If you read our blog, chances are you will really like the NCMA blog, which gives a behind-the-scenes look at the goings on direct from staffers—it’s definitely in my own feed reader and I love the opportunity to get to know the people working there. Chad is no exception—though we’ve never met, I know him well enough through his blogging to not be surprised at all when he, after seeing the above video, sent along a note that said “I’m now imagining our painting out in the wilderness, having adventures.”  Nice : )

[edit!  Valerie is taking questions via our blog.  Leave a comment and she’ll answer when she checks in!]

Seher Shah (Pakistani, b. 1975). Interior Courtyard 2, 2007. Graphite pencil on white, medium weight, wove paper, 80 x 120 in. (203.2 x 304.8 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Purchase gift of Dr. Margaret Hammerschlag and gift of Donald T. Johnson, by exchange, 2008.4. © Seher Shah. Photograph courtesy of Bose Pacia, New York.

Part of her “Jihad Pop” series, the layered imagery merges private imagery, iconic Islamic spaces, and universal geometric forms. Seher’s visit provided a wonderful opportunity to hear her insightful−and impromptu—comments about the piece.

Luckily, we all had plenty of cameras to document the moment and Carolyn was gracious enough to give us a quick on-camera video interview about what in the world she was doing. So, now, meet the conservator:

Having trouble viewing the video? It’s also up on YouTube.

black list by neenna via Flickr.  All Rights Reserved.

Stats

Let’s take a look at the basic statistics.  During the show’s four month run, visitors recorded 482 videos, 236 of which made it to our Black List Project YouTube channel.  Of the 236 that were published on the channel, 96 made it to the Brooklyn Museum favorites playlist.  We had 43,386 video views overall, but keep in mind one video (recorded by one of our security guards) was seen over 23,000 times when it was featured on YouTube during MLK day. Also, the channel was given non-profit status at YouTube which means auto-play is activated for videos featured on our channel and this will raise the view count.

Moderation

The project required a sizable amount of moderation.  Videos went live throughout the day and were post-moderated in the evenings.  Depending on how many videos were recorded, moderation took between 5-15 minutes per day.  When we had higher volume at Target First Saturday, we’d see anywhere between 40-80 videos recorded and this moderation required an hour or two. Interestingly, we received some of our best comments during Target First Saturday and the ratio on those days was much more signal than noise, so even in the volume, it felt worth it. Moderated videos fell into three areas and I’ve left a few of these live so you can get a chuckle:  1) kids goofing off 2) adults goofing off 3) people who would press record and walk away.  There were also more than a few instances of will our hardware make it out of this experiment alive!!??! Only one video was removed because it violated our comment guidelines. Typically, we don’t moderate this heavily, but on this particular project we decided to do so because wading through video content to get to decent recordings is a lot more difficult than scanning text comments for gold.  As someone who did almost all of the moderation on the project, I can tell you it’s a time-consuming process and not one that I’d want to put our web visitors through.  We toyed with the idea of letting the community moderate itself at YouTube (ratings were left on), but we ran into issues there.   For starters, we didn’t have enough traffic to the channel to generate enough ratings on all the videos.  You can see what happens when you look at most viewed.  Some videos were seen a lot (due in part to our featuring the videos in different ways) and others were not seen much at all—had we left all the content, I have a feeling the view numbers would have plummeted out of sheer viewer frustration.

We ran into one significant issue along the way and this is something I was prepared for in my head, but perhaps not in reality.  I was surprised by how many members of the community were sharing racist statements at YouTube (we have never had this problem on other platforms). *wow* can only describe some of the comments that were deleted because they were in such clear violation our comment guidelines.  Only one video was deleted due to a violation in guidelines, but the opposite was true on YouTube, where in my entire career, I have never deleted more comments or blocked so many users. We have a very high threshold, so just know this problem was significant.  There was something about the subject matter of the show, what we were asking and how people were responding, combined with this particular on-line community that generated a lot of issues in this arena.  Now that the show has closed, we will go in and turn off comments on every video and that’s a first for us.

Technical Issues

We had a some technical trouble (crashing, sound mismatches, pixelated capture) in the early videos. We solved it by prioritizing traffic on that part of the LAN and enabling flow control at the switch side. So you need a strong LAN infrastructure where you can tweak a bit if you are seeing problems.  I would not try this over a wifi connection.  We also found lights were needed and we grabbed those at Ikea for very little money.

Archiving 

I don’t have a great answer for this.  Because the videos are uploaded directly to YouTube, archiving them becomes a manual process where we use free tools to download the files back to our systems.  This is a time-consuming process, so we will probably only do this for the ones that made our favorites list.  In addition, the channel and some of the videos with comments and ratings will be screenshot.  The channel itself will stay up for as long as it can be there—we have no plans to remove it.

Success? 

Yes, but there’s more we can do next time.  This was a very simple system which cost us very little in actual dollars.  As low-fi as it was, it worked well to provide something that we couldn’t have afforded otherwise. Staff time was needed for moderation, but other than the volume at Target First Saturday, the time needed to be accounted for, but was not overwhelming.  I will never forget seeing more than one visitor in tears when expressing themselves at these kiosks. Browse through these videos to get an idea of why this was so great.

Given the amount of moderation, I don’t think we’d use these often, but when we have a really important question we want to ask, it will be worth considering.  If I had to do it all over again, I’d make sure we had our favorites playing in the gallery alongside the recording area, so people could get inspired by what others had to say—closing the loop and bringing the voices back into the gallery. For the record, our Education Department was advocating this from the start, but given the time constraints we were under, we couldn’t make this part of the first round.  Nina Simon also has some good reasons for it here that you may want to read.  In a future instance, we’d ideally leverage the YouTube API to allow people in the gallery to comment on and rate the existing videos, but that’s a pretty large project for another day.  For now, we were happy with and learned a lot from this first try.

So, the idea was pretty simple: the curators of Burning Down the House: Building a Feminist Art Collection wanted our visitors to hear directly from the artists in the exhibition, so we set out to create a series of videos that would play on iPod Touches in the gallery. As most people reading this blog already know, we don’t have a lot of resources here (read: staff time) to produce video, so we needed a way to do this project without putting too much of a strain on the department. We purchased a bunch of Flip Video cameras and the curators set out to film short interviews with the artists—check these out. We were impressed with the quality of these cams, so if you are looking for a cheap and easy way shoot some video this may be a good answer for your needs—worked for us!

The iPod Touch part of the project turned out to be a bigger problem. Why iPods? Well, they are cheap and small. We are all conscious around here that too much technology can compete with the work on view and the Touches were a good fit. Small enough to be installed in a way that does not overpower the visitor experience, yet large enough screens to watch the movies and built-in touch screens to navigate a list of movie files.

iPod Touch installed in Burning Down the House seen here with Marriage Bed, 2001. Edwina Sandys (British, b. 1938). Mixed media. Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Henry Luce III and Leila Hadley Luce, 2004.29.

We were hoping to find a Museum Mode that would work for the Touch, but it doesn’t exist yet. I guess this makes sense, it took Apple a really long time to release Museum Mode the first time around and it looks like we may be waiting just as long for a version to run on this newer hardware. Best answer we could find was to use the API to create an app, but that doesn’t work either—the API won’t let you lock down the device in a kiosk-like way. No Museum Mode? No API? What’s a museum tech department to do? Our solution is not perfect, but it’s not difficult to accomplish and if you drop us a line we can point you to some existing documentation on the web that helped us.

Now that we’ve got them in the gallery, we will be watching usability closely. Apple is pretty good about providing easy-to-use interfaces, but it remains to be seen how it will translate in a situation like this one. We’ve got a fabulous team of security guards to help get feedback. I’ll be doing some of my own observation in the galleries and will report back with our findings.

The idea was simple—we queried three of our Flickr peeps (Amy Dreher, Trish Mayo, Stephen Sandoval) to see if Photosynth interested them as much as it did us. Turns out, they were game and couldn’t wait to get their hands on it, so we started planning to shoot at Target First Saturday. Before the date, we did some early trials with existing photography— all were shots of the outside of the building and all were shot at different times of day and in different periods of our history. Photosynth couldn’t make heads or tales of it—I can hardly blame it, we were not trying very hard at this point either :) It was clear, Photosynth was going to demand new photography and a lot of it, so we had a plan. You can see our early trials here and here.

Oh wait, can you see those trials? No? Well, you are not alone. This was our biggest challenge with this application and the most important thing to talk about at this stage of the game. In order to view or make a synth, you have to download a client and that client only runs on PC. Supposedly, the client will run in Firefox, but I could only get it to run in Internet Explorer (not something I ever like to use). Installing was a bear, you have to be an admin to do it and it’s a typical Microsoft installer package (i.e., heavy-handed). So how much of a pain is this really? Well, it turned into a bit of a circus for us. Amy and Trish are both on macs (so am I). Stephen had a PC, so he was testing on his own account and he could see progress when we were testing at work, but Amy and Trish couldn’t. Amy came over one day to check it out on a Brooklyn Museum computer, but other than that it was impossible to do more testing. To top it off, no one at the Brooklyn Museum has admin access to their computers, so they can’t even see the result of this work! Inside folks reading this—don’t call helpdesk—we shot some video to help you out. It’s hard to explain how silly I find it that I had to shoot this lo-fi video to show this off, but so be it. You do what you have to in order to make content accessible and I’ll get off my high-horse for now—Photosynth is early in the dev cycle, so fair enough.

Video and more after the jump (this is going to get long, sorry folks)…

So, if you have the client installed you can get to our Brooklyn Museum profile where we’ve been playing and Stephen has a couple of his Brooklyn Museum synths on his own profile. I’m going to look at two of these synths in the blog.

Photosynth the Brooklyn Museum from Brooklyn Museum on Vimeo.

The first is the synth from Trish Mayo’s photos. It’s a 100% synthy and contains 17 photographs. This is beautiful and because there are fewer photographs it loads quickly and sharpens quickly. This was shot from one vantage point on the plaza. The second synth combines the photography that Amy Dreher was shooting with Trish’s shots. Amy took hundreds of captures from multiple vantage points, so you can really move around the plaza. I combined them with Trish’s shots and you can see layers of different people coming and going which is cool. At 407 photographs, it takes a while to load and each image takes a bit longer than I’d expect to sharpen. Both synths are an interesting contrast.

But all this has us thinking—here are a few thoughts from Amy: How is this better/worse than a normal video cam? Could this be used as a team tool? Could this work as a community project (like the spring video)? How do they maximize those qualities that make this different and not just imitate what already exists? Although I’m glad it worked, I’m wondering if it is not so exciting because most of the photos were shot mechanically (mine)?

Our experience with Photosynth indicated that it needed structured photography (see the how-to guide for an idea) and this does mean a lot of the spontaneity is gone. It could be an awesome tool if used in a collaborative way (as the demo of Notre Dame suggests), but with the current structure that is really difficult. Our original idea was to create an account and each photographer could upload their own photos into one synth, but that got canned when we found out you couldn’t add photos to an existing synth. It’s a one-shot-upload, for now which makes collaborative processing difficult. So given our experience, I think these are the things we’d like to see:

1. A more universal player, so more people can view the synth. If it has to be its own thing, then it would be great if it could work in most browsers and a light-weight plug-in would be optimal, so it could be installed by non-admin users.

2. A more universal client. If the heavy-weight client is needed to process uploads, working cross-platform would be good.

3. A way to add photos to existing synths and a versioning system so you could easily see what works and what doesn’t without having to re-upload.

4. A way to work collaboratively with others within the Photosynth site. If #3 can be solved, could you have Photosynth groups where people could join and submit their photos for collaborative synths? Of course, #1 and #2 would have to be solved to make this a viable and accessible option.

5. A way to work with historical materials and make them synthy (even if it means allowing manual mapping). One of the really interesting things this could provide is a way to see a how a building changes over time. Just like Graffiti Archeology has been doing, what if you could do the same sort of thing within Photosynth to show layers of a gallery changing or changes to our facade over time as you walked through a space? If you were really dedicated and had a lot of photography at your disposal, this could probably be done within the existing structure, but manual mapping could help connect the dots when the automated process can’t make heads or tails of something. We’ve seen our Flickr friends trying to synth some of our material in The Commons, but without much success (see example 1 or example 2). Sometimes a manual connect-the-dots can help piece together the puzzle, like in this example created by one of our Flickr friends from the same source material.

A lot of this is already under discussion in the forums, so I’m optimistic that it’s only a matter of time. It was a fun experiment and we are happy to have been able to take it for a spin to learn from it in these early stages. Bonus: We always have a great time whenever Trish, Amy and Stephen come by—many thanks for helping us out with this project and providing the wonderful shots to make it happen!

Photo by Trish Mayo. All Rights Reserved.

Video by Stephen Sandoval (with awesome Times Square street noise). All Rights Reserved.  [Hey, you need at least IE7 to see the vid, but use Firefox because it is better]

If you are in Times Square, check out Gilbert and George on the MTV 44 1/2, the high def screen on Bway between 44th and 45th Streets. The series curated by Creative Time show early works by Gilbert & George, A Portrait of the Artists As Young Men and The Nature of Our Looking, are from 1970 and 1972, respectively, and are timed to correspond with the Gilbert & George exhibition, on view from October 3 to January 11.

Schedule (subject to change) as follows:

Monday AM: 12:00, 1:00, 2:00, 3:00, 4:00, 5:00, 6:00, 7:00, 8:00, 9:00
Monday PM: 5:00, 6:00, 7:00, 8:00, 9:00, 10:00, 11:00

Tuesday AM: 12:00, 1:00, 2:00, 3:00, 4:00, 5:00, 6:00, 7:00, 8:00, 9:00
Tuesday PM: 9:00, 10:00, 11:00

Wednesday AM: 12:00, 1:00, 2:00, 3:00, 4:00, 5:00, 6:00, 7:00, 8:00, 9:00
Wednesday PM: 12:00, 1:00, 2:00, 3:00, 4:00, 5:00, 6:00, 7:00, 8:00, 9:00, 10:00, 11:00

Thursday-Sunday AM: 12:00, 1:00, 2:00, 3:00, 4:00, 5:00, 6:00, 7:00, 8:00, 9:00, 10:00, 11:00
Thursday-Sunday PM: 12:00, 1:00, 2:00, 3:00, 4:00, 5:00, 6:00, 7:00, 8:00, 9:00, 10:00, 11:00

So, why am I starting this post with the IMA? Well, we just produced a short video for our exhibition © MURAKAMI and while video is not something we tend to do a lot of at the Brooklyn Museum, we are very proud of this one. “Mr. Pointy Comes to Brooklyn” was inspired by the IMA’s “LOVE MOVE“. Shot in timelapse style, our new video documents the load in and assembly of Takashi Murakami’s sculpture, Mr. Pointy, which is now on display in the Rubin Pavilion throughout the run of the exhibition. One of the things we really liked about “LOVE MOVE” was the way the IMA combined different types of footage to produce a video that could really hold your attention. We worked with the same format, combining still shots taken from the ground with timelapse shots from the roof, then shifting to a true timelapse of the sculpture being assembled.

To get some of the footage, we set up shop on the roof of one of buildings across the street from the Museum. Bob (left) and Francesca (right) almost froze up there! This part of the load in lasted all day and they shot more than 2000 images to go into the final timelapse. Those of us on the ground kept joking that they looked like snipers on the roof. Many thanks to Victor, the superintendent of the building across the street. Not only did he arrange to get us access, he provided electricity so we could power our equipment all day.

Bob hard at work and cold!

After the first day, we all got to move inside to warmer surroundings. At the same time we were shooting, Ruby Washington, a photographer from the New York Times, was here capturing shots for a piece just published in our hometown paper. Check out her great flicks in Carol Vogel’s article. We’ve also got a series of shots of our own up on Flickr if you are into the close-ups.

The view down Washington Avenue was pretty cool…note the pigeons decided to oversee the shoot!

You may notice there’s no music in the video. We really wanted to use a track from mobygratis, but we were just shy of time needed to get the approval for the track and our request is still “pending”, so it’s a bit of a silent movie right now. Once the exhibition completes its run we will have to take the video off YouTube and the flicks off Flickr, but we are thrilled we can share them with you for this limited time. Thanks to The Nugget Factory for the inspiration! Daniel, now we need advice about how to make transitions that will look good when YouTube does its compression. It looks so much better when we host it.