Thesis Meetings: 2/18/14

Most of this week's meeting with Scott was spent discussing my presentation for the critique this Saturday.

Here's a summary:

My shift in perspective is key.
The roots of my current investigation are in the way that people who are blind experience an art museum and how that experience could be improved. Originally, I wanted to create experiences through which people who were blind could access art from different pathways.

But, I realized that access is limited for a lot more people that I originally was considering. I shifted from designing something for a specific user group, to designing something for the general public. By representing works of art through different mediums, people can access them from new perspectives and are bound to see or learn something new.


There are different 'driving forces.'

One of the things I noticed from my research last semester was that people, blind or not, have different reasons for going to museums. This may seems obvious, but it was something I hadn't considered until I fully investigated the experience from another's perspective. I go to art museums because I like how museums smell, I like how quiet and reflective they can be, and I like knowing that I am in the same physical space as the work of masters. I am a visual learner; I look closely at how things are made.  My driving forces for going to museums are atmosphere and visual discovery.

When you consider a typical art museum experience (moving through galleries looking at art, perhaps with an audio guide and perhaps with a docent) you realize how limited it is in terms of learning methods and the story told.

Taking the idea of "driving forces" and the thought that if you offer access through at least three pathways, you can greatly increase the number of people who will get a certain level of aesthetic pleasure from the work. I decided on different buckets and came up with a number of different in gallery experiences that would, hopefully, offer a way to approach the art from new directions.

I'm not trying to compete with the original

I realize that my representations are partial, incomplete, impoverished, but that is okay. I am not trying to create the exact experience of handling a masterpiece. My probes are about adding dimension the the current gallery/museum experience, which itself quite impoverished.

There are mediation factors we cannot avoid: single perspective (from the curator), crowds, shadows, light on glass, velvet ropes, lack of information known, lack of information presented.

Museum pieces are rarefied objects far removed from the moment of creation and this project presents these objects from different perspectives. Through my explorations, I hope to make some of the invisible, perceivable.