Visual Velcro: Hooking the Visitor

A Chapter By Peter Samis

This article was published in Museum News, November/December issue of 2007.

New technologies can be part of a comprehensive interpretive plan.

The problem: creating a semantic context for perception. In the first half of the 20th century, museum curators and directors from Alfred Barr in New York to Grace McCann Morley in San Francisco knew that the meanings of the art of their time were far from self-evident, even to the educated Americans whom they hoped to cultivate as an audience. To be an advocate of modern art in those times was to act as an evangelist and an educator, alternately writing scholarly tomes and popularizing pamphlets, and devising innovative educational displays for use in the galleries and circulation on the road.

By the 1960s and 1970s, the gallery space had been pared back to a pristine white cube where, to quote Brian O’Doherty:
Art exists in a kind of eternity of display, and though there is lots of “period” (late modern), there is no time. This eternity gives the gallery a limbo-like status: one has to have died already to be there. Indeed the presence of that odd piece of furniture, your own body, seems superfluous, an intrusion.¹

Happily, in the 21st century, there are still embodied humans walking around art museums, and it is with these vibrant and varied individuals in mind that a museum might approach designing an interpretive plan.

Traditionally, interpretive plans have described for whom, how and why a museum interprets its collection, though not necessarily in that order. They acknowledge the diversity of visitors, both in their backgrounds and entrance narratives—the stories people tell themselves of why they go to the museum and what they hope to get out of it. Ideally, they propose a variety of strategies tailored to a range of learning styles. And they often itemize optimal standards adopted by that institution as to tone of voice, type size and wall text length, multiple languages and other accessibility features.

Since the 1990s, museum interpretive initiatives are no longer confined to the traditional analog array of exhibition didactics. Digital technologies have invaded every aspect of our lives, and museum galleries, while they may be holdouts, are no exception. So what is the state-of-the-art in museum interpretation in 2007? What mix of analog and digital? Does it entail every trendy device—each “next new thing”—that comes our way? To what end? What does current research show our visitors respond to most? What do they expect from us? How can we augment their experience in our galleries most meaningfully, least invasively? This essay provides early answers to these questions, with examples.

Consider the following interpretive principles endorsed by Tate Modern in 2004:

• Interpretation is at the heart of the gallery’s mission.
• Works of art do not have self-evident meanings.
• We believe that works of art have a capacity for multiple readings and that interpretation should make visitors aware of the subjectivity of any interpretive text.
• Interpretation embraces a willingness to experiment with new ideas.
• We recognize the validity of diverse audience responses to works of art.
• Interpretation should incorporate a wide spectrum of voices and opinions from inside and outside the institution.
• Visitors are encouraged to link unfamiliar artworks with their everyday experience².
  

The first rule of thumb in devising an interpretive plan for your museum is to put yourself in your visitors’ shoes—through direct observation, research (including interviews and/or focus groups) and openhearted empathy. Observation tells us that most visitors have developed well-established patterns in their use of museums. They read the wall texts we provide (whether they derive much benefit from them is another question); they rely on extended object labels (often too much, to the detriment of direct observation); they pick up brochures; some take audio tours. In fact, as of this writing, visitors consistently perform all of these activities in far greater numbers than they use computers, PDAs or other new media appliances.³With that humbling datum in mind, let us approach our problem—no, opportunity—space!

When do people most want information regarding the artworks in an exhibition? Some—more and more, in fact—want information in advance of their visit to the galleries, via the Web, and a smaller number will take the time to return to the museum’s website after their visit to learn more. But the vast majority of visitors want their information “just in time,” when they’re standing in front of the work. This need focuses our attention in planning for interpretive resources. If, as cognitive psychologists inform us, once a single “chunk” of information enters Short-Term Memory (STM), “[it] has between 3 and 20 seconds to reach Long-Term Memory [LTM],” our window of opportunity to hook into this new sensation is assuredly small. However, “Nothing enters LTM from STM unless it can be related, however tangentially, to something already in LTM.”⁴

To illustrate, let us imagine the humble Velcro patch. It consists of a strip of tiny loops, originally inspired by a burr caught in dog fur or velvet’s fuzzy surface⁵. Now imagine a sensory impression, in this case an artwork, arriving in your perceptual field. Unless the visual impression has a hook that can fit into one of the loops on your specific LTM “patch,” it will glide right by and be forever forgotten. If there is something in the artwork, however, that strikes you—a figure, a vivid color, a bodily sensation resulting from the artwork’s massive or minuscule scale, a memory trigger or implied narrative connection—then we can say that artwork has “Visual Velcro.”⁶It has hooked into your cognitive structure and stands a chance of remaining in your memory.

Famous artworks have had the receptive Velcro surface primed in advance by repetition and media saturation: Extreme cases would be the Mona Lisa, van Gogh’s self-portraits, Dalí’s watches or Warhol’s soup cans. But most artworks do not benefit from this Madison Avenue-like advance exposure. They live or die on the strength of the impression they make in the moment you stand before them. Different works in our galleries have varying degrees of Visual Velcro. (In the old days, we might have said some works are “more accessible” than others.) And while certain hooks are universal—anything with a face matches our internal wiring, for instance—others are generation- or culture-specific. Still other works seem like they were made from a different miracle material of the mid-20th century: Teflon. Much of the minimalist art of the 1960s, for instance, still leaves viewers baffled. Their gaze just slips right off of it and on to the next piece . . . and shortly thereafter, out of the gallery. But once a visitor has some scaffolding, the very pieces that seemed to merit no attention can become fascinating sensory experiences.⁷

The work of interpretation, then, is to give cognitive hooks to the hookless, and assure that these hooks are sufficiently varied so that they can successfully land in the mental fabric of a broad array of visitors. Once visitors have a framework, all kinds of sensory impressions, emotions and reflections can weave themselves into the fabric of perception. In fact, the more you know about a subject, the more you can learn about it (presuming the mental model you are working with accommodates the new information).⁸

Use of Mobile Devices for Interpretation
The time-honored interpretive solutions in art museums over the past several decades have been wall texts, object labels and audio guides. Audio tours are specifically designed to fill the need for artwork-specific information just in time as you are standing in front of a work. They are typically lightweight and, when worn on a lanyard with headphones, leave your hands free. Yet research repeatedly shows that most people prefer not to take them.

Only in blockbuster exhibitions does device usage go way up: as high as 30–60 percent of visitors. The thinking seems to be: “This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. I made a special trip to see these [Egyptian mummies/relics of the Titanic/masterpieces by van Gogh/Monet/Renoir], which will not be brought together again—the press assures me—for at least 20 years, so I had better get the most out of the hour I spend with them now.” The decision to rent a tour is thus born of the confluence of two mutually reinforcing demand curves: the first born of a lifetime familiarity with the exhibition subject at a distance, the second of the need to get just-in-time information in the object’s presence.⁹

Price is clearly a barrier to entry. With museum admission prices heading into the $20 range, laying out additional dollars for audio interpretation ironically feels more like a frill than a way to get the most value for your time and money. That is why museums like New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and the Whitney now offer free audio tours. Both institutions report that free tours for their permanent collection are used far more than pay tours in other institutions.

Age and form (the type of technology) are other discriminating factors. Research shows that visitors under 40 are far less likely to take an audio guide. That said, in a recent study, 79 percent of visitors owning MP3 players—who skew heavily toward the under-35 set—said they would be more likely to download a tour to their own personal hardware.¹⁰ In a recent experiment at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), visitors under 40 rated the podcast and cell phone versions of the audio tour 6.2 and 6.0, respectively, on a scale of 1 to 7—higher than the older users rated the “traditional” audio tour. The reasons cited included the ability to access information on demand, familiarity and comfort with the device and low or free cost.¹¹

In fact, the tour these visitors accessed—either via downloadable podcast or cell phone—was virtually identical to that offered on the traditional audio tour. The only difference was the format in which it was delivered. An opportunity clearly exists to package and promote interpretive and contextual enhancement to visitors in this younger demographic in a way that synchronizes with their self-image and lifestyle.

Since 2001, many museums have developed PDA prototypes; fewer have found the format sustainable. SFMOMA first delivered artist videos on PDAs in its “Points of Departure” exhibition. Tate Modern has been offering hand held multimedia tours via PDA to their visitors since 2002. Perhaps the most effective aspect of these devices is not so much their ability to deliver video on demand, but the way they extend the standard audio tour through their “Touch and Listen” feature.

This template enables visitors to use the image of the artwork onscreen as an interface to call up short commentaries about different aspects of the object they are observing. It is as if they were there with a curator or informed friend, pointing at the artwork and saying, “Tell me about this part” and “What about that?” The experience comes close to a conversation in its give-and-take rhythm; rather than getting stuck with an overlong commentary, the user initiates each request for more information—and that information is reliably targeted to specific regions of the artwork, following William Carlos Williams’s edict “No ideas but in things.” When the voice talks, nothing happens onscreen: All the drama is in the object itself. The PDA is simply an intuitive, indexical form of visual menu.

Figure 1