For my creative response to my internship at New Media Gallery, I created an I Spy page in the format of a print. This piece is both literal and symbolic and encompasses the essential parts of my internship.

I used the idea of a I Spy book because I felt that it went along with the gallery’s exhibition and also because I Spy books are for children just like how my program was designed for children. The exhibition I worked with was WITNESS  and it was focused on the idea of machine vision, surveillance, perceiving and being perceived. Hence, I included eyes, different ways of seeing, and googly eyes which were actually used in the art program that I developed. The nails are also a material that was used in the workshop. I had originally prepared the workshop for primary students using materials that were more crafty but there was a change in the age group and I had to change the materials to appeal to older students. Consequently, I added items like nails and wires and they represent my initial fear of working with intermediate students and later the relief I felt when they were very excited about my program. The three cups in the scene are a literal representation of the coffee and tea I drank throughout the internship to help me work through the rainy weather and exhaust. Lastly, the mop, keys, and chains are a symbolic representation of the community I saw in my internship. During my internship, I realized that so many different people were involved in creating this wonderful art space, not just artists or curators. There were cleaning staff, receptionists, technicians, and many more who worked together with artists to make everything happen. Everyone was connected like a chain, sturdy and united.

RESUME LINE

New Media Gallery- New Westminster, BC                           September 2016-December 2016

Arts Programming Intern

• Developed and executed an art program to help engage students with the gallery’s exhibition

• Worked in the capacity of a workshop leader and led 100 students through a 2 hour workshop

• Drafted event reviews, teacher’s guide booklets, and budget proposals

• Utilized scanning technology to archive artwork

The New Media Gallery is a contemporary public art gallery devoted to the presentation of international and local new media art. With the goal of encouraging people of all backgrounds to learn and appreciate art, Sarah, and Gordon – the directors and curators of NMG have been working hard to ensure that all the visitors to the New Media Gallery feel welcomed there. One of the ways that they do so is through the iBeacon technology- a device that enriches the gallery viewing experience for visitors. During my time interning there, I have been using this technology to create a project in response to Witness exhibition.

The iBeacon technology in New Media Gallery is provided by Judy- the CEO of Neartuit. iBeacon is a small device that allows Bluetooth devices to receive tiny and static pieces of data within short distances. In simplistic words, it consists of two parts: a broadcaster (beacon device) and a receiver (smartphone app). Using a smartphone or a tablet with Bluetooth, the receiver would detect these Bluetooth radio packets and sends the desired information deemed by the creator depending on how close or far it is from them. For the person with the smartphone or tablet to receive this information from the beacons, however, they would need to first install the app onto their hand-held device.

One of the most common ways that iBeacons have been used is to be installed behind artworks in a gallery, so that whenever a visitor walks by the artwork, the beacon behind that artwork would send information about it to whatever handheld device they’re using. This information can go beyond the general descriptive information and could contain more engaging mediums such as images and videos. However, for NMG- a gallery that specializes in new media artwork, as opposed to static mediums like paintings and sculpture, it could be problematic to install this technology next to the artworks. This is because the dynamic nature of these artworks would require the viewer to pay attention to them, and focus on them only instead of being distracted by another technology.

As well, many artists would also not like their art to be viewed with such a distraction in the way, and hence I decided to place the beacon technology outside of the gallery space, and yet still incorporate it with the exhibition inside the gallery. Therefore, the iBeacons would be placed underneath the chairs outside the gallery space, so that after people visit Witness, they can step out and see this, and be encouraged to take part in it.

Inspired by the idea that after watching an interesting movie, many would go on the Internet to read more about it, I decided to create a project that helps the gallery viewers gain a multiple-perspective and multi-disciplinary understanding of the exhibition after seeing it for themselves.

To better understand my project, I will explain my thought processes behind this project, by answering the important questions of ‘What, why, who and how’

• WHAT: a project in response to Witness exhibition
  What’s Witness Exhibition about? This exhibition contemplates ‘the seeing machine’. There are five works of art in this exhibition. Each sets up an interplay between the perceiving machine, the world that is perceived by the machine and us humans, who are both the perceiving + perceived bodies. A symbiotic relationship is formed between organic and non-organic systems. Bearing in mind that the theme of the exhibition determines the content of the iBeacons, I have done a lot of research on what topics would be valuable in enriching the visitors’ experience, and have decided that each iBeacon will contain a different theme that I pick from the exhibition. The point of them is to enhance people’s gallery viewing experience so that they walk away from the exhibition with a more comprehensive understanding of what they’ve just seen.
• WHY:  Why is this important? for the gallery visitors to gain more perspectives into the artworks that they have seen inside the gallery space, and to help people who are unfamiliar with the arts to better understand contemporary art through introducing them to popular modern art concepts that they’ve come across in the exhibition.
• WHO: Who is this directed towards? all the gallery visitors of the Witness exhibition (people of all ages, with a different understanding of the arts)
• HOW: How to make this work? I set up a comfortable, inviting setting that all viewers would like to take part in and take their time to enjoy. And I thought chairs would be a good way to allow this to happen
  Each iBeacon will contain info about different professionals talking about a certain theme, in the following order: a psychoanalyst’s point of view, a scientific point of view, an artist’s’ point of view and another one that is to be decided. Originally, I planned to interview different groups of people, but due to time restraints, I will not be able to do so and hence will carefully select information from the Internet instead. After discussing with Sarah, I have finalized the fields in which the people in my iBeacons will be presented:

1. An orthoptist- a certified allied health professional who works under the supervision of an ophthalmologist to evaluate and treat disorders of the visual system with an emphasis on binocular vision (using both eyes to see) and eye movement problems. This field is closely related to the work Surface Tension by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer
2. Artist Ai Weiwei talking about his work relating to Surveillance Camera, relating to the works Vision Machine #3 and The Agency at the End of Civilization 2014
3. A government authority person talking about the importance of surveillance to the safety of the nation’s people – relating to The Agency at the End of Civilization 2014
4. A psychologist talking about the theory of desire and ‘lack’ by Lacan, relating to the work Do Robotic Cats Dream of Electric Fish?

Evaluation:

During my researching and prototyping process, here are some of the issues that arose:

• It takes some time to download the app and to download the content onto one’s phone/ tablet. The solution: iPad would be downloaded already, there are issues with the building as well→ many factors need to be considered
• Certain beacons’ batteries (was 2-year and now moving towards 5-year) might not work.  Solution: check on them every day.
• People whose English is not their first language might still not understand basic words. The solution is to use different languages and a lot of images.

In conclusion, this experience has taught me many things, including the ability to do research about a project and present it. However, what I’ve found most valuable is the ability to apply design thinking to my future projects, which is a creative process based around the ‘building up’ of ideas, to solve a problem. There are no judgments in design thinking, but empathy is a critical element that needs to be considered so that a user-friendly solution is created. The four steps involve:

1. Empathy: Learn about the audience for whom I am designing
2. Define: define the problems based on the insights from the empathy stage
3. Ideate: Brainstorm and come up with creative solutions
4. Prototype: Build a representation of one or more ideas I have
5. Test: see the usability and effectiveness of my design in solving the problem

And in the process, I learned that the ability to empathize with the users is one of the most important things, and research needs to be carried out to reduce the assumptions make. In other words, we need to stay away from the tendency to create something that we think people need and move towards designing things that people need.

The resume lines:

New Media Gallery

Title: iBeacon App Intern

Key Skills: Research, Design, User Interface Design, Analyze, Video Editing, Photo Editing

During my four-month internship at the New Media Gallery, I worked on a project called Response to Witness, which takes the form of an app from Neartuit Technology. The app utilizes iBeacon technology and was designed with the aim of enriching the gallery visiting experience for the New Media Gallery visitors. By incorporating the content of the iBeacon to the exhibition named Witness, I aimed to give the gallery visitors a multi-disciplinary understanding of the works in the exhibition. This process involved researching, designing the app’s interface so that it’s user-friendly and improving the design based on the feedback from the users. In addition, video editing and photo editing were also part of the process, which was important because visually-appealing appearance would make the experience more enjoyable for the viewers.

Today, I got to talk to Judy- the founder of Neartuit organization today. She walked me through the ways that iBeacons could be used and showed me some prototypes of the app at different galleries throughout Vancouver. Judy also helped me solving issues that the iBeacons had, which was important since the device plays a large role in the final presentation of my project.

I did further research on the project and used Adobe Premiere to put the videos online together in order to create one coherent video. Here are some screenshots and photos of the prototype that I have been working on:

Sarah and I discussed the strengths and weaknesses of the interface designs as a starting point, as well as choosing the keywords to be used for each design. The take away key points for today is to always try to put myself in the gallery viewers’ shoes since they are the ones for whom I designed this app. Sympathy, is then, not just relevant to the design of an app’s layouts, but also to the curatorial process as a whole. I learned this from Sarah, as she was teaching me that Gordon and her always bear in mind that the intended audience of the New Media Gallery is the general public, and hence everything that is presented there has to be simple enough so that someone without any background in the arts understand what is said, while someone in the academics world do not find it too patronizing or over-simplified.

Week 6: Nov.4, 2016 

Last Friday was the D-day of my workshop for Fraser River School.

When I arrived on site at 10:00am, I was notified that we were unable to use the theatre and projector for the workshop and had to use the studio spaces instead.

Honestly, I was disappointed because I had edited a video composed of 17 clip of monsters, robots, machines, people who have a special type of vision like Pale Man, Minions, Coraline, Sauron, Baymax, etc. It was to serve as a visual aid, running in the background as students work, to inspire them.

Nonetheless, I tried to look in a positive direction, thinking maybe the absence of the video would allow room for more creativity.

At 11:00am I started to set up all the materials and distributed them evenly into 16 groups.

Materials consisted of :

styrofoam balls, cones, crepe streamers, wire, nails, googly eyes, feathers, pipecleaners, bells, beads, clay, toothpicks, wooden dowels, buttons, string, paper parasols, egg cartons, boxes, glue, and scissors

I was worried that the Gr.6 and Gr.7’s would find the workshop and its materials as too “crafty” and boring. But to my surprise the students were really excited to do some hands-on work.

After all the groups received the gallery tour and finished their works, we had a time for presentations where groups volunteered to explain their pieces and sometimes even tell a fictional narrative about the creature. A lot of groups volunteered but due to time we were only able to hear a couple which was unfortunate.

Here are images of some of the works. The students really embraced the ideas of the exhibition and added their own personality to their works.  Some pieces completely blew my mind in terms of design and concept.

October 28, 2016 Week 5

Today, I drafted a budget proposal and went out to the dollar stores nearby to do some research on possible materials and their prices. I really enjoyed going out and working in a different environment. There were some obvious price differences for similar products and trying to account for a 100 students was challenging at first. Balancing my desire to buy all the cool craft supplies and trying to stay within the $100 range was way harder though.

Last week at our meeting, I was notified that my program would be presented to a group of Gr.6 & Gr.7’s from Fraser River Middle School instead of Gr.2’s. I had to alter the program slightly to match their age level and create a Pre-Activity worksheet and a Teacher’s Guide for the program.

The Teacher’s Guide consists of objectives, material, processes, schedules, pre and post activity instructions.

For the Pre-Activity, I created a personality quiz to help sort students into groups. I figured kids 12-13 years old would like something like personality tests found in magazines and thought that it would be a nice way to buy their interest.

So far, there have been minor shifts and changes in the internship which have required me to be flexible but it has been definitely manageable. I’m super excited to lead this workshop on Nov.4.

Partner Profile

Name: New Media Gallery

Type: Civic Gallery

Opened: September 14, 2014

Medium: New Media

Curators: Sarah Joyce & Gordon Duggan

Address: 777 Columbia St, New Westminster, BC V3M 5V2 (3rd Floor, Anvil Centre)

Phone: 604 875 1865

Email: contact@newmediagallery.ca

Website: http://www.newmediagallery.ca/

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/NWnmg

Hours: Monday: closed

Tuesday: 10am – 5pm

Wednesday: 10am – 5pm

Thursday: 10am – 8pm

Friday: 10am – 5pm

Saturday: 10am – 5pm

Sunday: 10am – 5pm

The one page handout and link to presentation is attached.

new-media-gallery-handout

http://prezi.com/tsudv4enl2_z/?utm_campaign=share&utm_medium=copy&rc=ex0share