Learning From Museums : Kate Talks with the SFMOMA Interactive Educational Technologies Team

Peter: I’m Associate Curator of interpretation, which is an interesting title and mandate. It includes both analog and digital affordances that are offered to our visitors as they come into the museum and into the galleries. Our goal is to help them have a really authentic and ideally full-bodied, cognitive, emotional connection with the art.

That’s a tall order and we’re nowhere near achieving it at this point. So that leaves us a lot of work to do, which is part of what’s interesting. We know that there are some people who come into the museum bringing an intellectual arsenal, or, if they are artists themselves, they bring a practical, viscerally learned vocabulary and a kind of kinesthetic understanding of the works. And then there are a lot of other people who never took an art history course and never studied art or practiced art themselves and who are quite bewildered by the array of very disparate objects on display on our walls and our floors.

So it’s our task to meet all these different visitors, some of them half-way, some of them a quarter of the way, some of them three-quarters of the way in order to enable and empower them to have a really authentic experience with the art that honors the art itself.

Kate: I know you’ve talked about the museum experiences, “visual Velcro” and the idea of “hooking” visitors. It sounds like psychology is part of the toolset that your team uses to build and create these engaging experiences. I love the Velcro metaphor. Can you tell us more about what that means to you? What are the implications for your team in designing these hook-like, Velcro experiences?

Peter: I think that the human mind is wired in a certain way to recognize and process certain kinds of things — like faces, bright colors and scale. These are things that go back millions of years.

Cloud Gate, Anish Kapoor

These are relationships in rapport with our own body and our physical experience in the world and so we’re attuned to remembering and retaining those things. They can give us an emotional as well as a cognitive jolt, and as a result they can hook into our psyche, our neurons, our neural structure. For example, artists that use either scale or some kind of facial representation as part of what they do hook into these ways of seeing. There are also easy hooks into the very large or the very small in terms of scale.

For example, the work of Anish Kapoor, and his “Bean” in Chicago (Cloud Gate) that enormous public sculpture that reflects the people’s own faces back as they look at it, but distorts them and changes them and transforms them and reflects their environment back. That has an impact on people. These are pieces that people can relate to without having an art education.

Then there are other works, like minimalism (I think of Donald Judd or Carl Andre). I think that unless someone has had training and understands something about the phenomenological premises that preoccupied these artists, a lot of people don’t know how to approach it. They actually don’t know “where the art is.” I think of these experiences as being more like Teflon: people just skate right by them.

Untitled, Donald Judd

10 x 10 Copper Square, Carl Andre

Erased de Kooning, Robert Rauchenburg

A lot of pieces in our galleries lack that immediate hook, so it’s up to us in some way to take a piece that is as minimal as Robert Rauschenberg’s Erased de Kooning Drawing and communicate why this would be an interesting project and even a compelling and courageous and dangerous project for an artist to undertake. It’s our job to restore the context that makes the artifact of that experiment compelling.

Kate: So, if the only hook an artwork has is based on a traditional way of looking, it can be harder to engage with. And works also have a whole constellation of different social or political connections that people may not know about. So other than the writing in a little square gallery card, how does your team work to activate these pieces and rile them up so that visitors have a visceral and emotional response: potentially to the context, if not to the work itself?

Peter: Obviously there are already far too many artworks in the galleries that don’t even have that little square gallery card. I mean they don’t even have a few sentences in that little square beyond the title, the artist, the date and the medium. Many of them don’t have any commentary at all so they really leave you up in the air. And then often the artworks themselves are untitled so if you’re looking to the title for a little bit of help or a hook that’s not gonna happen. But even if you take the classic case of an artwork with an extended object label (it’s what we call them in the museum) often those labels traditionally have been written to cover too much territory in too short a time. So they’re highly condensed, compacted and they make reference to lots of things that aren’t present in the gallery.

The Bather, Paul Cezanne

Torse de femme, Pablo Picasso

Here’s a classic example: say you’re viewing a Picasso cubist work and the label says, “Inspired by Cezanne,” well unless there’s a Cezanne there and you’re talking about what it is in Cezanne that Picasso was inspired by and unless someone can look over there and actually see it then you’re not helping the untrained visitor.

So what we do with multimedia is we unpack that paragraph. We’ll create a multimedia piece that may be two or three screens, and each of those screens might have several examples of other artworks that create a world in which this kind of artwork that we’re standing in front of could be born… could in a sense come into being, and the semantic constellation in which this artwork lives. And so without ever saying “what this artwork means” per se we create a network of influences and ideas that are afoot at the time when this artwork is made. This may include the artist’s prior works, where the art and artist was going next, peers, what this artist was looking at and thinking about, what the issues were, etc. Then you are able to encounter the artwork on its own terms.

Kate: That’s a lot to be responsible for. I know that part of the role of your team is to develop the educational technologies such as kiosks and screen-based tools that help people experience the “semantic constellation” as you say. How do you decide “This is the experience that we think is going to meet people wherever they are and help them get engaged with this work.”

Peter: My initial take is that we look at the art and on a certain level we have to listen to ourselves. If we’re unfamiliar with this particular artist we say what our own questions are. But we have to go beyond our own questions, so we have to imagine ourselves as naive eye viewers entering the gallery and being confronted by the art — say like a three inch piece of rope hung 40 inches above the floor. We have to ask “What would be the questions that that a person would have around this?” You know, questions like “why is it art?” “Why should I care?”

These are inevitably underlying questions for much of contemporary art practice because it’s so much out of the zone of mass media culture. So you need to create a way to communicate “Why is it compelling?” Why was it compelling to the artist to make this particular concrete form? These are two different worlds we’re coming from. We’re serving as bridges between these visitors who might just be bewildered (and maybe vaguely hostile) if they’re not met halfway, because they think there’s a hoax that’s being perpetrated on them. And the artists who are in fact, intensely involved, who are very intelligent, very creative, individuals who are completely dedicated to whatever it is that they’re pursuing as their particular path through the art world and their own creative career. And so the question then becomes “Why would someone who’s not perpetrating a hoax, but who’s actually perfectly serious and engaged and wonderfully and delightfully immersed in some kind of a creative path, why would they choose this particular form of expression to be the stuff, the fabric of their life for years on end? What keeps it interesting for them?” So our job is to mediate between these two worlds that normally don’t talk to each other.

Tana: We decide the big questions that we think people are going to grapple with. Are they specific works, are they aesthetic issues, are they cultural context issues? Are people really going to want to know the story? Do they need to know more about how to look at the piece to make sense of it?

We break the issues down into various kind of buckets of questions, and then we construct narratives around them. We try and tell stories because we know that people like stories, like to learn. People like to have context so we work really hard to just define what those questions might be, and then we build out those questions with additional images, brief text, video clips, audio clips, any kind of media that we can support, and that can address the question.

Peter: For example, interviews with the artists.

Tana: Right. People love stories, first and foremost. They love to hear what people think, what others have to say and what people think about the art. And they love to hear from the voice of the artist. That’s probably the thing they like the most. So whenever possible we will include the voice of the artist in whatever feature that we’re designing, because we find that the artist is the primary source, and we know that we’re here to help implement the vision for their work. So whenever we possibly can we, we feature the artist’s voice.

Peter: To add to that, I think that when visitors actually see the artist an enormous wall crumbles. When they actually hear the artist and they see them as a person as opposed to as a kind of “invisible cipher behind the wall” then it’s all of a sudden human-to-human, and there’s an inherent kind of sympathy and relief that there’s a real person who’s thinking about issues that they can express and that the viewer can understand.

Kate: I’m curious to hear your thoughts on how these stories impact the voice of the museum. Institutions, and particularly cultural institutions often speak with a voice of authority. How do you express the voice of the actual institution when you’re focusing on bridging visitors and the art?

Peter: That’s a very good question. On the one hand, whether we want to or not, we’ve got an authority voice and we acknowledge that. But we try not to be mono-vocal, and we try not to restrict that voice to one single approach or one single narrative. We try to make a complex weave of different threads so that it actually feels like you could approach this artwork on many different levels.

Tana: I think that in the past 20 years, the museum voice has shifted a lot. I really do think that the museum has started to understand that visitors need to hear from more than just the authoritative museum voice. That’s why we got so interested in podcasting, because we found it easy to produce audio that could engage a lot of different voices around art and artwork — not just people from inside the institution such as curators, but artists, performers, writers, students, young people, all kinds of different people we’re really interested in hearing from. And so we really try to create a collective narrative about questions the work, instead of maintaining an authoritative voice.

Kate: It sounds like the whole nature of the museum experience is shifting from being about providing answers to asking the right questions.

Tana: Yeah. I think that we’ve always known that. This goes back to the focus on teaching: give people the skills to be able to stand in a gallery on their own. Give them the four things that they need to know to walk through and make meaning of the works, even if they only make meaning in a few pieces. We know they’re not going to necessarily make meaning in a whole show unless it’s an easy show, like a Calder or maybe Magritte.

Big Crinkly, Alexander Calder

Personal Values, Rene Magritte

Repressia, Matthew Barney

Not easy, I shouldn’t say that word. Accessible is the word. If you have a more challenging exhibit, like a Matthew Barney show, what are the skills that you can give people to experience the show, and what are the questions that you can help them ask themselves without necessarily providing a didactic “correct” answer.

We’ve been on the forefront of this idea of inquiry, allowing visitors to own their own interpretation and to not tell them the right answer. To do this, you have to think a certain way. We try to give backstory because I think backstory supports what Peter said: If people feel like they’ve seen a human, if they’ve seen the artist in their studio grappling with these issues, then there’s an ah-ha moment and the visitor might have more generosity toward the difficult work of art or a less accessible work of art.

Peter: The inquiry is what makes a difficult work of art turn into a solution.

Frieda and Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo

Tana: Yes, and even for more accessible artists, like Frida Kahlo. She’s probably one of the most accessible artists. Even though people walk through that show and just breathe in Frida and her amazing work, life and story, they want to find out more about her life and what she cared about, her politics. People just love to know about the artist.

Peter: It’s the hungry mind stage of aesthetic literacy.

Tana: Right—and the really wonderful thing about artists like Kahlo that have become icons, is the many creative responses to her output. There’s a whole other layer of visitor participation and we’re trying to bring this into the galleries as well, just to kind of show that this artist has created a whole other movement in relation to her life and her work.

Peter: Frida-mania.

Tana: Yeah, It’s thirty years after her death, and she’s still so influential. It’s really exciting.

Peter: I want to underline that the sense that art history and aesthetics are only one way to discover meanings about the works museums display. Everyone brings their own experiences, and there are other kinds of ways to make meaning. Finding ways to find the thing that rises up within people when they are faced with an artwork. This is the stuff we end up eliciting and soliciting when we do an interview in the gallery or an Artcast. We hear amazing insights, including people who lived through the times that the artwork is depicting and have very personal stories. It’s riveting in a way that no art historian could ever conjure. People share — and you can mesh that with a quote, or an interview clip from the artist or from a curator, and it triangulates and amplifies the resonance of the work in a beautiful way.

There’s a conference in Minneapolis called “Learning in Museums” and we’re going to be talking all about this, with an emphasis on the role of technology and informal learning in the museum setting. Topics like balancing what technologies you put in the galleries, what you put outside the galleries, and what you can put on the web. What kind of menu of affordances we can offer to our visitors to provide the information that they need most to have the most meaningful experience and encounter with the artwork, just-in-time and on demand. It’s an artful mix. You know I feel like we’re still at the beginning of experimenting with these things even though we’ve been doing it for a number of years.

Tana: And you also want there to be a certain informality so that people feel that they can converse and can engage in dialog. So how do you create this environment that hopefully involves some technology, hopefully involves some comfortable chairs and involves some people, to create a space that is welcoming but isn’t overwhelming? That doesn’t make people feel like “oh, I don’t want to be here.”

Peter’s really at the forefront of this right now in our institution, looking at our galleries and asking “how could we do better?” How could we make our public feel more at home here and linger longer? To have more time, and give them more resources, i.e. seating, i.e. something to listen to or look at while in the presence of the art? And have these resources not in a corner without the art, but in the presence of it? I’ll tell you it’s not easy. There’s a lot of competition in the galleries for the art. I would say that it’s just evolving all the time.

Kate: I can see that it’s tricky because the more successful you are at providing these things, in a way, you’re moving farther away from the traditional mission of a museum. For example, if people are going there more for each other, for each other’s interpretations and the discussions around the art and less for the appreciation of the art itself. I can see that is a double-edged sword.

Peter: But frankly if the art serves as a trigger to really vital issues in people’s lives today I don’t think anyone would feel that’s a betrayal.

Tana: I agree.

Kate: That’s great to hear. I put this question out to both of you: If you could identify one thing that you think is important about immersive museum experiences now, what would that be? What’s the key idea that is your guiding star when you’re doing your everyday work?

Peter: Meet the visitors where they are. And that means if they’re at home meet them there: project the art ideas out to them via podcast. Even if they never come into the museum you’re already showing them that these objects on the wall aren’t just mute squares or rectangles. They are resonant with ideas and world views that are rich and complex and engaging and meaningful; these works can be meaningful to them as well. On the web obviously, we can do this with multimedia programs and rich media interactive features.

Then, when they come in the door you want to meet them by giving them access to tools for understanding things that they might not have brought the knowledge with them to understand. In each gallery you want to make sure that there’s some kind of section or gallery-level text that gives a sense of what story the curator is articulating here. Make the implicit explicit. Things like wall labels. These classic things aren’t to be dissed; they’re part of the puzzle.

Blossoms in the Night, Paul Klee

I think seating is vitally important because on the one hand, we espouse this idea of the authentic encounter with the artwork, but then we don’t take into account that we’re all in bodies and our bodies get tired and our legs get tired and our feet get sore. Paul Klee said “the first thing you need to do to appreciate an artwork is a chair,” and we don’t even give people that. So “meeting people where they are” can come to something as physical and concrete as just giving them a place to sit, so they don’t have to rush through the galleries because they’re just getting tired. This goes for our interactive kiosks as well. We don’t want to make them decide “do I click or am I too tired on my feet to explore three or five more minutes of material?” We always give them a chair for that. We should do at least the same for these artworks that we value so highly.

Perhaps having people in the galleries who they can be talking with if they’ve got questions and reflecting with about a work. We might help them have one more little insight that triggers their own experience in a new way, a la the docent tour if they’re lucky enough to be there when the docents are coming through. And at the end of a show how do they consolidate what they’ve just seen and answer their open questions, while those loops are still open, and before they get sucked into the thousand distractions of their life outside the museum? They came to the museum to refresh themselves, to get new ideas, to have new insights, to have some serenity, perhaps to have some reflective time. How do we allow them to really make the most of this?

Our visitor education center is an amazing resource where we’ve got artist interviews galore and deep interactive features. And then when they go home they can go back onto the web, look at our blog, or other things online. We have to figure out what the follow-ups are going to be, and some of that has yet to be invented. That’s my watchword: meet the visitors where they are, both physically and cognitively. Meet them cognitively where they are depending on what kind of history or idea scaffolding they bring with them (or the lack thereof) as we talked about before.

Kate: Interesting, that’s fabulous. And you, Tana, I’d love to hear what you’re thinking.

Tana: I would echo what Peter said. And I would very simply say that we’ve realized we can’t just offer a digital solution that’s off in the corner away from the art. We really realize now that we need to offer multiple analog and digital tools that are in the presence of the art, in order to really help our visitors connect the dots and to make meaning throughout their visit. We’ve grown our team from a small three-person team focused solely on the digital, to now having someone who is managing the gallery interpretation side of things. This means helping us create learning lounges, putting up interesting kinds of almost small exhibitions that are educational right in the gallery, next to or very near the artworks.

Peter: You’ll see that in the Frida Kahlo show.

Tana: Yes. We’ve fully embraced the new world of visitor experience and we’re really excited to get away from “just hoping they’ll come to us,” and instead, working to meet the visitors where they are.

Kate: Well this has been wonderful you two. I’ve enjoyed our discussion, and look forward to learning more about the SFMOMA visitor interpretation work at UX Week.

Peter Samis is Associate Curator of Interpretation at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA). In 1993, he served as art historian for the first CD-ROM on modern art, and then spearheaded development of SFMOMA’s Interactive Educational Technologies (IET) program. Since then, programs produced by the IET team have received wide recognition from sources as diverse as the American Association of Museums, the Webbys, Communication Arts, and I.D. Magazine. Samis is on the governing councils of two museum-focused open source initiatives: Pachyderm 2.0 and steve. Together with his team, Peter continues to produce innovative content for SFMOMA’s galleries, website, podcasts, and Koret Visitor Education Center.

Tana Johnson brings experience in video, teaching, and curriculum development to her position as Program Manager, Interactive Educational Technologies on SFMOMA’s IET team. The former Coordinator of School and Teacher Programs at SFMOMA, Johnson spearheaded highly successful youth arts programs: SFMOMA Teen Visionaries, High School M.E.D.I.A., and SFMOMA Matches. Currently, Johnson is co-directing a documentary film on self-taught African-American artists called No One Has Taught Me. Johnson graduated with distinction from San Francisco State University’s Inter-Arts Department in 1996.

Kate Rutter is a senior practitioner at Adaptive Path. She actively embraces the term “specialized generalist.” Her background in fine arts includes hands-on creation as well as a rather uncomfortable stint as a gallery guide. She’s committed to finding interesting ways for people to engage deeply with the practice of art-making as a way of making meaning in their lives.

1. Anish Kapoor
   • Cloud Gate
     Wikipedia
     Millennium Park
2. Donald Judd
3. Carl Andre
4. Robert Rauschenberg
   • Erased de Kooning Drawing, SFMOMA Collection
5. Pablo Picasso
   • A Hidden Picasso: SFMOMA Interactive Site
6. Cubism
7. Paul Cezanne
8. Alexander Calder
   • SFMOMA Exhibit
9. Rene Magritte
   • SFMOMA Exhibit
10. Making Sense of Modern Art: SFMOMA Interactive Feature
11. Matthew Barney
    • Drawing Restraint: SFMOMA Exhibit
    • Drawing Restraint: SFMOMA Interactive Feature
12. Frida Kahlo
    • SFMOMA Exhibit
    • SFMOMA Interactive Feature 1
    • SFMOMA Interactive Feature 2
13. Paul Klee
    • SFMOMA Exhibit
    • SFMOMA Interactive Feature 1
    • SFMOMA Interactive Feature 2

SFMOMA Interactive Technologies team

• About the Educational Technologies Team
• Open Space, SFMOMA blog
• SFMOMA Artcasts (podcasts)
• Paper: ‘Artcasting’ at SFMOMA: First-Year Lessons, Future Challenges for Museum Podcasters broad audience of use. From Museums on the Web
• Book: The Digital Museum : A Think Guide Published by the American Association of Museums
• Chapter in The Digital Museum : Visual Velcro : Hooking the visitor
• Paper: Gaining Traction in the Vaseline: Visitor Response to a Multi-Track Interpretation Design for Matthew Barney: DRAWING RESTRAINT