Love and Yearning Interview, Part 1 · 1531 words posted 08/04/2004 01:11 PM
Last fall, the Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery exhibited Love & Yearning, a collection of illustrated Persian manuscripts exploring epic love stories and mystical themes. Among the featured manuscripts was “Haft Awrang,” (or “Seven Thrones”), around which the gallery designed a Flash interactive in order to draw visitors more deeply into the texts. The interactive was displayed on kiosks at the gallery, as well as on the web, and won a 2004 Muse Award Honorable Mention.
The “Love & Yearning” exhibit is one of my favorite uses of Flash: it’s like having the beautiful words and pictures directly at hand, only better. The visitor can view the pages as a whole or zoom into details too small for the naked eye, and the designers have created a playful flow from story to story with very little of the gimmickry that often mars interactive works.
The web team responsible for building the interactive—John Gordy, Head of Digital Media, and Jacqueline Bullock, Web Producer—walked me through the process from start to finish. The interviews were conducted at the Freer and Sackler galleries in July 2004. This week, I’ll examine the cultural decisions that go into designing exhibits, as well as the process of storytelling. Next, I’ll look at the steps needed to translate a manuscript into an interactive kiosk.
If you haven’t had the chance to see the Haft Awrang interactive, take a few minutes to explore it before reading this interview.
Planning the Exhibition
Dr. Massumeh Farhad is the Chief Curator and Curator of Islamic Art. Dr. Farhad curated the exhibit, and narrates portions of the web interactive.
MASSUMEH FARHAD: We have this outstanding manuscript in the Freer from the 16th century: the Haft Awrang, or Seven Thrones. We were going to show four paintings, but the frustrating part of it is you can’t see the whole manuscript, you can only see so many pages. We started talking about ways we could make the whole manuscript available to the visitors, short of actually having it there and having people flip through it. I had first seen this web site where you could actually flip pages, but that became too complicated, and it didn’t really allow us to focus in on the details; it became more of a gimmick and a distraction of turning the pages.
One of the challenges, not only having more than one page available to the public but also, with Persian or Indian painting, is to really make people look at the detail. We’re all so used to looking at Western art, a large picture hanging on the wall: you walk into a room and you can sort of “get it.”
With Persian painting especially the images are so tiny you have to work at it, you have to look closely. A lot of people don’t have the time or inclination, and we needed to find ways to draw them into the painting. If people came and looked at the interactive, we hoped that they would then look for the details in the actual paintings.
These were some of the ideas that led us to creating the program: to make all the paintings available and to make visitors focus on the details.
since1968: You thought that the electronic version might drive you deeper into the physical version.
MASSUMEH FARHAD: Right. The interactive is just a way of teaching you how to look. I mean you can stand there and say as many times as you want “you need to look closely,” but people say “oh yeah” and they can’t be bothered. When you have the ability to really focus on the details and create this interaction between you and the work, it’s learning a new way of seeing things or looking at things. It’s an experience you can take with you and use. We also have magnifying glasses, which help, but not as much as when you can zoom in and see some of the detail.
since1968: One of the things that intrigues me when I see a Persian exhibition: there’s a willingness to show images of the Prophets, and a lot of Sunni Muslims disapprove of that. As a Muslim working for the Smithsonian, but also as a custodian for the Smithsonian institutionally, how do you take the decision to show those images?
MASSUMEH FARHAD: Well, you can’t deny history or tradition; it’s censorship. Whatever my background, whatever my beliefs, I am here as a custodian of this collection. Clearly, there are different attitudes toward imagery, but at the same time when you look at the number of images of the Prophet that do exist, even though there are a lot of people who believe it’s not right there are just as many people who created representations of the Prophet, and it clearly seemed OK; they have survived.
One thing that’s important to remember is that these works were made for a private, secular sphere. For instance, the painting of the Prophet and the Seven Thrones is part of a poem. It’s still the Prophet, but he’s not used for a religious purpose, or he’s not shown in a religious context. You don’t have images of the Prophet in a mosque.
There isn’t a single rule; the whole issue of imagery is so layered. Part of my responsibility here is to show part of the complexity, not only of the cultures but also of the art. There isn’t just one view, and that’s one of the reasons Islam is so misunderstood. The belief is that there’s one Islam and one Muslim, but we know you can go to different villages in one single country and it’s different in each village.
since1968: When you’re deciding which images you’re going to show in a walk-in exhibition, where the group of people are more self-selecting, vs. when you choose images for the web, do you show identical images? Is there any consideration that we’ll show a larger set of images in person vs. a smaller set on the web?
MASSUMEH FARHAD: No. We’re a public institution and everything we have is available and accessible to the public.
JOHN GORDY: If the question is how many images you have, and what you put up on the web vs. what you put up in the exhibition, there are always choices—we want to have a narrative and to keep the web presence focused.
MASSUMEH FARHAD: In many ways my role as a curator of Islamic art is really not that different from a curator dealing with Indian art or Japanese art: we’re all here to show the complexity and breadth in the artistic culture of these different geographic regions.
JOHN GORDY: Another thing, we’re presenting this in the form of visual art. Most of the people who come to the museum are looking at it as visual art; religion is very important to the creation of the art. But people aren’t coming in and looking for a mosque or a temple. Haft Awrang was a love story.
Storytelling
Howard Kaplan is a museum writer for the Freer and Sackler, and wrote much of the text that accompanies the exhibit with the assistance of Carol Huh, Assistant to the Chief Curator and Curator of Islamic Art. I asked him how he translated a set of complex images and scholarly essays into something accessible to the general public.
HOWARD KAPLAN: In putting together the interactive, the storytelling aspect really had to be there. When you’re writing for the web you need to tell a story, and the design flows from one story to the next. You can go to any one of the seven stories, but once you’re in you can easily go to the others. That sort of hands-on activity level made you want to learn more. So many times you can go to a site, it’s like “here’s the text,” and you’re just going to scan and move on. Here you don’t. Some of the writings covered scholarly subjects like Islamic architecture… and then there were things that were not scholarly, like food preparation, making milk or yogurt.
As we went through the manuscript, we would go through the pages of the catalog and identify what would make a good hotspot, something to Zoomify, a detail.
We were able to locate things that you really couldn’t see in the manuscript with just your eye.
since1968: Such as?
HOWARD KAPLAN: There’s a signature of the calligrapher on one of the pages—you can’t see this with the naked eye (left). The signature was only discovered after magnifying one of the tiles. 
I think it’s a model, and I hope there are other manuscripts down the road that use these same tools, in the way you can zoom in and create text that is informative and lively and appeals to different audiences.
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The images used on this page are taken from the Love and Yearning exhibit. They are owned by, and used with permission of, the Freer and Sackler galleries and are not part of the Creative Commons license that covers the rest of this site’s content. Next: In part 2 of the interview, John Gordy and Jacqueline Bullock discuss translating the images from Haft Awrang into Flash.
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