Jason Cleverly

The Enlightened Eye is a museum interactive made for the Liskeard and district Museum designed to deepen visitor experience of mineral specimens. The Enlightened Eye supports a system of planetary gears allowing mineral samples to be examined sequentially by a digital microscope. Using a touch screen and a specially designed interface, visitors can annotate and select close up views to make unique responses that can be shared online.

The machine uses seemingly antiquated technology; the kinetic machine styling is an evocation of the camera obscura and the orrery, think magic lanterns and Joseph Wright of Derby’s Eighteenth century paintings of scientific enlightenment experiments. Simple Manual controls are positioned to encourage visitors to cooperate, engender collaboration and enrich participation.

These compositional considerations are part of a deliberate approach. Where aesthetic design and affordances are meant to support memorable interactions and meaning making. Additionally by inviting virtual and material inspection through a drawn response, the Enlightened Eye aims to connect the objects under scrutiny persuasively to the visitor.

The museum visitor is invited to draw directly over the microscopic images of the minerals, this invitation supported by the suggestion that images may be seen within the morphology of the rock structure, landscapes faces and other visual associations can be unearthed and isolated. This process allows for a playful or a serious relationship to be made with the specimens. The mineral samples a drawn from the Museum’s own collection and very local and connected strongly to Cornish mining history and culture. To be in a museum tracing and annotating curious and beautiful structures from deep in the earth may also place the visitor in the shoes of the eighteenth century gentleman scholar, recreating the taxonomic process of closely observing, identifying and recording mineral samples before the advent of photography.

I discuss this project in the chapter Design and Museum Interpretation: Contemporary Characteristics and Practice. In the book Design Objects and the Museum:

http://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/design-objects-and-the-museum-9781472577238/

This interactive is also the main case study of my practice based PhD research project, 

The Artist-Designer: Situating Creative Interaction and Interpretation in the Museum. Here I have conducted an ethnographic study of The Enlightened Eye in use as well as evaluating my role as a designer and artist and museum interpretation.

The Interactive Worktable and Escritoire was commissioned for The House of Words exhibition held during summer of 2009 to celebrate the 300th anniversary of Dr Johnson's birthday.  Dr Johnson is famous for compiling the most influential dictionary in the history of English language, published in 1755.  Johnson’s house, built in 1700 in Gough Square in the City of London, is one of the few residential houses of its type still surviving, containing panelled rooms, period furniture and paintings. For this installation, I built a playful, imagined recreation of Johnson’s furniture to evoke a sense of purpose and context. My exhibit comprised a table, an escritoire, book and inkwell, to be positioned in the garret room where the dictionary had been originally compiled

Using a digital pen that could translate handwriting into text-based data visitors added words of their own devising, or wrote idiosyncratic definitions of existing words to add to a collaborative online dictionary. The results can be seen here:

http://www.drjohnsonsgarret.net/

The coding and web design for this tangible/digital interactive was designed and developed by Tim Shear:

http://www.timosea.com/

Tim and I wrote about how we worked together in the publication Collaboration Through Craft, in the chapter Designing Collaboration.

http://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/collaboration-through-craft-9780857853912/

This project was part of Design of the Times (Dott) Cornwall’s Design Season. Dott Cornwall a partnership between The Design Council, Cornwall Council, University College Falmouth and the Technology Strategy Board. Dott is a six week multi-site exhibition of design works at 16 locations. Several shipping containers were distributed around Cornwall, and participants were invited to install artworks refecting important Cornish scientists, engineers, artist and social contributors. This work focuses on Richard Trevithick (1771-1833), a subject nominated by the Cornish Nationalist politician Loveday Jenkin. A mining engineer and inventor, Trevithick developed the first high pressure steam engine and the world’s first full scale working steam locomotive., The installation responded to Trevithick’s biography through the form of a large structure housing a series of dioramas. Additionally a small model of Trevithick’s 1808 engine Catch Me Who Can*, could be pushed along in front of the dioramas, illuminating each as it passed. The shipping container was situated at Carbis Bay, St Ives, and was open to the public for a month. The intuitive intelligibility of the design was evident during my invigilation, and visitors reported a greater understanding of a figure often overshadowed by contemporaries such as Stevenson and Watt. The novel simplicity of the interface, its narrative, illustrative and kinetic elements were approachable and engaging to visitors.

*Situated on a circular track in Bloomsbury. Paying a shilling, members of the public could experience ‘Mechanical power subduing animal speed.’

Lineamentum was developed for the Royal Cornwall Museum Truro. It comprised a mobile drawing kiosk sited in front of a large vitrine containing a variety of applied arts including ceramics, metalwork and glass.

Lineamentum allowed visitors to draw museum artefacts, to engage intimately with them and to engender a feeling of ownership and engagement through the close inspection that drawing requires. Building on the experience of The Narrative Engine, I aimed to cultivate this kind of interaction, the design was devised to make participants feel at ease about the drawing process.

To make the process of drawing easier for the visitor, I utilised a system employed by Albrecht Dürer in the fourteenth century. Dürer’s use of the perspective net and grid is a well-known device for perspectival rendering of 3D objects.

The design of the Lineamentum allowed the visitor to use the net and grid to draw with board markers on an illuminated gridded white board.  Drawings were projected in real time on to a large screen above the vitrine, and to a secondary screen in the museum foyer.

A collaborative commission with crafts maker John Grayson to design and make an interactive exhibit for the Museum of the Jewellery Quarter, Birmingham. This machine allows visitors to understand the way sheet metal can be shaped by fly presses by having a go themselves.  The Museum of the Jewellery Quarter is built around a perfectly preserved jewellery workshop offering a unique glimpse of working life in Birmingham’s famous Jewellery Quarter. When the proprietors of the Smith & Pepper jewellery manufacturing firm retired in 1981 they simply ceased trading and locked the door, unaware they would be leaving a time capsule for future generations.

John and I took our inspiration from some of the features of this extraordinary museum.

http://www.birminghammuseums.org.uk/jewellery

https://johngraysondesign.wordpress.com/

Held at the Potteries Museum Stoke on Trent the exhibition Ways of Looking concentrated on a range of works by artists, including David Hockney, Francis Bacon, Patrick Caulfield and Dorothea Tanning. A third iteration of The Universal Curator allowed visitors to configure their own versions of paintings drawn from Tate Britain’s collection.

In the exhibition these pictures were thematically arranged into categories such as ‘Looking at People’ and ‘Looking at Oddities and Enigmas’. Real things such as thermometers, as well as ersatz objects based on elements extracted from paintings, were again available for configuration by visitors.

Edward Wadsworth’s Regalia (1928) and Paul Nash’s Equivalents for Megaliths (1935) were amongst two of the paintings from the exhibition that were explored for this piece. Visitors arrangements of objects were fed to a live screen in the gallery to accompany the exhibition paintings. As with The Narrative Engine, the selected arrangements could be printed out. In this case, the visitors’ work was placed in small frames in the gallery so that the contributors’ work became part of the show.

For the exhibition Tell-Tale Narratives in Contemporary Craft at the Shipley Art Gallery Gateshead in The Universal Curator was reconfigured to become The Narrative Engine. To suit the theme of the exhibition, ersatz versions of contemporary craft works that featured in the exhibition could be arranged by the visitor to make a narrative scene. The stage for this arrangement also featured a back mounted screen that could be changed to alter the context that the objects inhabited. Selected results of the arrangements were captured during workshops, which enabled participants to write a story to augment their creations. The printed pictures and stories were then displayed in the gallery.

The Universal Curator was funded by the European project Situating Hybrid Assemblies in Public Environments.  It was commissioned for  the 2003 exhibition Re-Tracing the Past held at The Hunt Museum, Limerick Republic of Ireland. The Hunt Museum houses an internationally important collection of works of art and antiquities collected by John and Gertrude Hunt. The eclectic collection includes diverse religious artefacts, ceramics, tools and toys.

The design for The Universal Curator was developed to allow the visitor a sense of ownership of key items from the collection, and to create their own selections for display. The design featured a large canon-like structure that contained a camera that could be trained on a lit stage-like area. Visitors were asked to place ersatz plastic versions of the selected objects on this stage, the selection appearing on a large screen that then became a personally curated cabinet.

 http://www.huntmuseum.com/

The Mysterious Green Man and the Multifaceted Green Man are site specific projects I undertook at Kingstanding Circle, Birmingham, England. Commissioned by the local transport authority, CENTRO, it was created in 2004 from sheets of laser-cut stainless steel.

This piece examines the elusive nature of the Green Man figure, draws upon the arboreal qualities of the site and reflects the nearby Art Nouveau style benches. The Green Man is a mysterious legendary figure, a woodland nature spirit, which has its roots in pagan mythology. The design allows the viewer to observe a shift in image as they move around the sculpture, tangling and untangling the face in and from the steel foliage.

In 2000 I was approached by the British Crafts Council, to design and make a work that would fill the Special Exhibit space at the Sculpture Objects and Functional Arts (SOFA) Exposition in Chicago in 2001 This opportunity had a number of potential outcomes, not least of which was to develop a work that would afford and provoke multiple visitor engagement.

Nautical imagery had been a recurring theme in my work, and the concept of an ocean liner emerged at the development stage. I wanted to set the ship in an ocean so I decided to treat the generous space I had been given like a Panorama. Following visits to the Mesdag Panorama  in The Hague and Lucerne’s Bourbaki Panorama. I became preoccupied with the proto-cinema immersive spectacles popular in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. I consequently aimed to provide the visitor with some of the immersive qualities engendered by the panorama.

The resulting work took the form of two discrete zones: on one side a large ship resembling a scaled up tin toy, based on the designs of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century German company Gebrüder Bing and occupying the other, a section of deck and a secondary vestibule featuring simple apertures. The boat structure included a back-projected live feed from a camera focused upon the deck area, with the image appearing on the boat’s main cabin, therefore creating the opportunity for visitors to appear both on the real deck, as well as projected as if they were aboard the liner. Additionally, several portholes featured along the main hull of the boat, two of which contained hand painted faces of imagined passengers, and a further three which contained monitors displaying a live feed from three small cameras mounted on the side of the hull, allowing visitors to appear within the portholes. In addition the first and third live feed portholes were fed by opposite cameras, affording a potential surprise for visitors. So, upon encountering the vessel, visitors could position themselves in a number of ways that would allow the incorporation of multiple participants.

http://www.vom-lehn.net/Dirk_vom_Lehn/Publications_files/hindmarsh%20et%20al-CSCW-Conf2002.pdf

The Beatrice Royal Gallery in Eastleigh, Hampshire, commissioned and selected me for a new project in 2001. The project arose from the gallery’s desire to help visitors navigate their rather large and complex internal space in a former church. This consisted of a series of interconnecting rooms housing small and large-scale crafts and sculptural objects, forming a mixture of semi-permanent displays of work for sale to the public.

Having identified a number of suitable positions within the gallery, I developed two variants of this extended structure. The first, titled Keepsake, took the form of a massively enlarged Georgian eye miniature made of painted, carved wood, two metres high and positioned by the main reception. It was connected to a large metal vessel-form in close proximity but made remote by the layout of the gallery. The embedding of a small camera into both structures formed a connection between the vessel and Keepsake and each supported a television monitor relaying the signal from the other. A monitor lay at the bottom of the vessel structure. This positioning was chosen after the curator reported the frequency with which visitors looked into other large, mainly ceramic vessels on display. The Keepsake screen was situated in the iris and pupil part of the eye image, meaning the head would become a visual stand-in for the pupil when another visitor looked into the pot.

The second structure, simply named Viewer, followed a similar configuration to Keepsake, a copy of a painting by Cornelius Gijsbrechts, The Reverse of a Framed Painting (1670). This was mounted on a framework situated against an internal wall. Housed within the structure, and viewable via an aperture, a live feed showed a view from an adjacent gallery. The secondary device also primarily took the form of a painting; Lucas Cranach the Elder’s Portrait of a Man (1522). This hand-painted copy had two circular holes in place of eyes that framed the ‘real’ video relayed eyes of a visitor peering into the Gijsbrechts’ device. The work mounted in the wall had the intention of giving a viewer that peered through the sensation that they were immersed in the portrait in the adjacent gallery.

The intent for this piece was to create an interactive artefact that allowed the audience to interact both with the work and collaboratively with others. The project had an open-ended design brief that, while allowing for a continued personal exploration of particular visual and material qualities, asked for it to enhance and support social interaction. 

Deus Oculi was conceived to directly engage two visitors at a time; although a single individual or a number of viewers could also participate. A large wall mounted structure. Consisting of a large Renaissance style painting, positioned in the landscape format, featuring two figures in a plain interior. These figures were appropriated copies of Petrus Christus’s Portrait of a Young Man (1450-60) and his Portrait of a Young Woman (c. 1470). These images were positioned so that the head and shoulder portraits inclined towards each other. This was a compositional conceit that mirrored and related to the intended positioning of the visitors. Two structures resembling hand-held mirrors were arranged on either side of the painting. In place of the mirror glass were circular paintings, the right and left eye from Portrait of a Man by Antonello de Messina (c. 1475-6).

The design required the user to centre their attention on the screens, however the work needed a compositional balance. This was resolved by making the surrounding surface of the screens highly decorative, creating a tonal equilibrium. 

Qualitative field studies revealed many instances of active engagement and co-participation by visitors. In some cases separate groups as well as those together, directed and informed each other in the navigation of the work.

http://www.eecs.qmul.ac.uk/~jane/courses/RM/2002-03/CraftingParticipation-2002.pdf

I designed, made and installed this interactive map for the Museum of Oxfordshire in Woodstock. A series of painted wooden panels contained small door that could be opened to reveal various objects of local interest such as Stone Age sickles, antique leather gloves and roman snail shells.

2016 Design and Museum Interpretation: Contemporary Characteristics and Practice. Chapter for Design Objects and the Museum. Pub Bloomsbury. Eds. Liz Farrelly, Joanna Weddell ISBN 9781472577238

http://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/design-objects-and-the-museum-9781472577238/

2015 Playing with Words: Creativity and interaction in Museums and Galleries.  Patel M. Heath, C. Luff P. Cleverly J. The Journal Museum Management and Curatorship DOI: 10.1080/09647775.2015.1102641 

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09647775.2015.1102641?journalCode=rmmc20

2014 Crafting Audience Encounters. Risner, I. Bunnell, K. Cleverly, J. Making Futures. Making Futures Conference Mount Edgecombe Plymouth. Vol 3. ISSN 2042-1664

http://www.plymouthart.ac.uk/documents/Risner__Isabelle_et_al.pdf?1396624974

2013 Designing Collaboration: Evoking Dr Johnson through Craft and Interdisciplinarity.(Auth. Shear T. Cleverly J. Collaboration through Craft). Eds. Alice Kettle, Amanda Ravetz (MMU), Helen Felcey (MMU), Bloomsbury ISBN 9780857853912 hardback; 9780857853929 paperback.

www.bloomsbury.com/uk/collaboration-through-craft-9780857853912/

2012 Revealing surprise: The local ecology and the transposition of action (Auth Cleverly, J, Heath, C , vom Lehn, D & Luff, P)  Emotion and Social Interaction,Eds. Anssi Peräkylä andMarja-Leena Sorjonen Oxford University Press, ISBN-10 0199730733

http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199730735.001.0001/acprof-9780199730735

2002 Creating assemblies aboard the Ghost Ship D. Von Lehn, J Cleverly, C Heath, J. Hindmarsh. Proceedings of the ACM Conference   on Computer supported cooperarative work New Orleans Louisiana, USA. ACM Press New York NY, USA ISBN:1-58113-560-2

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/220879325_Creating_Assemblies_Aboard_the_Ghost_Ship

2002 Crafting Participation: Designing Ecologies, Configuring experience. D.Von   Lehn, J. Cleverly, C. Heath, P. Luff Journal of Visual Communication SSN 1470-3572

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/229432094_Crafting_participation_Designing_ecologies_configuring_experience

I seem to have made a lot of the posters for student shows as well as other events here are some of them.

I have worked and taught many students, here are some images of objects and projects - I will be adding more images and putting names to them soon!