Page 290 - AC/E's Digital Culture Annual Report 2015

AC/E Digital Culture Annual Report 2015290The success of this exhibition led the museum to undertake similar projects: Split Second in 2011 and Go in 2012–13.Split Second192 also took shape in three parts, with the virtual community in charge of choos- ing the content. In the first part participants were asked to choose a painting from the muse- um’s collection devoted to India. The choice was made through a series of images generated at random while they were timed. In the following phase participants were asked to write a small text to accompany the image in their own words. Lastly, users evaluated a proposed work and accompanied it with an explanatory text; this phase was also timed.The idea was to obtain information on how people react to various works of art depending on the information they receive about them.The result of this experiment was an installation that opened at the museum on 13 June 2011. It featured a selection of paintings accompanied by the most controversial responses, in addition to the graphs compiled from assessing the infor- mation. The installation allowed visitors to view a few works that are rarely on display owing to their delicate state of conservation.Finally, Go was a project curated by the commu- nity, designed to encourage exchange between artists, society and the museum, though in this case virtual tools were of lesser importance. For this purpose, 1,708 artists opened their studios to the public for two days in September 2012. Afterwards, the ten artists who received the most votes progressed to the next phase, in which the museum’s curators made a second selection anda group exhibition was held at the museum featuring the work of the five remaining artists. It opened on 1 December 2012. The whole process was documented on a website193 set up especially for the exhibition.In 2014 the Frye Museum in Seattle staged a crowdcurating experiment for the online com- munity: #SocialMedium.194 For two weeks in August the museum put 232 paintings from its collection online through its different platforms and users could vote for them simply by clicking on “like”. The works received a total of 17,601 votes from 4,468 users all over the world, and none of the paintings had no “likes”. The work that received the most votes was Scheuerer’s Peacock (1907), which soon went viral on Tumblr with 3,525 “likes”.The work with the second highest number of votes, 210, was Franz von Stuck’s Die Sunde, which is hailed by experts as one of the most important works in the Frye’s collection.The exhibition occupied several rooms in the institution, and each chosen work was displayedFocus 2015. Museums and New Technologies