Course: HIST 635 – Internship in Archives
Internship: Art, Culture and Technology Archives and Special Collections at MIT
Week 5 Time: Mon. 7/19, Sat. 7/24 – 12 hours
Total Time: 50 hours
Part 1: Monday July 19
I think I may have mentioned this before, but the new big assignment for my internship is creating an exhibit for Thera’s virtual museum! Starting projects like this is always difficult for me, because the more freedom I have to create, the more nervous and frozen I become. Recently I’ve started learning that the best way for me to overcome this is just to search and explore the potential content. Eventually, I find something that grabs me and then I go, go, go.
Last week, I brought home a Center for Advanced Visual Studies (CAVS) booklet with images of their artwork and programs of their events. The CAVS materials make up a significant percentage of the ACT archives because the ACT program was created when CAVS and another program merged. So the booklet was a perfect way for me to explore the options for the exhibit and get an idea of what I might be interested in. I found a few really neat events that I wanted to cover, but either they already had a virtual exhibit, or we didn’t have enough digital content from the event to make a good webpage. Luckily, while I was searching for digital content on the ACT Dropbox, I kept stumbling across Sky Art, something Thera had briefly introduced me to on Thursday (she made a kind of View-Master/reel viewer device using photos from the Sky Art projects).
“Sky Art” is a term that was coined by Otto Piena (Pee-na) (the second CAVS director) back in the 70s or 80s I believe…. Perhaps earlier. He created incredibly long balloons and filled them with helium so he could make art that stretched dozens if not hundreds of feet into the sky. He created the balloon rainbow that stretched over the closing ceremony of the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich (after an attack on Israeli competitors, which is definitely in living memory I imagine). He also lit up giant helium-filled balloons that looked like stars or giant palm trees that waved in the sky with the wind. He also worked several times with Charlotte Moorman (most famously known as the Topless Cellist) before her death in the 80s. He sent her into the sky attached to many balloons and she played “Sky Kiss” on a cello that was somehow fixed to her body. Fascinating! Her avant-guard style music isn’t my super favorite, but that’s NOT the point.
Anyways, as you can see, I’ve found inspiration and I’m running with it. I definitely think there’ll be enough content in the collection to make several pages of interesting images, stories, and DEFINITELY videos. I’ve found interviews with Otto Piene and Charlotte Moorman online as well. I’m so glad there’s a lot to work with! And no one has created an exhibit with it for the virtual collection yet. Phew.
Part 2: Saturday July 24
So! Today’s work was very short but I got a lot done and I’m definitely making progress on this exhibit. For four hours I scoured the ACT Archive Dropbox for “sky art” and found a lot, so I downloaded all of the most interesting articles and images. Then I divided those up into potential sections for the exhibit and put each section in its own folder. I ended up coming up with a lot more sections that I originally thought. The (super) rough titles are: Sky Art; Otto Piene; Teaching and Learning; Newspaper Articles; Icarus the Sky Opera; Exhibits and Shows; Sky Art Conferences. We have images and videos for each topic and then I’ll write out “labels” and such as well. I think instead of creating this exhibit on a Google Docs, I’m going to create a draft page on WordPress and design the whole exhibit as if I were actually creating it on the Virtual Museum website. I don’t think Thera is using WordPress for the museum, but I think that her platform and mine will be at least a little bit transferable, and I’ll be able to figure out where I want everything to go and what sorts of widgets I’ll want to use. Even if they’re not exactly the same widgets, I think they’ll be comparable. Tomorrow I’ll be starting on the draft!
Kayla Allen 