Brief

Create an interface that allows visitors to engage in our collection of contemporary art. The installation will be shown at 'Total Aktion', an exhibition that is aimed at a new and younger fraction of our audience. [strongly abridged]

Description

Metasyn is an interactive visualisation that provides visitors with an insight into The Museum of Contemporary Art's collection. The content is based on the museum's database, as well as the analogue video and sound sequences that have been digitised to date. The physical interface consists of a 6 meter wide slightly concave screen and a handheld pointing device that rests on a cylindric stool (#3). On the screen, 1000(+) physical objects from the collection and 2000(+) digitised sequences originating from those objects are represented as icons in 3D space.

Concept

In Danish the word 'syn' means sight or view. Hence, the title is intended to be read as a meta view; seeing the information that lies beyond the physicality of one or more objects. We commonly use the word “seeing” as a synonym for understanding, and Metasyn serves as a cognitive tool that allows us to quickly spot patterns and get an overview of the entire collection.

The idea is to get around the collection both as a whole, as interrelated pieces and as individual art works. To simplify this, the interface is separated into three levels of scale that I refer to as Macro, Meso, and Micro. Functionally speaking, Macro is an information visualisation, Meso is a relational 3D browser and Micro is a media player.

At the Macro level, the entire collection is presented in a diagram where a single selected object is put in context. A horizontal timeline, spanning about a decade, divide the digitised media in the upper half from the physical objects in the lower half. The quantity of objects for each year is distributed like on a bar graph. Metaphorically, the lower half represents a kind of basement archive; mirroring the upper half that is digitised and hence ‘visible above ground’ so to speak. Physical objects are sources like CD albums or VHS tapes, while digital objects are sequences that originates from those sources.

From Macro, it is possible to dive into the Meso level. The word Meso derives from Greek simply meaning 'in the middle of things' and is often used to describe the space related to human scale. At Meso, the art works are spatially positioned around you and can be approached in order to examine its preview, facts and relations. Because you browse on a timeline, the surrounding objects represent a view into a specific time period of the collection.

When an art work has been approached, it is possible to zoom into the Micro level and experience the media in full quality. In contrast to the Meso level, the Micro level is striped from all distracting interface elements and provides a calm setting for focusing on the art work.

About the spatial organisation

The objects are lined up vertically by year showing the distribution of objects over time. For a given object, its vertical order is a product of the 'grade of dominance' that the related artist has. The objects that are made by artists whose objects are commonly accruing in the collection are placed closer to the ground plane. This results in an organisation where the most dominant artists are represented close to 'the core' of the structure, while the less known artists ends up in the periphery. This decision was made to support the impression of exploring the unknown in the outer areas of the collection, and to increase chances additionally that the museum’s choice of popular artists are promoted.

The third axis of depth is used to create an optimised spatial distance between the objects and provide an illogical randomness to the organisation. Through experimentation with applying meaningful arrangements on the third axis, I saw interesting structures emerging. Unfortunately, overlapping objects complicated the browsing experience.

Process

During the process of creating Metasyn, I considered many different ways of generating additional metadata that could result in other interesting visualisations. In the end, it all came down to two issues. First, any sort of tagging or parametric weighting of the art work requiring the audience to input data would result in a more complicated interface. Second, if the organisation was based on subjective keywords or parameters, the visualisation would promote a biased view of the collection: both as a whole and as a portrayal of each individual art work. I spend almost a month trying to come up with the most objective parameters for organising the collection, but I had to leave the research and declare it a dead end. Art is an individual experience (although the setting can be social) and instances that invoke anticipation or prejudices before a first encounter is something that I believe should be avoided or at least reduced.

I decided to base the organisation on fact, and the facts available in the database that could give rise to relevant organisations were reduced to: the creator (or subject regarding interviews and reviews) and the year of origin. The collection challenges the defined categorisations of media and disciplines, which is also one of the factors that make it stand out. However, if it was limited to a specific media or artistic discipline, or if it only contained works of art and not also 'work around art' (e.g. interviews, reviews, and objects documenting events,) it would be easier to create a more rich and still honest organisation. Since I decided to give a complete overview of the collection, that was simply not possible. With the given database, the parameters and organisation I chose seemed the most consequential to me.

Evaluation

With the Meso level, I tried to set up a stage for an immersive experience that could pull the visitors into the collection and keep them in a state of flow where one object always leads to another. The screen is helpful, but the critical part is how the navigation feels. By fiddling with the inertia of the camera and the relative angle of view (depending on the angle on the pointing device,) I achieved a fairly smooth movement that resembles diving underwater. Regrettably, the interface was more difficult for the visitors than I had imagined, and it was the greatest overall disturbance in the flow. I still believe that the pointing device is valid, but it might be too advanced for a museum experience where even to speak of a learning curve is a bad indication: people move on if they don't see an immediate reaction to their actions. Children and young people who were used to playing computer games were naturally the ones who handled the interface with less difficulty.

The process was dominated by a large amount of practical work regarding the database, along with the digitisation and integration of the content. I believe many hard decisions remain regarding the database as historical storage versus the database as foundation for a digital interface, with the purpose of passing on the art collection content to the visitors, but that is beyond the scope of an introductory text.

We are getting closer to a time when screen based interfaces like Metasyn can run on an average web browser on an average personal computer, and this should be regarded as a great opportunity for the future of museums. Whatever raises awareness around contemporary art will eventually attract more visitors to the exhibition spaces.

Thanks

Morten Carlsen, Michael Edinger, Enrico Passetti, Morten Søndergaard, Mogens Jacobsen, Rasmus Holmboe, Andrew Nagel, Barnabas Wetton, Elle-Mie Ejdrup, Lars Gravgaard, Thomas Markussen, Musik Lab Denmark, Damvig Develop A/S, Fælleskonserveringen and Leona Sui-Ling Fang.

Tech

Ideas were Prototyped in Procesing. The museums SQL database was cleaned and filtered using Java and saved into a XML file. The final application was built in Unity. A redesigned plastic shell for the Nintendo Wii remote was designed in Pro Engeneer and was printed using SLS. The screen and stool was build by Total Produktion.

Selected inspiration

Benjamin Fry
Edward Tufte

Sponsor

Damvig Develop, SLS print of the Wii remote shell.