Leiden City of Science References, Part 2: Campaigns and Happenings

On Friday I wrote-up some references in response to an inquiry on Twitter from Meta Knol, Director of the Leiden City of Science initiative, about “the most engaging, interesting, mind blowing, and inclusive websites and/or online campaign[s]” in the field of art and/or science.

After an initial brainstorm I thought it would be easier and more useful to organize my thoughts in a series of posts here than in a zillion tweets.

Today I’ll add another category, Campaigns & Happenings, to the list of things I would want rattling around in my brain if I were creating a year-long festival of science.

As with my previous post about Websites & Channels; Platforms; and Campaigns and Happenings, my viewpoints and experiences here are limited (or blinded) by my predominantly Western, European/North American field-of-reference (What are the best citizen-science campaigns in South America? Where are the best science happenings in South Korea?!), and I am coming at this with an interest in looser, more informal, more bottom-up kinds of productions than one would typically find from cultural and scientific institutions; more “How can we see or reveal the know-how / curiosity / creative capacity of this community?” than “How can we tell audiences about this thing that we want them to know?”

In the next few days I’ll put up some thoughts about interesting Media & Products, and Convenings, Places, and Activities.

Campaigns & Happenings

Ask-a-Curator

Creative Mornings

Curators of @Sweden

  • What: A 2012-2019 campaign: Twitter account for the nation of Sweden, given to a different citizen every week.

  • Why: Official entities, governments, and institutions often choose to use friendly but stilted and inauthentic voices for their social media presence; Sweden chose to trust their voice to everyday citizens. It’s a testament to their faith in the power of democracy — messy, diverse, surprising, authentic. Also a good lesson in trusting your audience and not freaking out when user-generated-content gets controversial (per the New Yorker story, below).

  • Website: Twitter, https://twitter.com/sweden

  • Press/info: “The Pleasing Irreverence of @Sweden“ (New Yorker, 2012), https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-pleasing-irreverence-of-sweden; “Say Goodbye to @sweden, the Last Good Thing on Twitter (Wired, 2018)”, https://www.wired.com/story/goodbye-sweden-twitter/

  • Sample: Here’s the first tweet (and dialogue/replies) from Lars Lundqvist’s tenure as Curator of Sweden in July, 2012. Or dive into the archive of Tweets https://twitter.com/sweden or pick up a thread/theme from the articles above.

Day of Facts

DIY Bio community

Email to trees

  • What: City of Melbourne, Australia assigned email addresses to city-owned trees so residents could report problems, but people started writing letters to the trees!

  • Why: Example of strange, awesome, unexpected ways that people will use simple tech platforms (email!) for remarkable things. (“The street finds its own uses for things.” — William Gibson.) Evidence that people have an un-met need to express and explore their relationships with nature.
    Website: …

  • Press/info: When You Give a Tree an Email Address (The Atlantic, 2015), https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/07/when-you-give-a-tree-an-email-address/398210/

  • Sample: See the examples from the Atlantic article, cited above, or this lovely interactive from ABC News Australia.

Imgur Art Crawl

  • What: Community art show from one of the Internet’s largest image sharing & social sites.

  • Why: Making the skills, talents, and passions of the community visible. Non-transactional and non-financial. “Art” as defined by non-experts, largely absent the hangups and preconceptions of art museums, galleries, and academics.

  • Website: Announcement: https://imgur.com/gallery/RzG2mku
    Press/info: …

  • Sample: https://imgur.com/t/artcrawl — My favorites are the ones from people who cook, sew, and craft who say “I don’t know if you consider it art, but…”

Maker Faire

MOOCs

NASA Planetary Rovers and Space Probes on Twitter

Wikipedia Edit-a-Thons


Other post in this series: Part 1: Websites, Channels, and Platforms | Part 2: Campaigns and Happenings | Part 3: Media and Products | Part 4: Convenings, Places, Activities

Leiden City of Science References, Part 1

My friend and colleague Meta Knol, Director of the Leiden 2022 City of Science, asked yesterday for Twitter’s thoughts on “the most engaging, interesting, mind blowing, and inclusive websites and/or online campaign[s]” in the field of art and/or science.

A lot of ideas came to mind! And I thought it would be easier to list them out here than to blast out a series of Tweets.

I decided to focus on unusual science sites rather than art and culture. I also tried to think about what kinds of digital and digital-physical things (sites, apps, platforms, products, convenings) I would want to have rattling around in my mind if I were putting together a year long festival of science.

I’ve broken my thoughts into 5 categories, Websites & Channels; Platforms; Campaigns & Happenings; Media & Products; and Convenings, Places, & Activities. I can see that I definitely have a Western, English language, American/European bias and perspective on things, and I’d be eager to learn of new sites and resources that are more relevant in other contexts. Who is the most popular science blogger in India? Who is doing citizen science in West Africa? I’d really like to know!

A lot of this is just content in its most basic form, writing and speaking – blogging and vlogging — or using other people’s platforms (like Google Earth). I don’t think one needs to build fancy/expensive new websites, apps, or technology platforms to surprise and delight people, especially at first. Nobody cares that Derek Muller’s Veritasium videos are on YouTube and not his own Website or app — they just want to hear what he has to say. (Though the ethics of 3rd party platforms requires careful consideration.)

I also have a bias towards looser, more informal, more bottom-up kinds of productions than one would typically find from cultural and scientific institutions; more “How can we see or reveal the know-how / curiosity / creative capacity of this community?” than “How can we tell the community what we want them to know?”

As I was looking for articles and info about some of these efforts I could feel the influence of formal education — school-based learning. Not that I think school is a bad thing (!), but there’s a tendency for that particular lens with its requirements for standards of learning, formal evaluation, etc. to kind of drain away the open-ended curiosity and joy-of-learning that I find so appealing in so many of these projects. This was particularly evident with projects like Google Earth and Google Expeditions, where the tone of conversation about classroom goals quite overwhelmed the simple beauties of exploration, curiosity, and wonder seen in the experiences of the kids.

The first two categories I came up with — Websites, and Channels and Platforms — are below, and I’ll put the others in subsequent posts.

Here’s a Jamboard showing my initial brainstorm, though I’ve since pared away some ideas and added some new ones.

Websites & Channels


Individual Healthcare Professionals & Epidemiologists on Twitter

  • What: Someone, maybe Farhad Manjoo at the NY Times, observed that individual medical practitioners have been doing an outstanding job of communicating to the public during the pandemic crisis.

  • Why: An example of people in platforms and informal networks doing good.

  • Press/info: …

  • Sample: via Charlie Warzel: “In a 35-tweet thread on Monday, Tom Inglesby, director of the Center for Health Security of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, laid out the case for social distancing in American cities.” (Inglesby’s tweets start here: https://twitter.com/T_Inglesby/status/1237138117464715270

SciShow

Teen Vogue

The Brain Scoop

Veritasium

Vi Hart

Wait but Why

Platforms

Bill Nye the Science Guy


BLACK and STEM (#blackandstem)

Creative Commons, Open Science

Experiment.com

Google Cardboard / Expeditions

Google Earth / Google Sky / Google Treks / Google Street View

IEEE Spectrum

  • What: Magazine/blog from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.

  • Why: Great writing and content point-of-view at the intersection of science, technology, and society. Nice balance between technical and non-technical language.

  • Website: https://spectrum.ieee.org/

  • Press/info: …

  • Sample: Pick anything on the homepage (good information architecture example of putting your content up front!), https://spectrum.ieee.org/

Instructables

Khan Academy

Minecraft / Minecraft Education Edition

MIT Open Courseware

Reddit Ask Me Anything (AMA)

TED & TEDx

TikTok

Wikipedia

YouTube

Zooniverse

* * *

Other post in this series: Part 2: Campaigns and Happenings | Part 3: Media and Products | Part 4: Convenings, Places, Activities

The total erosion of meaning itself

The central disappointment of these spaces is not that they are so narcissistic, but rather that they seem to have such a low view of the people who visit them. Observing a work of art or climbing a mountain actually invites us to create meaning in our lives. But in these spaces, the idea of “interacting” with the world is made so slickly transactional that our role is hugely diminished. Stalking through the colorful hallways of New York’s “experiences,” I felt like a shell of a person. It was as if I was witnessing the total erosion of meaning itself. And when I posted a selfie from the Rosé Mansion saying as much, all of my friends liked it.
Critics Notebook: The Existential Void of the Pop-Up ‘Experience’ by Amanda Hess, New York Times, 26 September 2018. The piece is subtitled “I went to as many Instagramable ‘museums’, ‘factories’ and ‘mansions’ as I could. They nearly broke me.”

Mr. Toad in Hell

…“Experience” has emerged as among the defining fads of my generation. […] By classifying these places as experiences, their creators seem to imply that something happens there. But what? Most human experiences don’t have to announce themselves as such. They just do what they do. A film tells a story. A museum facilitates meaning between the viewer and a work of art. Even a basic carnival ride produces pleasing physical sensations. […]

I’m no Disney evangelist, but come on. Disneyland has a ride where you get to experience life as Mr. Toad as he is being sentenced to Hell. To Hell!

Critics Notebook: The Existential Void of the Pop-Up ‘Experience’ by Amanda Hess, New York Times, 26 September 2018. The piece is subtitled “I went to as many Instagramable ‘museums’, ‘factories’ and ‘mansions’ as I could. They nearly broke me.”

Engagement

christo2.png

Good day, sir. I am Christo. I am Bulgarian. Excuse my French. I am a sculptor. I make large-scale projects in the landscape. Temporary projects. And I would like to cover the Pont Neuf with a silky cloth for 14 days.

— Christo, from the documentary Christo in Paris, 1990

[Later in the film, an argument breaking out on the wrapped Pont Neuf.]

“It’s pure art.”

“This is free art.”

“It’s pure art, there to express what you feel.”

“And this is art?”

“It’s not art?”

“If you tell me this is art, then we’re not speaking the same language.”

…

“Explain to me what art is then! Explain to us what art is. Tell me what it is.”

“It’s very complicated. I can’t tell you in two words. But it is a creation of the mind, a creation that transposes reality." 

"It’s an idea!”

“No, a creation which transposes reality in such a way that will express something in a sensitive way to others.”

“I don’t know you. You don’t know me. If the bridge weren’t wrapped, we would have never spoken to each other. Ever." 

A tour guide observes, "Nothing will stay, it’s ephemeral. But people will look at the Pont Neuf in a different way.”

This is what engagement looks like.

"Everybody here is a part of my work"

christo3.png

“The work is not only the fabric, the steel posts, and the fence. The art project is right now here. Everybody here is part of my work.”

— Christo, at a Marin (or Sonoma) county zoning hearing for the construction of Running Fence, 1976.

From a film about the project:

[Waitress, making hamburger patties]: 

If you just look at it, the poles and the guide wires, it looks nifty, because it just swirls and turns and dips. And when he gets his curtain on it… it’s not pretty in the sense of pretty… it’s different, and it looks kind of nifty, this thing just winding all around. I imagine to some extent it is attractive. I just think the poles winding, you know, around the natural contour of the land is … it’s not pretty in the sense of pretty: it’s nature pretty. 

Customer: He’s the one who put that across some canyon and the wind blew it down or something like that?

Waitress: Colorado. 

Customer: Yeah.

Waitress: He says if it stays up one day - - the whole thing - - he’ll be happy. Can you imagine? One day? 

Customer: Three million dollars?

Waitress: I don’t know how many years he just toured all over the coastline. California, Oregon, the whole coastline. And he finally decided on this one little area he decided was the most beautiful area in the whole coastline. 

Customer: Is that right?

Dialogue and stills from Running Fence, a documentary by Albert and David Maysles. 

I’m working my way through a boxed set about Christo & Jeanne-Claude’s public projects. There’s a lot of cheap talk about “engagement” in museums, the arts, culture… But Christo takes it to people where they live. Christo is the master. 

“Before [Richard] Owen, museums were designed primarily for the use and edification of the elite, and even then it was difficult to gain access. In the early days of the British Museum, prospective visitors had to make a written application and undergo a brief interview to determine if they were fit to be admitted at all. They then had to return a second time to pick up a ticket–that is assuming they had passed the interview–and finally come back a third time to view the museum’s treasures. Even then they were wisked through in groups and not allowed to linger.”
— Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything, p 91. Link via Google Books

Richard Owen was the driving force behind the creation of London's Natural History Museum, which opened in 1880. In contrast to the British Museum, the Natural History Museum was dedicated to open access and civic engagement, according to Bryson.

Improv Everywhere

The Mp3 Experiment Eight (by ImprovEverywhere)

Boingboing says: “Charlie Todd says: “3,500 people downloaded the same mp3 from our website and pressed play simultaneously along the Hudson River in Lower Manhattan.  What resulted was a massive silent party with glow sticks, camera flashes, and flashlights.”

One of the youtube comments says:

”I drove 600 miles from Cincinnati with 3 cars full of 5 people and we had the best day of our life! Thanks ImprovEverywhere!“