Gallery reflection

Instructions

Use this template for your answers. Remove the instructions before you submit.

• Verify the author and date fields.
• Due as a pdf to D2L by April 18, 2025 (flexible), but feel free to submit at any time prior. You should probably generate your answers in this document as a webpage (html), but print the file to a pdf from your browser before you submit.
• Use the file name last_first_gallery.pdf, with your last and first names in those places.

Background

For class we will visit the Melton Gallery. You may want to take good notes, make sketches, take pictures, or go for a second visit. We will view work of the following artists:

• Benjamin Murphy
• Andy Mattern
• Pete Froslie
• Paho Mann
• Laurie Frick

Feel free to browse their pages and consider other works. You may also find these resources to be good reminders or additional inspiration.

• Talk from the Artists’ visit Unfortunately I forgot to unpause the Zoom recording, so I don’t have a recording of the talk. Some combination of this talk and the slides below will allow you to recreate some of the experience needed to complete this assignment.
• Slides from the Curator’s presentation (video on D2L)
• TED talk by Nathalie Miebach (Art made of storms) to be relevant.
• Glacier Casualty List
• Andy Mattern’s photo paper “OBA Database”
• Paho Mann on “Latent Constructions”
• Laurie Frick’s Lexus Ad

Task

Please complete the following tasks relating to your experience with the visit and your impressions of the art, artist(s), and presentation. For some of you this may be a new combination of thoughts, but try not to let that intimidate you. There is effort to put in to this, but there are no right or wrong answers.

The visit

Give a brief description of your impression of the Curator’s presentation, then address some of the following:

• Do you have any questions about the presentation that you were unable to ask during the vist?
• Describe something surprising or interesting from your visit?
• Had you thought of art as data or data as art before? Are you more (or less) likely to now? It is fine if your answers are “No.” But even then, spend some time thinking about why.

The exhibit

Identify one artist from the collection and explore their work using the internet on your own or from one of the links above. Identify one (or more) work that sparks curiosity, interest, confusion, or some strong reaction.

1. Describe the work and its background or goal (you can use artists’ descriptions, but avoid copying or quoting too heavily).
2. Describe how well you think the work represents its intended goal.
3. Now imagine translating some aspect of the work to code.
   • What kind of graph or graphs could you use to relate this content? Describe the axes and any decisions you might need to make in preparing this hypothetical graph.
   • Feel free to make “fake data” and create a mock data visualization. If you do, which output is more interesting? Or possibly more impactful?

Reminders

You can prepare answers however you like. In the end, submit a properly-named pdf file to D2L under “Assignments >”Gallery visit”.