New Media Initiatives Blog

In the research process for Worlds Away: New Suburban Landscapes, Design Director and Curator Andrew Blauvelt uncovered many interesting words invented to describe suburbia. Andrew enlisted now-former Design Fellow Jayme Yen and Visual Arts Fellow Rachel Hooper to assist in the research for the exhibit, and to further research the lexicon of suburbia. To make the collecting of the terminology easier, we set up a private wiki for them to use.

The wiki of terms has transformed into the lexicon found in the Worlds Away exhibition catalog (soon to be found in the Walker Shop). We thought the lexicon would make a great resource, so it was decided to build it into a larger exhibition website.

Site URL: http://design.walkerart.org/worldsaway/

The exhibition website is still a wiki, and you can help enhance and add to the terms in the lexicon. Each entry in the lexicon consists of a definition, a section for images, and a google map. You can modify or enhance the definitions, or add new terms we might not know about. Images can be added to better describe the term. And map locations can also be submitted to give a satellite overview for terms that may best be seen from above (cloverleaf, for instance). We also added bios for all the artists in the exhibition, as well as a few sample essays and excerpts from other essays found in the catalog. Additionally, the selected videos from our YouTube competition can be found on the video section of the site.

The design of the site is drawn from the exhibition catalog design by Senior Designer Chad Kloepfer. The book uses different paper and ink colors in different sections to compartmentalize the types of content (essays, interviews, lexicon, and topics). The site also takes the book or paper metaphor and uses it as the navigation mechanism, allowing you to always see the index for the other sections of the site.

I wanted to enforce a rigours structure on the wiki, not let it grow out of hand, and only allow public edits in the lexicon section. Like our other wiki sites, this one is based on pmwiki, which allows for a rigorous permissions system. We’re using a few extensions, extended markup (for footnotes), Google Map API, NewPageBoxPlus, and DictIndex (for the lexicon list). Pmwiki is quite hackable, and the skin we constructed makes good use of that hackability. For the animation and accordion, I’m using my favorite javascript library, MooTools.

Please take some time to explore the site and enhance the lexicon of terms.

We’ve decided to extend the deadline for our open call for videos about the suburbs. The deadline has been extended a week to January 22nd. So if you ran out of time, you have a little more. To participate, upload your video to YouTube and add the tag "walkerworldsaway" or post it as a response to our call video (seen below). To be considered for gallery screening, entries must be 5 minutes or less and be online by January 22, 2008.

Here’s a playlist of some of the great submissions we’ve already received:

I’m very happy to announce that the Walker Design Department now has a blog. The designers have been working in stealth mode for a short while preparing posts and putting in a little content so that the site wouldn’t launch empty. In true design style, they’ve thought the format out very cleanly. Emmet lays it out in the first post:

Bulletin Board: These posts will alert you to upcoming design programming at the Walker such as the Drawn Here architecture lecture series, the Insights design lecture series, and design exhibitions like Worlds Away: New Suburban Landscapes. And you will respond en masse resulting in many ticket sales.

Flat Files: There are boxes and boxes full of postcards, flyers, brochures, posters, gallery guides, and other Walker ephemera that we would love to properly document and archive. Since we don't have the time to do that, we'll just pull out a few pieces each month and tell you who designed them, what the project brief was, and why we love them even after all this time.

Memos: Here we will call your attention to the history of our department, how our studio operates today, and design issues that we address on a daily basis. Like fonts and stuff.

Interviews: . . . with designers. Sample question: "If you were stranded on a desert island, which 10 typefaces would you take with you?"

Junk Drawer: A catchall category for link dumps.

Additionally, many of the recent design fellows will be (and have already been) blogging:

We've invited a whole slew of former Walker designers to contribute whenever and whatever they feel like--reporting from places as far as England, Holland, and Korea, as well as places more close to home like MCAD. We want to hear what they're working on now, what is interesting to them, who they think is stroking it, seriously downloading the uploader. Who knows what they'll write about. Not we.

There are already ten posts in the blog, so interested readers will have some insightful catching up to do. Here’s the URL: http://blogs.walkerart.org/design.

Last week, after quite a bit of work, the re-designed teens site went live:

(larger screenshot)

In discussing what a new site might be like with Witt, Christi and WACTAC, we came to the conclusion that the types of content we wanted to be on the site didn’t have a very clear relationship to each other, and that the audiences for each are different. There is, in effect, a “business audience”, which is visiting the site looking for information on what Teen Programs is, what they do, how to apply, etc. This audience most likely consists of parents, other museum professionals, and Teens looking to apply to WACTAC. The other audience are other teens, or others interested in what the teens are interested in. The new site literally divides the page in half for each of these audiences.

“The business side of things” is a simple information based site, loosely based on the look and feel artistic program sites. The layout was adapted somewhat to fit better into the dynamic space of the Teens site, but the style is the same. “The play side of things” is where the teens make their mark by posting blog entries, artwork, links and events. There are several different ways that WACTAC makes this page theirs:

• Blogging: the site’s back-end is WordPress, so blogging is built-in. Every teen in WACTAC now has an account, and Witt is working with the council to cultivate ideas that can be formed into posts.
• Links, for when the teens find something that isn’t quite worthy of an entirely new blog post, but maybe deserves a short note and a link, we’ve got that covered too. The links are culled from del.icio.us via RSS feed. Right now we use a shared wactac account, but in the future, and should any of the teens want to have their own del.icio.us account, a network can be set up and we can pull a combined feed.
• Events are highly important to the site as well, and these are pulled via RSS from a shared account on Upcoming.org. We wanted the teens to be able to not only highlight their events at the Walker, but non-WACTAC Walker events as well as non-Walker events. I looked into several systems to essentially create a group calendar, and using Upcoming in this way seemed the easiest. It is essentially a social bookmarking service like del.icio.us, except it deals with the temporal and location based data that an event has. The time and location is in the RSS feed, which makes it a cinch to pull and display.
• Art from the teens and other people that have influenced them will also be on the site. For the time being, this section is a category within the blog that gets special treatment. Images posted here are displayed in a larger size using a lightbox clone. Down the road, depending on how much this is used, we might consider replacing this with flickr. We’re using yahoo services for everything else, so why not make it complete?
• Customizing the interface is one of the features of the site that I think makes this page really the teen’s space. Much like myspace, the teens can customize the colors, text, and background of this side of the site. Unlike myspace, they don’t edit the CSS themselves. Instead, the theme includes an admin panel that allows the teens to pick the colors for the boxes and text, as well as change the header and background images. I’m using a handy color picker based on mootools to make it easy to use.

This is the most “dynamic” site I’ve built so far, and I re-learned a lot about using javascript, especially with the Mootools framework. The hyper-object-oriented nature of JS + moo is both confusing and extremely powerful. For a javascript framework, mootools is quite compact and does a lot. There are also quite a few classes and user-contributed scripts out there based on it. In addition to the color picker mentioned above, the business side of things uses a heavily modified version of SmoothGallery. This article on “The Hows and Whys of Degradable Ajax” was also helpful in figuring out how to do the ajax loading on the business side of things in a semi-accessible fashion.

There are other things in the works for the site, including a Facebook app and perhaps a MySpace widget. That is the subject for another day, however.

If you’re looking for the old site, it still exists in archived form: Arhived Walker teens website.

One of the first big projects I worked on when I came on board here was redesigning the Walker shop’s online storefront. This effort has now come to fruition and I’m happy to present the new Walker Shop. Here are some interesting tidbits about the design:

• The design makes heavy use of our identity system, Walker Expanded, as implemented on Shop materials, and extends this into the web version.
• The shop home page borrows the poster design metaphor from the main Walker homepage, since it works well to exemplify the different neighborhoods, and in the shop, item categories.
• Each of the item categories also have different photography in the header that closely tie in with the items as they are seen in the physical shop.
• In creating the design, I also did research on what information shoppers look for or need when shopping. The resulting pages are located in the bottom 3 columns on every page.
• The cart icon in the shop is from the Drunkery Love icon set and the plus icon is from urlgreyhot.

In terms of technology powering the site, we worked with EVT Retail to handle the back end work. EVT hosts the entire operation, but their software is able to talk to the point of sale system and inventory system that our shop uses. This means that the online shop has accurate knowledge of what items are for sale and how many we have left. Not every item that is in the physical shop is online, but there is much more available than the old shop. The new shop also talks to our membership database so patrons with memberships can also get their 10% discount (it shows up in the checkout process).

The Walker has had a flickr account for several months, but we have only been using it to hosting photos from Party People. That is changing. We’ve created two additional groups:

• Walker Art Center
  For photos of and around the Walker building.
• Minneapolis Sculpture Garden
  For photos in and around the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden.

The groups are something we’ve been meaning to create for a while, but seeing the Shelley Bernstein and Nicole Caruth present about the Brooklyn Museum’s use of flickr at MW2007 threw another dash of gasoline on our fire. During their presentation, Shelley told us to steal her idea. This is our start.

So if you have photos from your last visit to the Walker or the Sculpture Garden, and are a flickr user, please add them to our group. Not a flickr user? You can still browse as the groups grow. As of this post, there are already 117 photos in the Sculpture Garden Pool, but only 10 in the Walker Art Center Pool.

Some things many museums are concerned about with regard to user created photos on Flickr are photo policies and copyright. As moderator of these groups, we do need to watch out for photos that don’t fit within the photography policy of the Institution. The Walker does not allow photography in the galleries or of artwork. Photography of the building and architecture is allowed. The Sculpture Garden does allow photography, but it needs to be non-commercial in nature. The reasons for these policies are two-fold. First, while the Walker may own the art in the galleries, we don’t always own the copyright. Many of the artists in our collections are alive and still hold the copyright on their work. The Sculpture Garden is a public space so the same rules can’t apply. However, many of the works in the sculpture garden are still copyrighted by the artists. Fair use allows non-commercial use, but commercial use must be licensed by the copyright holder. Wedding photos and that sort of thing need to get a permit from the City of Minneapolis.

Legalities aside, I think our policy makes sense for a few other reasons. We’re more interested in the community aspects of seeing and attending the Walker. I don’t think taking a photo of work hanging on a wall documents that. We already have many of those in our collections database. Secondly, if we did allow photography in our galleries, it can be distracting to visitors and potentially damaging to the artwork. Robin told us that on her recent visit to MOMA, guards were constantly having to deal with visitors who used their flash while photographing artwork. The concentrated light in flashes can be damaging to some types of paint, not to mention distracting to other visitors. Thirdly, as much as I would love to take some macro shots of Charles Ray’s Unpainted Sculpture or Robert Smithson’s Leaning Strata, I would have to get too close to the work and probably would end up touching the work, which can also be damaging to the artwork. As a museum, we have an imparative to preserve the work for everyone to view.

At the same time, we know photos that don’t fit within our guidelines exist. It is possible to snap a photo when a guard walks out of the gallery, the same way it’s possible for someone to put their fist through a painting. We just can’t condone them and ask that people don’t submit them to our pools.

I manned the photobooth this past weekend for our monthly Free First Saturday event. It was a hit, and the photos are just about the cutest thing ever. I made a special point to make sure the camera was positioned lower so that little kids, which are generally shorter than adults, could fit in the frame. Adults had to crouch down.

Take a look at the resulting set on flickr. Prepare to say awwww.

If you attended the After Hours party for Heart of Darkness, odds are you might have participated in one of the 300-plus photos taken during the night. Another After Hours is happening again tonight, and PPP will be there for all the action.

This time around, the technical setup is more automated and much improved. Photos will be automatically uploaded to flickr during the party. You won’t have to wait for me to come into work the next morning, batch process them, and upload them. I’ll try to post some more technical details on the workflow next week, since it has taken a bit of debugging and might be useful for some to know.

In the meantime, you can find the photos in the Kara Walker After Hours flickr set, and also in the After Hours group pool. If you take any photos at the party with your own camera, add them to the pool!

Thursday, January 18, 7:00 pm, Walker Cinema

If you've visited the Walker recently, you've likely encountered the captivating animated dolphin, a creature that engages visitors in a dialogue about subjects ranging from the philosophic to the prosaic. The Walker-commissioned Dolphin Oracle II is the work of Minneapolis-based artist/designer Piotr Szyhalski, created in collaboration with Richard Shelton. A professor at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, Szyhalski works in a variety of media -- illustration, photography, typography, drawing, painting, sound -- which are often combined in installations, interactive media, and live performance. What remains central to his production is the insistence on the viewer as a "co-creator" of the artwork. Szyhalski will converse with Steve Dietz, director of ZeroOne: The Art and Technology Network and organizer of the recent exhibition Global Festival of Art on the Edge in San Jose, California. Founding director of the Walker's New Media Initiatives, Dietz has curated digital media exhibitions worldwide and has contributed to numerous publications and the recently published book Else/Where: Mapping -- New Cartographies of Networks and Territories.

This lecture will be webcast and archived on the Walker Channel.

A little over a week ago Walker staff moved from the temporary offices at One Groveland. We’re now mostly settled into our new spaces above the galleries. I took a few quick, unofficial shots of the new space and created a new office photoset on the Walker’s Flickr page. You may note that just a few month’s ago this was Robin’s office, but it has been transformed.

My general read on the new offices are that people are very glad to work in the museum again, because we take great pride in working for a cultural institution. It is much easier to feel that pride if you’re actually in the building.

We in New Media are very happy to be in closer proximity to the Dialog Table and Hennepin Signage servers. The trip has been reduced from a walk down the block to a walk around the corner. The break room is also popular due to increased fridge size, large windows, and abundance of coffee.

A user group for Max/MSP has been formed in the Twin Cities. The first meeting was last month at Acadia Cafe and from what I hear, it was a resounding success. Topics included getting Max/MSP to talk to Quartz Composer, motion tracking with jitter, and how to safely generate and save files from within max. There are some demo files on the group’s wiki to corroborate.

The next meeting is tentatively scheduled for Tuesday the 12th of December, once again at Acadia Cafe. I’ll be demoing how to use Max/MSP to talk to the command line using the shell external. I’ll show some of the techniques I used for the capturing component of Party People Photos, and give a brief intro to the command line (on OS X) and some possible areas of expansion. If you plan on attending, visit the group’s wiki and edit the page with your name to let us know you’ll be there.

The meeting is followed by the Tuesday Night Music Series for Improvisers and Experimentation, which is always an interesting experience. I’m very pleased to be a small part of the group and hope that it can contribute to new media art in the Twin Cities. If you know of any other user groups or gatherings like this, please post them in the comments.

We have made some small, though useful, changes to the blogs in the past few weeks and we think they’re worth a small note.

• Brent added the blog title to the blog aggregator page. Now it is much easier to tell what content goes to what blog. Additionally, post titles link to the blog post and the blog name to the front page for that blog.

• We’ve added the ability to display info about our blog authors. Authors are now listed in the sidebar in each blog. When you click our name you’ll be able to see our email address, personal or departmental URL, and a bio, if the author has elected to post one. Not all of our authors have updated their profile yet, but eventually you should be able to learn more about just who we are. Some of our authors have also elected to post photos.

  Eric posted about some of Jakob Nielsen’s weblog usabilty tips discussing author bios and photos. I agree with Eric that author photos are certainly not necessary, and we’re not requiring them for our authors. Those of us that are brave enough are breaking the ice and have posted photos. Please be kind. It just happened to work out that Party People Photos gives us some recent, high quality photography.

• Last week Paul posted the first in what we hope will be a more frequent audio blog series. We’re using the wordpress plugin WP-SingleMP3 to embed a nifty flash audio preview in the blog post, but also linking the mp3 audio so the category RSS feed can function as a working podcast.

We’re always looking for ways to improve the experience and information on the blog. If you have any ideas or constructive criticism you’d like to share, we’re listening.

Often in our posts we’ll include links to upcoming or current events at the Walker, but those events rarely if ever include links back to the blogs. We’ve always intended to go back into the events and add related links to the blog posts to help foster discussion, but it’s just one of those things that kept slipping off the radar.

Until now! I just finished writing an XML RPC ping server for Walker content and have set WordPress up to ping it every time we post. The ping server pulls the RSS feed and looks for links back to the Walker site, and then does some magic to add a related link from that page back to the blog post. If all goes well we’ll start to see more traffic between the calendar and the blogs and vice versa, and best of all it will happen automatically whenever we post about an event.

I’ve uploaded everything to flickr and put it in our group. Don’t forget to join our group and add your photos to the pool once you’ve joined the group!

At this Friday’s After Hours event, we’ll be debuting our latest crowd pleaser. “Party People Photos” is an installation that lets people take their own photos and have them projected onto several screens during the party. Additionally, we’ll be putting all the photos up in a Flickr Pool for all to see and even add their own photos to the pool.

The idea for the project grew out of the theme of the ads for the party, “Party People”, which uses images of people from the expansion opening party back in 2005. We like the opening photos, but we want more of them and we want everyone to be able to experience the party. We did a test run of the installation on monday and it went quite good. Word got out among some of the staff and we captured quite a few photos. Funny, sassy, weird… Exactly what we’re hoping for.

Below is a screenshot of the projection movie from the test, which is what it will look like on Friday night.

Quicktime h.264, 880K

Capturing
We’re using an iMac with a built-in iSight to capture the images. The iMac is hooked up to a Canon Eos 10D via USB, which is the camera that actually takes your picture when triggered. To trigger the capture, we have a big red button connected to the computer via an i-pac. I soldered up the connection for the button and the iPaq, which marks the first time I’ve ever got to do soldering at my day job. The button took some googling to find, but it turns out the company that makes it is actually located in Roseville, MN. The flash on the camera is a ring flash, so they have a sexy, fashion photo feel.

Tying all of the inputs together is Max/MSP + Jitter. When the button is hit, it acts as if the “x” key has been hit on the keyboard, which starts the countdown. At 7 seconds, the camera capture is started. As I talked about in a previous post, we’re using gphoto2 to handle the capture. It takes a few seconds for it to happen, but goes off at right about 0. The built-in iSight on the iMac is used to give a preview image so people can compose their shot with the proper amount of sass and pizzaz (heavy on the sass, please).

Some geek porn:

Once the photo is downloaded, it is dropped in a folder where launchd sees it and triggers a script that rysync’s it to the projection computers. At this point, the capture station is ready to take another photo.

Projection
The projection isn’t quite a slide show, but achieves the same goals as a slide show in that it shows a collection of images. We’re using quartz composer to do this, since it’s the hottest graphic tool on OS X and makes this kind of thing very easy and very smooth. In this patch, the images around the edges randomly pick an image from the pool of available images and display it. The center images have a simple algorithm that displays a mix of the most recently taken images, but some other random ones as well. This way, if you’ve just gotten your picture taken, you’ll be able to see it big, but you’ll also have an opportunity to see other photos.

Even more geek porn:

If all goes well, the projection will be showing on “The Rock” in the Bazinet Garden Lobby and on the shades in the Cargill lounge.

On the Web
Once the party is over, we want the fun to keep rolling, so all the photos are going up on flickr. Not only do we want an easy way to show the photos, and flickr has one of the best web-based interfaces for that, but we also want people to be able to add their own. We’ve set up a group for the After Hours parties, where we’ll be putting our photos. If you go to the event and take some photos with your phone or digicam, join our group and add it to ourAfter Hours Flickr Pool. We’ve also set up a page on the walker site that has some info about After Hours and the flickr group.

One small note: By attending the party and getting your pictures taken in the photo booth, you give us the rights to use your photo in documentation of the party and project. This is all covered on the back of your ticket for the event, so it is basically a condition for getting in the building. If you add your photos to our pool, they’re covered by whatever copyright restriction you put on them in Flickr.

So, go to the party, get your picture taken, take some photos of your own (just not in the galleries), join our flickr group, and upload your pictures. If you have any feedback, we’d love to hear it.