Object, museum, and machine

The Harvard Art Museums are on the verge of their grand re-opening, and we at metaLAB couldn’t be more excited. This would be true even if we weren’t working with the museums on a number of engaging fronts—in particular in the Lightbox Gallery, a lapidary media space nestled high in the lantern atop the Renzo Piano-designed new wing. metaLAB has been working with museum staff on design thinking for the Lightbox Gallery since Spring 2012; in the last few months, we’ve been developing a media-and-data-animated experience for visitors, making use of the room’s large display panel and projection system. A key part of that experience is the “object map,” a sortable, interactive visualization of some 1800 objects on display in the museums’ galleries—the reflection of which appears to float in the vertiginous space of the Fogg Museum’s Calderwood Courtyard in the image above.

Our project in the Lightbox Gallery is meant to help museum-goers explore how contemporary visual experience is transformed by digital media. Images now come to us morphed and animated, remixed and glitched, in a flood of file formats, every time we browse the web or use a mobile device to encounter art. These high-tech images are never perfect surrogates for the original objects (which are technology themselves, patterned with their makers’ skills, beliefs, and aspirations). And yet through their agency, we find ways to fill our lives with art.

At a preview event last Sunday evening, I had the chance to spend a couple of hours sharing the object map with museum professionals in attendance. I found it enlivening to talk about differences between the objects the computer sees—strings of alphanumerics contained within curly brackets—and objects that are fashioned by human hands, framed by ever-shifting notions of value and desire, and yet invested with a glamor and power that abides. While both machines and humans interact with objects, then, we do so in different ways. For machines, symbols are widgets—chocks and levers for making systems of computation move; for humans, symbols are banners we follow, desires we defer, the glimmers that haunt our nights… whether in fact they’re widgets as well at some deeper level doesn’t matter very much when it comes to how we forge them, seek them, and treasure them up. Do paintings likewise burn in the secret dreams of our web browsers? Perhaps—but if so, they appear there as streams and strings of data. The object map allows visitors to pry open the boxes where the machine keeps these strings and streams, to observe how craftily they thread through the ways we keep, experience, and value works of art. Thanks to the craft and ingenuity of metaLAB team members Jessica Yurkofsky, James Yamada, and Krystelle Denis, the project offers us the chance to experience these relations in the making, embodied through beautiful objects and images, rather than through words (like mine!) alone. We hope you’ll pay the Museums a visit soon after opening—and that when you come, you’ll give the Lightbox Gallery a test drive.