TELEPHONE: International Arts Exhibition

Project at a Glance

When Covid isolation took effect in March of 2020, many artists were struggling with how to respond. I started an arts game in which a message is passed, not just from person to person, but from art form to art form. So a message could become a poem and then painting, film, music, sculpture, dance and so on. As Director, I led a team of 10 devs, ops, and designers to build an exhibition of works by almost 1000 artists from 493 cities in 72 countries. The game took a year to play, received worldwide acclaim, and was completed on a budget of $150 despite seamlessly ingesting more than 10,000 artist files from the backend into the custom interface. Our remote community “whispered” the message more than 7.6 million kilometers back and forth over the face of the Earth.

Project Summary

There were three teams I coordinated in this project — Design, Dev/Engineering, and Operations. The design initiatives included developing a design system from scratch using Figma and Miro, as well as solving highly complicated user interface problems for the 500,000+ global visitors to the exhibition. The Dev/Engineering initiatives involved building a backend administration system, configuring a backend storage with Amazon Web Services and Vimeo, and creating the scaleable process by which forward-facing pages would automatically populate artist pages without minimal errors. The Operations initiatives included everything from assigning works and maintaining communications with the 1000 artists, using our CMS through Google to collect and edit artist files, and creating a bug-bashing system by which to audit and correct all errors manually. We also created an artist portal so that participants could log in and fix various errors on their own pages, reducing our operational workload by enormous amounts.

Tools

We used a free version of Figma to collaborate remotely when building the design system and to communicate with Dev & Engineering. We used Miro to conduct various team exercises to define our goals, values, audiences, and to white board and utilize design games like Crazy 8’s and others. We used AWS and Vimeo API for backend storage and built our internal admin platform and artist portal using Django. We used Slack for our internal team communications and used Discord to create a space for artists to interact directly. Google Sheets and Drive played a major role especially as our makeshift CMS and our bug bashing system. We also used CodePen and BitBucket extensively.

The home trunk of our internal administration tool, built mostly from scratch.

The home trunk of our internal administration tool, built mostly from scratch.

The artists pages in our internal administration tool.

The artists pages in our internal administration tool.

Clicked into an individual work of art. This page of the internal admin tool allowed us to route files properly to the front end.

Clicked into an individual work of art. This page of the internal admin tool allowed us to route files properly to the front end.

Using Google Sheets to store all of the information about the artists and works. This was wired into Django, AWS, and Drive.

Using Google Sheets to store all of the information about the artists and works. This was wired into Django, AWS, and Drive.

Set up a system using Google to bug bash some 719 issues with all hands on deck within 20 days prior to public launch.

Set up a system using Google to bug bash some 719 issues with all hands on deck within 20 days prior to public launch.

Used Miro to do vision planning with the entire team at the forefront of the year-long project.

Used Miro to do vision planning with the entire team at the forefront of the year-long project.

Using Figma to create and share mobile and tablet versions of pages to give guidance to Dev on responsiveness.

Using Figma to create and share mobile and tablet versions of pages to give guidance to Dev on responsiveness.

Creating a brand new design system of original components based on the aesthetics of minimalist Brutalism (to contrast with bootstrap). Includes a very early site map as well as a number of the elements that would be used variously throughout the exhibition.

Creating a brand new design system of original components based on the aesthetics of minimalist Brutalism (to contrast with bootstrap). Includes a very early site map as well as a number of the elements that would be used variously throughout the exhibition.

Goals and Process

With the pandemic, we wanted to provide a way in which artists from all over the world were able to commune in a very intimate way (interpreting one another’s art work) without needing to be in physical proximity. Our primary goals were to serve the artist, to help people who were lonely, to publicize this work worldwide, and to help foster an international community. Other initiatives involved studying the intersemiotic process by which translation occurs between various forms of expression (focusing on ekphrasis and synesthetic properties). To that end, we have been invited to present our findings at ATOA in New York, Smith College, the Colloquium for the Nida Centre for Advanced Research on Translation in Rimini, Italy, and will be presenting the project in Lisbon, Portugal later this year.

The first task was finding the team. In this regard, we were exceptionally lucky, getting highly talented volunteers from Google, Dropbox, Microsoft, and various universities. None of this work was paid and our team put in approximately 10,000 hours of labor over the course of the year, in addition to our day jobs and family responsibilities. The next task was to schedule out all of our initiatives so we would be finished directly on our launch date (it was only one week later from what we had planned at the forefront a year earlier). Next, we had to recruit the artists, relying on message boards and social media and institutions in various countries but much of it was spread by word of mouth. Had our operations been more scaled at the forefront, we could have done a game of 10,000 works of art. As the game was unfolding and being played by the artists, much of the year was spent designing and building the interface, as well as constructing the method by which all files would be ingested by the front end. Each person on the operations team wrote thousands and thousands of emails as we coordinated with every artist in every country.

Ultimately, the design of the online exhibition is itself a work of art.

Managing the Team

While this wasn’t my first foray into managing a team, it was certainly the most enjoyable so far. In fact, everyone on the team (mostly 9 members but at one point 12) said that it was the best, most efficient, and most drama-free project group they had ever worked on. Some of this was based on my leadership abilities and some of it was based on luck. There were also a couple of variables that made this leadership role unique.

The first was that this project had almost no budget and no one was being paid. It could be that this team functioned so beautifully and seamlessly because we attracted a group of people who truly believed in the inherent value of the product. On the other hand, I had no actual authority derived from paying employees. This meant that I had to motivate our team with sheer exuberance and enthusiasm, constantly referring back to the values and goals we had collaboratively developed at the forefront of the project and to continually illuminate the beautiful vision of our finished product. When I needed the team to work harder, I could only do so by example, working intense hours like a robot to prove to everyone that I was personally willing to do more myself than I would ask of anyone else.

Secondly, I had not ever met most of our team in person, conducting all meetings and individual check-ins remotely. We used Miro for white-boarding, Figma for design reviews, Slack for real-time touch-points, Google Meet for our full group conferences, and both Google Drive and Sheets for asset audits. But what was truly wild is how close and beloved we all became to each other. This past summer, I’ve finally had the opportunity to meet up with our group in person (both on the East and West Coasts) and it’s felt as though we’ve known each other forever, embracing one another as old friends. A big part of that was a lot of laughter and a continuous celebration and high-fiving of each of our members as they crushed individual assignments.

I think what I brought to the table as a leader and manager was a deep understanding of how all the pieces of Design, Dev/Engineering, and Ops worked together in conjunction, both in terms of what they needed regarding assets and instructions and functional constraints. Beyond that, I made sure to protect the autonomy of each of our team members, knowing that it was important not only to bring out the gifts of each contributor but also to make sure that each member felt as though they had a stake in the project, that they owned it too and were responsible for it. I think the more I fostered a sense that this project belonged to all of us, rather than an interactional relationship in which we worked for someone else, brought out the very best work product in each of us.

The TELEPHONE Working Group during one of our full group calls directly prior to launch.

The TELEPHONE Working Group during one of our full group calls directly prior to launch.

Challenges

The primary challenge here was the sheer scale of the project. By design and structure, it was set to expand exponentially over the first six months. This meant that every week entailed 3x more work and contacts and artist management and file grooming as the previous week. One of our designers said that it was trying to build an airplane once we had already jumped off the cliff. That’s very true. Plus, we were working with almost no budget and everyone was volunteering insane amounts of time.

Secondly, there were aspects of operations— the way that we accepted and tagged and catalogued artist files— that caused certain problems on the design & engineering side. An example might be what file types we accepted or the fidelity or aspect ratio of images of images. Another example would be the formatting of poems. In numerous text file formats, the spacing and indentation of text did not transfer cleanly through markdown, which made for a lot of manual operations work adding spacing. Many of these issues could have been mitigated by a much deeper specs process at the forefront of the project— though this was always going to be an issue as what artists want to present is not always predictable. For example, one artist submitted an entire self-generating website as her work and we would have never been able to predict that.

Another continual challenge was the unpredictability of schedule and timing. To prepare media and press kits, we had to have a hard launch date but sometimes artists wouldn’t finish on schedule. We could have removed them from the game but each of those would have set the launch date back by weeks. We thought we had built in enough lead time to lock the project before launch but wound up only finishing five days before our public release. We finished on time but it was sweaty toward the end.

There are also immense design challenges here. The exhibition function was difficult to wireframe and flow out because it was so functionally complicated to move through all the various threads of the game in a way that was intuitive to users. The game map was also incredibly complex to design and, of any of our features, this was the one that underwent the most iterations. The problem was that the first half of TELEPHONE expanded exponentially, from one message in the first round to more than 260 works of art in the 7th generation. This made the map incredibly tall, requiring zoom and drag functions. The filter functions certainly help (and are particularly beautiful using our Geo World Map plug-in) but I’m not sure we solved this design problem perfectly. Still, the response from exhibition visitors and artists alike has often been one of awe.

TELEPHONE game map of almost 1,000 artists with edges showing how they are connected. Each node is hoverable and clickable, taking the user to that individual work page.

TELEPHONE game map of almost 1,000 artists with edges showing how they are connected. Each node is hoverable and clickable, taking the user to that individual work page.

A screenshot of the Exhibit function, in which guests can navigate through the network of interconnected works, sort of like a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure style of curating a series of directly related art works in a thread.

A screenshot of the Exhibit function, in which guests can navigate through the network of interconnected works, sort of like a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure style of curating a series of directly related art works in a thread.

An image of participating artists on a global map showing their locations. This is using a Leaflet plug-in and each dot represents a city. For example, New York includes 70+ artists and brings up a scrollable list of artists there, each clickable into their work.

An image of participating artists on a global map showing their locations. This is using a Leaflet plug-in and each dot represents a city. For example, New York includes 70+ artists and brings up a scrollable list of artists there, each clickable into their work.

This is the basic search & filter list of all artists in the TELEPHONE exhibition. Artists can be sorted by art form. Though it decreased the granularity and accuracy of these categories, we went from 18 art forms to 7 because it made the game map easier to scan.

This is the basic search & filter list of all artists in the TELEPHONE exhibition. Artists can be sorted by art form. Though it decreased the granularity and accuracy of these categories, we went from 18 art forms to 7 because it made the game map easier to scan.

Product Launch

The TELEPHONE project was started on March 27th of 2020 and made available to the public on April 10th of 2021. The About page includes 10 critical and theory essays about what is happening in the exhibition by professors, scholars, critics, artists (and one Guggenheim Fellow) from four countries. Within weeks, we had welcomed more than 100,000 visitors to the exhibition from every corner of the Earth. Though the initial peak of traffic subsided as expected after a month, continued traffic has remained robust, achieving our goal of maintaining a “long-tail” for this exhibition. In the first half-year the project was live, we have welcomed more than half a million visitors with a high return rate and impressively long session times. Not bad for a project with a total budget of 150 dollars.

A look at our global traffic 28 days after the launch of TELEPHONE according to Google Analytics. The United States accounted for far and away the most users but we were happy to see significant engagement from many visitors internationally.

A look at our global traffic 28 days after the launch of TELEPHONE according to Google Analytics. The United States accounted for far and away the most users but we were happy to see significant engagement from many visitors internationally.

Moreover, our team was ecstatic about seeing the response from the education community. For example, we have given presentations or scheduled to with Smith College, University of the Free State (South Africa), University of San Francisco, and the physical printed catalogues of our work has now been included on the syllabus at Brown College. Wake Forest University also took our game and made their own branch, passing the message through students at that college. But we’ve been even more delighted that elementary teachers at schools from the United States to Brazil to Indonesia have been adapting our arts game to their classrooms (with extraordinary results).

Critical Reception

The response by publications, critics, universities, and arts writers has been significant. What follows is a small selection of the articles and news segments about the meaning and nature of TELEPHONE. This was achieved with zero dollars of publicity and no professional publicists or institutional support. Not included was the selection of the project by the New York Times as one of their top things to do for a week. Basically, I directed a project in which my compatriots and I did something kind of impossible.