As team leader for the install team, it was my job to talk to the other team leaders, and ensure my group fulfilled its required tasks on time. Due to our location challenges, there was less work for install than a physical installation would require. This proved a complication for me as I had to try and provide jobs for 6 people, specifically when the two websites we were using only allowed single user editing. Overall I knew this project was going to require only a couple of individuals doing the grunt work, but having the full group as sounding boards and idea men was great for progress. I do wish I could have given the others more work to do, but there really wasn't much else without that collaborative editing feature.
I ended up organising the virtual gallery with final placement input from the rest of the team. As part of this install, we added the artist statement to a interactive link on each image so that we had enough space for our images. This was due to the decision to follow a template gallery to ensure a higher quality atmosphere for our viewers.
I spent a lot of time uploading the digital art images and adding in the formatted statements, however Artsteps is a rather finicky website to use and there were several errors along the way which meant I had to remove and replace images several times. Overall I didn't have to spend too many hours working on that, but it was enough that when Artsteps decided to crash the day before we were due to go live I was a little disappointed. Due to the potential that Artsteps would not be back up in time, Emma and myself made the decision to move the images onto a separate page on the exhibition website. Because Emma had spent so many hours formatting the website, I nominated myself to create the image gallery and got Emma to double check I hadn't broken anything. This also enabled us to pick up issues that weren't previously noted, and I fixed them as we corresponded.
Thankfully, this morning Artsteps was back up and running and because of the work I had previously done, all I needed was to add a couple more submissions and place the final art pieces on the wall. Once this was done, I set up the guided tour, added a couple of logos and our 3D gallery was now part of our exhibition again. This required me to go back into wix and update the website back to the original summary that mentioned the 3D atmosphere, and add in the 3D link. This provided yet another opportunity to spot and fix another error, and instigate a suggestion that Traci had made in regards to linking the artist statements to the gallery pages.
Very good run down of the difficulties of staging a virtual exhibition. We're definitely interested in having more virtual exhibitions so we'll have to keep in mind how to keep everybody busy. Maybe you and Emma could have had two other people from the team picking up errors instead of going through it together? Would that have sped the process up or bogged it down, do you think?
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