The
Portland Art Museum’s new installation, Object Stories, is intended to explore the relationship between
people and things. By the use of still photos and audio these relationships are
presented on a website. One of the museum galleries is the site for the
community to come and document their story about their object.[1]
The museum website has online options for viewing the process of the
installation, along with the images representing the layout of the gallery
space.[2]
An
audience’s experience using the internet is a socially engaged behavior, which
differs from the traditional relationship of a museum’s audience and museum’s
static objects. While the online presence of Object Stories offers an interactive platform for both types of
socially engaged art and new media art this interaction is at a distance.[3]
The internet aspect implies a distance in the viewers connectivity to the
project. The online experience places a more passive engagement upon the
viewer. The hybrid status between the use of new media and the Object
Stories project is demonstrated
by the Portland Art Museum having a site-specific area. [4]
It is a gallery for participants to collaborate with the process. This information pertaining to the process
is presented on a museum’s webpage that is listed under the “learn” section as
well as the “about” and “how to tell your story” section of the Object
Stories website.
In
the “Introduction/ Viewers as Producers” of the Participation book, Claire Bishop references Jacques
Rancière’s unpublished essay The Emancipated Spectator concerning the “active” and “passive” assumptions
of spectatorship. Rancière’s argument is for a need of a third term in which both
“active” and “passive” is considered with spectatorship. The third term concept
can be initiated by no division of an audience, with a presupposition of
equality, and the unattachment to a privileged artistic medium. These are an
invitation to individual translation beyond the author’s appropriation of the
work.[5]
My
blog post will use the third term of “attention” in my descriptions of online
experiences. The word “attention” is demonstrating the act of applying my mind
or I am concentrating on a situation or object. My attention will be focused on
the Portland Art Museum’s web content of visual representations, audio, and
text. The cyberspace presentation and site-specific gallery video documentation
employs media outside of the traditional art history canons.[6]
The equivalency of citing a first person perspective is to give a personal
account as a spectator with an online experience.
I
will refer to the use of language by relating it to media content. The three
terms, interaction, participation, and collaboration, will be referenced with
my online museum experience. These words are cited as catchall phrases for
contemporary art in the “Participative Systems” section of the Rethinking
Curating book. In my text, I
will focus on using documentation pertaining to the physical interactions with
digital devices and new media participative systems.[7]
I have considered the use of language in this blog post to contribute to the
scholarship of interdisciplinary studies and expand upon contemporary art
terms.
The
word interaction is depicted for the physical state of a person reacting with a
computer by pressing keys that triggers sensors in a computer program. The
audience experiences with these computer programs are linked with complex and
evolving reactions. These experiences are formed with personal interaction of
choice, navigation, control, and engagement from the options on the website.[8]
I am physically and actively pushing keys on my laptop computer to chose
visuals, texts, and audio that are presented on the website. My attention to
how I interact with these specific features is determined by the layout and my
personal interest to the themes of the museum webpage.
An
example of how I use my attention to navigate and engage with the “stories”
section of the Object Stories
website is being conscious of the text and images that are displayed on the
rectangle tile layout. The tile layout presents the black color side of the
rectangle with a white text theme. When I place the curser on the rectangle and
click the selection bar on my touchpad area of my computer the rectangle flips
to the opposite side. This side displays a still image of a person and their
object.
My
visual engagement with the text and images directs my personal interest. This
is a deciding point if I will continue to the next window of the webpage to
find out more about the person and their object. At this moment is where the
term participation can be implied with physically choosing by the computers
keys the next detailed information section of the website. My attention is
directed toward participating with the context of the person and their object.
The subtle activity of my senses is focused on the presentation of the audio
and visual. All these factors are supplementing my online museum experience and
referencing Rancière’s argument of the capability of inventing my own
translation.
This
is my translation of a chosen story from the many displayed on the webpage. I
am presenting this as a stream-of-consciousness narrative writing exercise that I did right after the
presentation of Take A Ride Change Your Life by Edna – Alice White.[9]
This is intended to capture the main focal points from my attention on the web
page presentation.
I
wanted to know what kind of ride and where and how would it change a life. The
first visual I saw I enjoyed her curly brown hair and golden hooped earrings.
She told about having to give up her personal car and ride the bus as her main
transportation. My memory is of a time when I had car problems and needed to
rework my schedule and learning the bus schedule. I had to consider time
differently just like she did and give up my personal space on the road. She
mentioned the interaction with others. I thought of visuals of the diversity of
people and the new sounds on the ride. Also the wonderment of where everyone
was off too, but I missed my car radio. A small cardboard bus is what she is
holding Of course – she couldn’t bring the real bus. She holds it with care and
in one photo she is hugging it next to her red sweater she is wearing. She is
living the experience of every ride on the bus. It is not just as a routine to
get somewhere.
In the “Participative Systems” section the term
collaboration is identified with the “production of something.” This identification
is related with the collaboration between people, which could be a combination
between artists, curators, or non-artists.[10]
The Object Stories project is
the collaboration between Portland Art Museum’s staff and the participants from
the surrounding community. The visual and audio presentation of people and
their objects on the Object Stories webpage is the “production of something” from the collaboration. The
public and myself view the continual collaboration’s production via the
internet.
I have utilized my online museum
experiences to establish a new media perspective of spectatorship beyond the
singular placement of passive engagement as a viewer. The approach of using my
third term “attention” contributes to the dialog of “active” and “passive”
assumptions of spectatorship. This online type of audience participation does
have its limits with the interaction of physical details of the people and
their objects, along with the use of my other senses. Writing my experience in
the first person with the combination of descriptive terms for socially engaged
art and new media art develops a personal user perspective from the
Mid-Atlantic area of the USA of the Portland Art Museum’s Object Stories.
[4] Ibid, 120
[5] Claire Bishop, Participation
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006) 15 - 16
[9] http://objectstories.org/stories/#!/
[Accessed: May 10, 2013].
