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POLLING A collaborative survey & analysis with Nicole Kistler In the two-year process of funding, planning and creating the Living Barge Project, Nicole and I learned a great deal about the business of public art. Grants often asked us to measure our success, which struck us as particularly odd - since art is such a subjective medium, how does one know when they have been successful? It made us wonder how people value art and what factors figure into that assessment. Fortunately, in our parallel (professional) lives, we both have experience trying to assess subjective things using scientific means, or assigning a value to things like a view of the mountains, quality of life, or an ecosystem. It's absurd that we have to quantify these things in order to protect them.
So we applied these same social science methods to art. We conducted 2 surveys. The first survey was given to three different groups - people at the Pioneer Square Art Walk (outside of SOIL), riders on the Bremerton ferry which connects Seattle to the military town of Bremerton, and students at Aviation High School where we had been teaching a high school class. This survey, shown below, asked people what they thought of art and where and how often they looked at it. For the second survey we created two images - one of a painting in a museum, and a photoshopped image of the same painting sitting in the art section of a thrift store (the pictures in the installation view above). We showed people at the Fremont Sunday Market one or another of the images and asked them to set a value on the painting they saw.
By designing surveys about something that is personal, subjective, and difficult to categorize, we were able to expose some of the inherent difficulties in the survey process - the forced choices, question wording, and categorizing that not only can signal poor survey design, but outright manipulation. As our society has become more and more obsessed with data collection, polling and surveying to make decisions, it has become common practice to design a survey to get the answer you want - leaving us all data rich and information poor. This was reflected in the chaotic 'punk rock science fair' presentation of the results of our analysis, shown below as installed at Crawl Space Gallery in Seattle.
The act of giving and taking a survey
is a public act and a personal one. In answering survey questions, the respondent
must make a number of decisions - whether to be straightforward and cooperative
no matter how unsatisfactory the choices are, or to be noncooperative or
answer untruthfully. It's also an act of trust - that the information you
give is not going to be manipulated or tabluated in a way that you did not
intend.
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