Thesis Evaluative Blog Post

The installation is complete and my thesis project is done. It's very exciting to be complete with the project and I'm glad how it all came together. It was interesting for me to have all these ideas throughout the semester and creating this final culminating piece. What was most surprising about my project is that at many points I diverged away from my original ideas and influences, but towards the end I came back and attempted to stay rooted to my initial inspirations. Influences from Raphaelle Peale's Catalogue, A Deception is very apparent in my piece and I like how my piece could be seen as a modern day version of Peale's piece. 

My piece installed in Mason Gross Galleries

Physically and digitally, I enjoyed how it came out. One of the main ideas for the piece was in relation to interaction. I wanted to see how people responded. I noticed that the younger generation, when approaching my piece attempted to access the GalleryConnect content on their smartphones. Those who didn't have smartphones were somewhat distraught at the fact that they weren't able to interact with the piece. Yet, this whole though process they went through is something that I see as a form of interaction. To me, as long a person walks up to the piece in the first place, the design is successful, even if they decide to walk away.

I've noticed that older individuals didn't really notice that this was an art piece at all, they seemed to truly believe that "this art piece has been relocated" and instantly they walked away. During the reception there weren't too many people attempting to access the GalleryConnect interface, which was kind of disappointing to me, but the ideal situation for my piece would be during the regular gallery hours. This way, the individual has time to see the piece, walk up to it in curiosity, and actually have the time to make their decision on whether to connect to my GalleryConnect mobile website or not.  

 

Within the interface itself, something that would tell me the true success of app is the Google Analytic engine I set up to track my mobile website. The most traffic I had was on the opening night of the reception, and the second highest traffic was on April 5th. I had a total of 232 page views, 128 of those views being unique. Below shows the statistics of the overall website, and below that shows the mapping of the clicks that people have made, showing the percentage of people that clicked on various links within the website.