Out of Sync: Curation, participation and reactional pathways

Abstract

Refracting the theoretical problems of participation and synchronization through the concept of visitation, this article explores the connections relating personal experience, curation and digital practices within collectivizing gallery environments.

Crossing between motional exploration and active the making of art and theory, the project described employs unobtrusive and accessible digital technology to trace and display as 3D visualizations in space and time visitors' engagements with and individual reactions to contemporary visual art exhibitions.

In a museological culture where the relative success of exhibitions is often measured according to attendance numbers and visitor demographics, a more thorough evaluation is facilitated by modelling quantitative data, obtained through new media observation techniques developed collaboratively with computer science and e-Research scholars.

Relating visitors' personalized routes and interface with exhibited objects and locations, this data is subsequently presented through visualization in the Google Earth platform. The images produced enable the comparison of visitors' movements and interactions and communicate something about visitor participation within exhibition environments.

Exhibiting not synchronism but rather multiple distinctive performances generated by the visual art works on display, these visualizations occupy a theoretical position between an historical ontology, associated with the static museum, and a philosophical ontology of performance, associated with movement and disappearance.

Investigating the ways in which spatial layouts, in conjunction with deliberate curatorial actions, affect the course and intensity of visitors' participations, the images reveal divergent visitor actions as functional and productive.

Mobilising a graphic communication of transient data, each visualization facilitates multiple perspectives and the construction of extended models of participation, in terms particularly of the forms of deviance and creative agency possible within a framework of exhibition directives.

Notes

¹ The visualization process was developed collaboratively with and supported by Dr Stuart Dunn, King's College London. The data capture software was designed with Dr Nicolas Gold, University College London.

² With thanks to the Courtauld Gallery, London, and, in particular, Dr Barnaby Wright, Dr Caroline Campbell and Kerstin Glasow for facilitating this project, providing architectural plans of the gallery and discussing with me the benefits and influence of the methodology and visualizations in relation to display practices (Kerstin Glasow, personal communication, 18 March 2011).