Stanford Mendenhall

Susan Yelavich

Writing for the Public Realm

24 September 2018

Fig 1. Red Lobster glass (front face)

Fig 2. Red Lobster glass (side face)

Fig 3. Red Lobster glass (top view)

Fig 4. Red Lobster glass (bottom view)

Fig 5. Red Lobster glass (blank side view)

“Narrative of Glass: Curation with New Media”

Museums do not normally present an important aspect of design objects: the way an object is used in contrast to how a designer intended them to be used. This personal use by an object owner is a personal interpretation of an object’s function. This personal use builds narratives around design objects. This use may not be documented by contemporary scholars. However, it is documented by users of objects on social media. Instagram will be used as an example to describe curation with new media.

The Red Lobster glass is rectilinear with four faces on each rounded side. One face of the glass has a lobster on it with the “Red Lobster” brand name, and two phrases, “Fresh Fish. Live Lobster.” Another side of the glass has lines and numbers, signifying that it is for measuring. If a curator were to present this Red Lobster glass, she may say that it was used for drinking beverages, or that it was used as a measuring cup. She would be wrong. I personally use this glass for storing coins. These personal stories of users tend to get lost in history or depend on sources that may not be credible.

Two hundred years ago these design narratives may have been recorded in diaries and journals. Now these personal stories can be found through social media. Social media as a form of documentation is not as alarming as it may sound and can produce higher curatorial standards. When curators look to digital sources for documentation of how an item would be used outside of its intended function, they can look to social media companies.

For instance, if the Red Lobster glass were to appear being used on Instagram in a variety of ways, viewing an Instagram profile is one informative source. Knowing if a photograph was staged is one journey a curator could take on Instagram. The distinction between staged and natural is important because a staged shot would not give a curator the same information about how the glass is used by individuals in contrast to whether this was simply a facetious use of the glass by an individual.

Instagram itself, dependent on company policies, is a record of standards, from back-end (back-end: code that does not produce what a user of a website would visually see) to the front-end code (front-end: the expression of code that visually presents itself to a website user). A curator can investigate Instagram photography to see what filters are applied to an image of the glass, the captions that are applied underneath a photo, or other photos within a specific profile to judge the credibility of the source.

A documented example of how code can influence curatorial research is through algorithms. Algorithms produce desired responses. For example, Facebook algorithms filter through 15,000 stories that might show up on a newsfeed to only present the most relevant 300 stories.[footnoteRef:23803] The complexity of this issue is that social media companies update their code. Curators will need to describe, for each update of the code, what the code is doing, how it effects the media presented, and how that effects the accuracy of a curator’s statements about that form of media. [23803: Vasterman. 2018. From Media Hype to Twitter Storm. [S.l.]: Amsterdam University Press. http://oapen.org/download?type=document&docid=644217.]

In The Non-Functional System, or subjective Discourse, Jean Baudrillard writes, “Between the world’s irreversible evolution and ourselves, objects interpose a discontinuous, classifiable, reversible screen which can be reconstituted at will, a segment of the world which belongs to us, responding to our hands and minds and delivering us from anxiety.”[footnoteRef:29831] One way an object relieves the human from anxiety is through its function. Perhaps this may be the doing of post-modernism, but objects are not always used according to the designer’s intended function. Curatorial research will need to look to new sources for information of how objects are used. Through social media, curators will be able to show how objects were used, in Instagram’s case, with photography as the source. [29831: Baudrillard, Jean. 1996. The system of objects. London ; New York: Verso.]

Bibliography

Baudrillard, Jean. 1996. The system of objects. London ; New York: Verso.

Vasterman. 2018. From Media Hype to Twitter Storm. [S.l.]: Amsterdam University Press. http://oapen.org/download?type=document&docid=644217.