Confessions of an Exhibit-Builder

Marbellous Indeterminacy

I've had any number of visitors and prospective interviewers ask me where ideas for exhibits come from and what goes into building an exhibit for Mindport, i.e., what does the process involve. It's difficult to come up with any sort of pat answer to this question, because the process involved in creating each exhibit depends on the creator and the individual exhibit. They're all different. I'll attempt to say a few things about my own process of exhibit creation and about Mindport's general experience with our exhibits, which we often characterize as "interactive art."

House of Unborn Saints

It seems that one stage in the process of all sorts of creative work, and which plagues some other creative people I know, is an encounter with the "this is dumb" stage. There's almost invariably a point early in a creative project when it seems like a dumb idea, that it won't work, or nobody will like it. That's usually the second hump to get over. There's an earlier hump for me, which is taking the step from an emotional sensation or idea to something that embodies it in physical form. In my case, there's always an uncomfortable transition back and forth from a logical "left brain" mode, to a more lyrical and imaginative "right brain" mode. This is more true with those of my creations that involve both imagination and a certain amount of engineering. If you've visited Mindport, "Marbellous Indeterminacy" and "House of Unborn Saints" are just two of my pieces to which this applies. There's a strong element of sheer imagination in these, but also quite a bit of practical engineering involved, not only to get the things to work, but to make them easy to disassemble and to repair. That in itself is a skill that's taken me the full duration of Mindport's existence to refine to a semi-satisfactory level.

Pipe Organ

Some of the exhibits I've built didn't require much imagination. They were mostly engineering challenges, and, in the case of the pipe organ, I relied heavily on information found on the web, posted by pioneering organ makers who had gone far deeper into the subject than I had. The finished organ was an example of what's lately become known as "mission creep." For some years I'd had it in mind to build one or two large organ pipes, which would generate very low tones. The purpose of those would be to demonstrate how organ pipes work. After considering that idea for a spell, I thought, why not make an octave-worth of smaller pipes that would allow someone to play a simple tune. That proposition expanded to two octaves, then to two and a half, with all the sharps and flats, thirty pipes total. That sent me on a web search which turned up the website of Raphi Giangiulio, who has built a truly impressive organ. He had posted full dimensions for complete sets of several types of pipes, without which I might never have attempted building an organ at all. To make a long story short, or a short story longer, you can find a detailed description of my version of the organ project here.

Most exhibits I've built turned out to be a lot more work than I anticipated, and not all of them ended up being good exhibits. Some were maintenance nightmares that eventually had to be retired because, in the case of a couple of them that included water, they stubbornly leaked, or, in the case of one that included a large volume of sand, the latter had a way or migrating into other exhibits, much to their detriment. There is even an unanticipated difficulty with the organ, which is otherwise a good exhibit: it's a lot louder than I expected it to be. When Mindport is crowded, we sometimes must levy controls on its use.

We still harbor one maintenance nightmare, which is Marbellous. We keep maintaining her because she's a fascinating character who represents much of what Mindport is supposed to be about. Also, there's a paradoxical rule that truly interesting exhibits almost always require more maintenance than their ho-hum compatriots. In order to minimize the need for maintenance we've gone to lengths to encourage our visitors to treat exhibits gently, and I must gratefully acknowledge that 99%  of them do so, and guide their youngsters in that direction as well.

One challenge, when a new exhibit is completed and ready to be installed, is to write comprehensible instructions for it. This task usually falls to me, mostly because I'm interested in the way people interact with, not only our exhibits, but with any sort of tool or technology. I find it fun to imagine encountering any piece of equipment as though I was seeing it for the first time, and attempting to anticipate what questions might come up in connection with its operation. The question with exhibits is, how much I can leave to the viewer to discover for him or herself, and how much has to be documented in some way. Some of my work experience previous to the advent of Mindport involving technical writing has come in handy in writing documentation for Mindport's interactive exhibits. If you visit Mindport, you'll find quite a bit of information about various exhibits, including their history  and the process of creating them, posted inside the accompanying white notebooks.

Thus far, I've focused on practical aspects of Mindport's exhibits. The question, Where do your ideas come from? is more difficult to answer. You may find hints in the aforementioned notebooks. Often I can't exactly identify the sources of exhibit ideas. At core, they arise from my long-term interest in science and art, which dates back to pre-teen years. Reading and experience with these subjects have been roiling around in my brain for decades and mixing in often unexpected ways. Sometimes I see some sort of equipment or artwork created by someone else, imagine it's one thing, only to discover that it's actually something other than what I'd imagined. . . but that what I'd imagined had some merit of its own as an exhibit possibility. It's little like imagining faces in an Oriental carpet, in driftwood on the beach, or cloud forms. My imagination has a way of projecting itself on outer forms, and sometimes what I project plays a part in creating an exhibit.

One thing that keeps me interested in creating exhibits for Mindport is that doing so is always a learning experience. Even exhibits that turn out to be a bad idea teach me something worthwhile: Like, don't do THAT again, or if I'm going to do it, do a better job, make it easier to fix, or don't make it so complicated that nobody can figure out what to do with it.  One thing I've observed is that someone, usually a smart kid, will do exactly the thing to an exhibit that I hoped it would not occur to anyone to do. The corollary wisdom is, if I can figure out a way to screw it up, so will someone else. The name of the game is, design an exhibit which encourages creative experimentation without including hidden vulnerabilities.

Kevin Jones

Elements

 On a recent road trip to Colorado and back, I had occasion to spend several days with friends in  Montana who own property situated on a creek. . . or river, the appropriate designation depending on what time of year you visit. In spring, with snow melting and runoff in progress, the flow rate approaches river status. When we've visited during late summer, the flow has dwindled to a trickle, due largely to water diversion for irrigation and waning snowpack.

Being a lover of water in all its forms, ocean, sea, trickle, flood, puddle, pond, pool, I spend a great deal of time in its company. Considering the average flow of the particular watercourse I mention here, I'll call it a creek. During my visit, I took advantage of a sunny afternoon to walk upstream a quarter mile, admiring what river-runners refer to as "hydraulics," though when we're talking "creek" the depth isn't sufficient to float anything larger than in inner tube or a small kayak.

I found a gravel bar that allowed me to station myself and my camera conveniently close to the flow of water over obstacles; boulders, bushes, cobble, gravel, and became so absorbed by the action and color there that I recorded over one hundred images in a half-hour. Later on, I went through these and selected a group that seemed best to express my fascination with water and the emotional reaction it evokes. They will find their way into Mindport's gallery in due course.

Upon reflection, it seems to me that over the millions of years that life has evolved on this earth, we've become intuitively attuned to the characteristics of what the Greeks considered to be the four elements; earth, air, fire, and water. Our survival depended on intimate observation and knowledge of these, not to speak of the behavior and essence of the plants and animals that share our environment, feed us, and provide us with shelter. Any of those four elements can hold our attention for hours. Beside the obvious attraction of water, consider the infinite variety of pleasures afforded by observing clouds, geological land forms, or simply the hypnotic effect of an open camp fire.

At least that was so traditionally. Nowadays survival seems to dictate that we focus our attention exclusively on electronic screens, ones like your eyes rest upon just now, where you observe an illusory pixilated representation of the creek I've described, augmented by the hieroglyphics we know as writing. I can't help but to contemplate the irony of my attempt to encapsulate my experience of this flowing stream in digital form to be transmitted to you via fiber optic cable. It's a pleasant way to relive the experience, but I'd rather be there still.

Kevin Jones

Guestbook

We first started asking visitors to sign a guestbook in 2010, primarily as a way to ascertain whether we should continue to spend money on expensive print and internet advertising.  Three years later, visitors have filled up one rather large book with their names, hometowns, and how they heard about us.  It makes for interesting reading, and we've gained a few insights about our visitors in the process.

Mindport visitors tend to:

a) use the internet to figure out what's fun to do in a town they are visiting (and are sometimes visiting from quite a distance)

b) notice ads placed on public transportation but are only occasionally prompted to visit Mindport as the result of a brochure or advertisement in a magazine

c) are not opposed to a little aimless wandering on foot

d) have kids, grandkids, parents, grandparents, cousins, aunties and uncles, friends, sweethearts, veterinarians, counselors, employers, coworkers, roommates, baristas, teachers, and "nice ladies on the street" tell them about Mindport

e)  be enthusiastic, descriptive, funny, and curious (but we could have guessed that)

Here are a few visitor responses to the question:  How did you hear about Mindport?

I love reading that "GABE!!" or "my friend Gracie's stepmom who works across the street at the Blue Horse Gallery" or the "Sehome Starbucks drive through barista," or "my doctor's nurse," or "fellow campers at the Cedar Park campsite" told a visitor about Mindport, and then imagining the conversation and the path they took to wind up here.

What we say matters.  Not always, that's certainly true, but perhaps more often than we think.  In Mindport's case, all those people saying, "Hey, check out Mindport" means we can spend more money and time making things and welcoming visitors and less of both trying to just get folks in the door.  Thank you for your kind words.  Keep on talking.

(And thanks for sharing these milestones with us.  Congratulations!)

Tallie Jones

The Virtual Life

Nosing about on the Web I ran across mention of a book of photographs by Doug Rickard that interested me enough to acquire a copy. These aren't really photos by Rickard, but were shot by Google's Street View camera. Rickard re-photographed the Google images on his computer monitor, cropped and processed them, and assembled them into this book. I guess you'd have to say it was a joint effort between him and Google, though nowhere in his book did I find any formal credit attribution to Google. His focus was on the most disadvantaged neighborhoods in several US cities, which he discovered via City Data website, from which he gleaned information on which neighborhoods were to be avoided in the cities in question. Ironically, the most broken parts of any US city he said could be found by looking at a Google map of the city and dropping in on any street or boulevard named after Martin Luther King.

Having done a lot of virtual "driving around" via Street View myself, I was very curious what sort of images Rickard had extracted. To me they're reminiscent of of the lonely, alienating paintings of Edward Hopper. If you blurred out the faces of a Hopper painting, the emotional affect would be similar. The human figures in Rickard's Google images have been recorded by a machine, so there's no relationship established between them and the photographer, which partly accounts for my bleak emotional reaction to them. Of course the areas Rickard chose to portray are bleak in themselves, and he went out of his way to convey an idea about the bleakness associated with poverty and racism.

Aside from the subject matter of these photos, and the artful way Rickard has processed them, the other aspect of them that interests me is the general idea of virtual reality, i.e. accessing graphic space in a way that conveys the illusion that we’re accessing a “real” world. Cruising along via Street View gives the impression that you’re actually viewing the area you’re accessing. Even though I know intellectually that these are machine images, and they may be years old, I can slip into believing that I’m looking through a window at the place being represented. It’s not unlike interacting with video games or virtual reality programs like Flight Simulator.

The few video games I’ve tinkered with (Riven, Wild Divine), and other V.R. apps, like Flight Simulator, and Google Street view all have had a similar emotional effect on me. After being involved with them for awhile, I begin to get the same bleak, lonely feeling that Rickard’s work conveys. I haven’t fully penetrated what this means, but I think it has to do with the fact I’m instinctively looking for relationship and not finding it. In other words, if I didn’t have means or ability to access human relationships in the real world, I might resort addictively to virtual reality in a fruitless quest for them. All addictions amount to looking for satisfaction in the wrong places, due to the fact that authentic satisfaction, for one reason or another, is not available.

This line of thought lead me to an idea: suppose Google Street View was somehow made to operate in real time, so that you’d be able to cruise the streets of a foreign city (as I’ve used Street View to cruise streets in Europe) and “be there now.” Then take this ability one step further: Rent-a-Robot. You go to a website, put $50 on your credit card. The site, for a day, assigns you a drone-like ground-based robot that operates just like our military drones, except it’s not equipped with killing equipment, but rather with shopping equipment. It allows you to wheel around the streets in a remote town with stereo vision, stereo sound, and the ability to rotate your remote “head” 360 degrees, thereby letting you look around and up and down, just as you do in Street View. Naturally, there would be provision for anything you bought to be shipped to you at nominal cost.

What a kick, eh? Of course you’d have the ability to speak: “Hi, I’m a virtual tourist and I’d like to shake your hand.” And you’d want arms to shoplift. . . er to pick things up with. . .and to shake hands, of course.

Then I thought about hackers. It would be inevitable that someone would hack the remote tourism site and start controlling the drone robots anonymously. Maybe by this time they would have been developed to the point of being indistinguishable from real people, so you’d have these robot people walking around, being sometimes controlled by legitimate clients, sometimes by anonymous hackers, who could do anything they wanted and get away with it, and sometimes by authorities trying to catch the hackers. In other words, you’d effectively have anonymously controlled sociopathic robots roaming the streets.

Oops. I guess it would be a lot like things are now, with the “real” world. Way too many apparently robotic humans are heading corporations that do things like pollute the Gulf of Mexico with toxic dispersants in order to hide the messes they’ve made in consequence of their own crass negligence.

At one time in our country's history, corporations were allowed to exist only if they served the public interest. This function has now been subverted, to the point that too many of them act like sociopathic hackers, for whom there seems to be no operating rationale other than hoarding dollars and political power. This is undertaken with little discernible benefit to the public. Indeed, corporations themselves are robots, operating according to simplistic legal programming designed only to generate profit, with their operations frequently subsidized directly or indirectly by taxpayers. They assuredly are not people and should not have the rights of people.

Despite my fanciful digression, I wish to convey that Doug Rickard’s book is an impressive and evocative piece of work, and a good example of a creative use of the Internet. I hope I haven’t given anyone ideas for an actual tourism service, or if I have, I want a commission on any profits accruing, which I will donate to Mindport.

Study question: How would you feel about tourist robots cruising your neighborhood? How about remotely-controlled airborne drones?

Kevin Jones

New Exhibits

Joining our freshly painted walls and reorganized displays are two new exhibits, both collaborations by Exhibit Manager Bill Lee and former Exhibit Builder/Designer John Ito.

Swirl, a stand-alone sculpture featuring rheoscopic fluid under glass, evokes air and ocean currents and was inspired in part by a trip Mindport's staff took to Science World in Vancouver a number of years ago.  I can't help but say, "Come give Swirl a whirl."  All flippancy aside, it's a lovely exhibit.

Magnetic Molasses, which shows off the interaction between a large magnet and an aluminum tube, is a re-visioning of our original table top version.  The new magnet is mighty enough to be a danger to folks with pacemakers and to credit cards, so be sure to stand back a foot or more while operating if you have either.


Tallie

Taste

A visitor quizzed me recently about a group of my photos hanging in Mindport's gallery. Quite a number of them most viewers might term "abstract," in that they are images of patterns in seashore gravel, water, clouds, seaweed; fragmentary views of pedestrian objects whose identity is not always apparent from their close-up perspective. Our visitor told me he couldn't tell what they were, and wanted me to explain it to him. Doing so was a challenge, akin to attempting to ascertain whether, when I see blue, another's experience of that color is the same as mine.

Patterns attract my eye without any rational explanation. They give me a certain feeling, and that's what the images are about. Either they give someone else a feeling or they don't. Whether they give someone else the same feeling they give me, I don't know. But most people seem to respond favorably to such abstractions. Eventually I told our guest that the pictures were simply of patterns I found appealing because they reminded me of images I see in dreams. He seemed satisfied with that explanation.

One of the interesting lessons learned from my years of experience attempting various art forms, including photography, ceramics, drawing/painting, and three-dimensional kinetic sculpture, is an awareness of the diversity of perception between different people viewing the same piece of work. I became increasingly conscious of this during a period when I was working with clay, mostly making ceramic hanging lamps, but also miscellaneous glazed clay vessels. One woman who was quite taken by my efforts, which she'd seen displayed at a local crafts fair, came by my studio for a visit. I gave her a tour during which she spotted a box of rejects, mostly things that I thought were ugly or which didn't meet my standards in one way or another. You'd think she'd found a pot of gold! She asked if she could go through the stuff. As a starving potter, who was happy to glean every cent possible from his work, I told her, Certainly. She carried away a number of items and insisted on paying me $15, which at least covered the cost of the materials from which they were fabricated. Some artists wouldn't get caught dead letting "inferior" work loose on the world, but I was living on a pittance at the time and wasn't going to let pride stand in the way of my next meal.

That was my first objective demonstration of how radically taste varies from person to person, and it was a good one. It taught me not to worry excessively about people's reactions to what I create, since whatever I do, some will like it and some won't. Having grown up in a household where criticism was rampant, it was finally liberating to realize that as an artist I have a choice whether to take criticism to heart or to let it go the way of water on a duck's back. In one sense criticism, preferably self-criticism, is a good thing when done in the correct spirit, because it keeps you on a path toward improving your work, or perhaps I should say it can hone your ability to express your feelings accurately as well as helping you clarify the direction your future efforts should take. But when fear of criticism prevents you from doing anything at all, it's good to come to terms with such fear and not let it paralyze you.

It's naturally pleasing when people love your work, but even that can be an inhibiting factor. I had a conversation once with a well-known local artist who was experiencing distress because he was tired of doing the sort of thing he'd been doing for years and wanted to take a new direction. He'd tried new forms of expression but a large number of his "fans" had objected so strenuously that he felt like making changes had become a painful uphill battle. This situation is especially difficult for artists who are attempting to earn a living with their creations. It's easy to become a slave to the tastes of your public rather than feeling completely free to go your own way. The tragedy is that so many past artists who remained true to themselves died paupers, only to have their work become highly valued decades after their lives had ended.

One moral you might take from this story is that the happiest artist is the one who isn't required to earn a living from his or her work. But I've heard it argued that the agonies of the market ultimately push artists toward excellence. . .  which inspires the question, is the happiest artist necessarily the best artist? The question, if answerable at all, could be the subject of a whole essay in itself. It all depends on the personality of the artist, circumstances, the sort of work s/he's doing, and how you define "best" and "happy."

For awhile, at Mindport, several artists met weekly to discuss their work. The rule was that when viewing another's creations, you didn't label them "good," "bad," or with any other objective label. Rather, the instruction was to describe how a piece made you feel, what it reminded you of, or otherwise how you responded to it. We all came to agree after practicing these habits for awhile that receiving this sort of response to our artwork was much more helpful, not to speak of interesting, than having pat labels applied to it. Even receiving such comments as "I like this," or "I dislike this," were of little use to us. As an artist you're attempting to communicate something, and the most gratifying response is hearing the details of how your work affects others, beyond simply kudos or condemnation.

It's true that as a viewer of art in some circles you may justifiably fear that you'll be considered naive or ignorant if you respond honestly to work in the way I've suggested. But I promise you that you won't get a response like that at Mindport. We're happy to discuss what we show, and will meet any questions you have with respect. But please, remember that we're vulnerable too and like to be accorded similar consideration.

Kevin Jones

Spring Cleaning

Mindport's tenth-year (in this location) revamp, painting, cleaning, and exhibit-shuffling session is near its end. We're open again, most exhibits are ready for visitors, and a new show of Kevin Jones photos is hanging in the gallery. One new exhibit, a newer and larger version of "magnetic molasses" has been installed by AnMorgan and Carol. The whole staff, including docents, have put in a lot of effort on this project. When you visit, we think you'll like what you see.

Regular followers may notice that the Blog heading has also been remodeled to reflect better what actually goes on with this blog. Over time it's become apparent that only a couple of the eleven staff members have much interest in writing entries. We, the two writers, are more entertained by writing about the philosophical ideas relating to Mindport and its social environment, than we are by writing about Mindport's internal daily doings. One reason for this is, in the collaborative process inherent in Mindport's operation, there isn't much obviously visible on a daily basis. Exhibits have a way of "coming about," rather than being a consequence of a hard-and-fast planned process. Often, an exhibit or project which starts out being one thing becomes another, an implication of this being that most of us who build exhibits don't care to talk about what is in process until it's actually complete. Personally, I've found that the surest way to lose interest in building something is to talk much about it while it's being conceived or built.

Judging by the statistics on our blog site, and by the questions asked by visitors in person, more people are interested in the ideas behind Mindport and in the sort of ideas that keep US interested in the ongoing collaboration which is Mindport, than are interested in descriptions of physical "daily doings."  We do enjoy writing something about new exhibits when they show up on our floor, and we'll certainly continue to do that, as well as announce any events of interest that happen to be imminent. But entries dealing with more philosophical subject matter, mental "daily doings," will be our focus when something we're reading about, seeing in the media, or thinking about inspires comment. We're living at a pivotal point in history when the survival of the human race depends on a major change in our collective belief system. We at Mindport are acutely aware of this, and much of what we create reflects, directly or indirectly, a response to what we see going on around us, filtered through through our personal histories and a shared world view.

Mindport is about ideas, Writing about these ideas is useful to us because the process of writing has the effect of clarifying in our own minds what's important to us and suggests future directions for our work. What we write also provides past and prospective visitors hints about the thought behind what they see exhibited on our floor.

Kevin Jones