience is when using it.  Of course, you can also browse Wikipop online and if you hit that link on your own iPad, you’ll see what visitors are seeing in the gallery.

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This post is part of a three-part series on Wikipop.