Impossible Questions
Earlier this week, my team at work announced a large-scale project that will consume a large portion of my professional life over the next few years. Art Tracks: The Provenance Visualization Project is a facinating concept and an opportunity to make a valuable contribution to the museum sector.
The TL;DR version of the announcement post:
The Digital Media Lab at Carnegie Museum of Art is attempting to structure provenance and exhibition history data so curators, scholars, and software developers can create dynamic visualizations that answer impossible questions—and we’ve assembled a talented team to do it.
Since announcing the project, several people have asked what we mean when we say “impossible questions.” In our minds, the impossible questions are the questions we’d love to have answers for, but currently don’t have the ability to calculate. Or if we could manually calculate answers, the available data won’t allow us to compute at scale.
Some examples of impossible questions we’re challenging ourselves with include:
- Which objects currently in the museum’s collection were in New York for the 1913 Armory Show?
- What items in the museum’s collection were located in England during WWII?
- What percentage of our collection has been on loan at least once in the past 20 years?
- What areas of the world have the permanent collection never been on loan to? What are the prohibitive reasons (geographical, political, etc.)?
- Where, on a map, is every item in the permanent collection located today?
- What group of works belonged to a particular nationality of collectors at a particular time and/or in a specific place?
- Which artwork in the museum’s collection has logged the most “miles” since creation?
These are just some of the things we’re considering as we explore this concept of impossible questions. We’ve only been working on Art Tracks for a month, but we’re already realizing that when you begin to connect an art object with its entities (artist, owner, exhibitior) over time and place, there is enormous potential for arriving at impossible answers.