What the Art Institute Should Pay Me to Design and Implement

Every time I visit the Art Institute of Chicago (and that is very, very often), I find myself frustrated by something.  A few things.  Okay, many things.  In the Modern Wing especially, I see so much work that I just can't connect with based solely on its aesthetics, and in these moments I often pull out my smartphone to Google the artist and the work in an effort to grant context to a work that otherwise is just simply lost on me.  And sometimes I'm too lazy and I just move on, accepting that I just don't get it and I'm not going to but sure, it's probably a genius piece of art. Right.

Yes, there's always an artist and a title, but those things sometimes mean nothing at all to me.  And yes some rooms and some pieces specifically have big long labels that talk about the artist and the works in a thorough and well-rounded way but lots of people are milling around in front of those labels, often just pretending to read them so as not to bug their art-lover friend who dragged them to the museum in the first place.

In addition to frustration borne out of a lack of information and context, sometimes I think, "Wow, this is great! I wonder what else we have that is similar... how do I find the impressionists again? Maybe there's something there."  You'd think I'd have a mental map of AIC cemented by now, but I don't. And, embarrassingly, I don't have the entire public collection memorized either. So I don't know what we have or where it is or how to find it, and sometimes that is frustrating, too, and on top of it, the guards stationed throughout the museums are neither friendly nor helpful. GRUMBLE.

So what could solve some of the problems? What could ease frustration in a straight-forward and forward-thinking way?  Ladies and gentleman, I present:

THE PATHMAKER

I think it's pretty simple.  Running on a dedicated iPad (or a BlackPad, or an AndroidPad...), a very delicate GPS system, perhaps supported and supplemented by some sort of coordinate system managed by the Art Institute, will know the location and position of every piece on public display, as well as the location and position of its user.  The simple interface will feature only a small number of active buttons and links that remain consistent through most screen options.  Using the PathMaker is pretty straightforward and easily learned by even your least tech-savvy out-of-town guests.

When you find yourself standing in front of a piece that you'd like to know more about, simply press the refresh button on your PathMaker screen.  As the screen reloads based on your current location, you'll see an image of the art work in question.  A standard label including the artist, the work, and the media will be displayed, and below that you'll have the option of four buttons: Artist Biography, More info on this work, More by this artist, and More works like this.  Pushing any of these buttons will load a new screen with the appropriate information, thought the back button and the refresh button are present on every page.  There is NO SCROLLING in the PathMaker.

If you wish to see more works by the same artist, or similar works by other artists, those lists will have linked thumbnails and titles.  Selecting, say The First Part of the Return from Parnassus, also by Cy Twombly, will load a page with a larger image and should you decide you would indeed like to see that piece, you'll hit the "Take me there!" button below the image.  Turn-by-turn navigation will guide you to the piece.  If you decide you'd rather not see another part of the Return from Parnassus, simply hit the back button and make a selection.  Or just start walking and the next time you have a question about a piece, stop and hit the refresh button.

Sounds easy, right?  And very cheap.  And super straightforward to code and implement.

to keep in mind

What is the history? What is the conflict? ... read more Giroux

Pony Island Stomach Flu

The words in the title will double as the tags for this post.

I'm up because I had a nightmare about my cat getting attacked by a dog and now I can't get back to sleep.  I should be headed to work right now but I spent much of yesterday barfing/trying not to barf and fighting a fever with ice water and the show Hoarders, which in turn inspired me to lie on my bed staring into my closet thinking, "Am I a hoarder? A pre-hoarder? Are boxes of crafting materials and computer parts just the beginning?"  It was the fever talking, I'm sure.

So I'm left this morning feeling... well, so you know how when you wanna eat a mango in a hurry, you just slice off a piece and then use your teeth to scrape away the fruit from the skin? And then there's always a little bit of mango left on that piece of peel but you toss it down and cut off another piece and go through all that until you have in front of you a seemingly-wasteful mango core and a bunch of gnawed, gnarled mango peel.  I feel like that pile of stuff. 

What I'm trying to say is that I won't be in cyberpedagogy class tonight. I think I'm done barfing but I've still got a fever and everything feels bad.  What I will do though is post here and post my Photobet on Prezi (eh, what there is of it.. explanation pending) and I will participate on the Ning in our discussion of tonight's article and I will post my own article to read for next week.  The internet is a very useful thing.

SO.

Take a look at this map and click on each blue placemarker to read the exciting narration of my weekend's adventure:


View Pony Island Weekend in a larger map

You might need to zoom out to see it start to finish.  To fill in the gaps, I flew on Thursday to DC where G picked me up at the airport and we drove to Richmond.  The next morning we set out for the Outer Banks of North Carolina where we rented a kayak and camped on a little island with nothing but raccoons and sentry seagulls (for the first night anyway).  The next morning we kayaked SO. FAR. and got SO. SUNBURNED. I might post a picture of my current state... or maybe not. Just trust me, it's bad.  We thought we were doing pretty well til we were suddenly rolled by a very large wave and all our stuff went overboard and we went overboard.  I remembered hitting my head and being under the boat, under the water, and it was surprisingly quiet and then WHOOOOSH!

I took a deep breath and the above-water sounds were deafening for a moment and then I think I laughed a lot.  I found myself holding onto our pack, one of our 2.5 gallon water jugs, both of our paddles, my camera (in a ziplock), and the map (also in a ziplock), while G righted the kayak and we tried to assess our situation.  We seemed so close to shore, but the constant and multi-directional waves and the current were making it utterly impossible to make any progress. I learned that I can't really swim in chucks.  I started to feel tiny tendrils of panic creeping up from my stomach as I became totally exhausted fighting the water, but then (cue Baywatch music) G managed to get himself back into the kayak and make a couple of passes near enough to me that I grabbed our rope and he pulled me over and hauled our stuff into the boat and I finally managed to pull myself in and then somehow we were on Pony Island.  WTF.

"My hat!" cried G. "I loved that hat!"

"My camera!" cried Me. "The rest of my photo project was on there!"

Then we both fell asleep on the beach for a while (this surely contributed to our terrible sunburns) and then realized where we were and went off and found some wild ponies and got really really close to them.

And then we had to get off Pony Island and people looked at us like we were crazy, but it was significantly easier and less eventful than our arrival.  And then: PBR, boiled peanuts, icecream, Indian food, fireworks, towel pillows, deep sleep, homeward bound.
---

Then: barf.

---

Now: So about the Photobet.  I have a new camera in my possession and I intend to finish the project in a very timely fashion, but I've at least loaded the photos I took before the day I left for DC into Prezi and here's the progress, sans paths or layout, the letters are just arranged in order so far, with gaps: 

Digital Photobet on Prezi

Geezlouise, this has taken a very long time.  I kept stopping to lie back down.  I'll post my article for next week to the Ning later today.  Back to bed again.

lazy hermit crabs

 

ne'erdowells, these.

Newport

At the end of August I drove to Providence with my best friend and stayed a short while.  It was rainy the entire time, even this day, but we drove to Newport and found a vista and parked the car and got out and a blue sky suddenly peeked out just enough to remind me how long it had been since I'd taken a deep breath.  I felt exceedingly out of place in the town, but exceptionally in place in the shallows on the rocks covered in sea plants and the teeniest baby mussels and the laziest hermit crabs in the whole world.

Hard habit

It's hard to get back into the habit of writing here.  It's odd because for so many years writing online was a part of my daily routine.  I started blahgging in 7th or 8th grade, before anybody had a sassy name for it.  I built a dumpy looking but highly functional Tripod page where I posted "Dear Diary, Today was fun..."-type entries, photos, embarrassing poetry, and an extensive alphabetical list of bands I listened to, with links to their websites or UBL entries.  I was a lonely nerd and the internet offered me many solaces.

If I look back at my various online journals and weblogs from the past fifteen years (?!!), very clear patterns emerge.  Up until a few of years ago, when I've been at my most sad, lonely, stressed, lost, etc., I blahg noticeably(/exponentially) more.  When my life has been on the up and up, my entries are generally shorter and farther apart, but still clearly convey the state of things.  At some point all my posts began getting more concise, less all-revealing, and generally infrequent, for probably a variety of reasons.  Facebook (but not Twitter) certainly played a role, but also I just have had more and more people to spend time and share with and perhaps as a result have felt less of a need to vent my life to the internet.

All this to say, I need to find some new inspiration lest I post nothing but entries that could be boiled down to one of the following titles:

"Grad school is so hard."
"My boyfriend is so great."
"My cat is sooo cute."
"Bikes are so fun."
"Indian food is so delicious."
"I so need caffeine."

Hmm. Maybe I stopped blahgging so much simply because I ran out of things that felt worth talking about in such a forum. HMMMM.

Since it got pulled before...

(and will again)

Ookay okay okay okay okay

Dear Blahg,

Please forgive my absence. I spent the summer trying to pretend I wasn't in grad school. I spent the summer traveling and cooking and riding bikes and watching baseball and making big plans and learning big things and falling in love.  And it's all been way more fun than blahgging.  No offense.

But now school's back! Huzzah! Huzzah. No really, I'm excited. I'll prove it by checking in more often. Starting now.

Sincerely,
Michelle