Installed and Permanent!

It’s been months since I’ve updated this post, and the install has been finished for a while now! My bad, my trip to Europe took precedence over blog updating, haha!

Anyways…we left off when we were in the middle of designing and installing. I will say that the install day was a full day of organized chaos. Everyone was on their toes, doing one thing or another. So I’ll just go through all of the major installations we did, followed by all the other things we added to the historic site.

This is a game coded in Unity, made by our Professor Miriam Langer and student Rebecca Sharp. Every year in December, Jemez has a public event called “Light Among the Ruins”, where they put candelarias all around the ruins and light them up for people to see. This is here so that whoever visits the site, year round, can participate in that event…whether it’s you placing and lighting your own candles, or take a virtual tour of one already lit up!

Here is another tablet station, with this showcasing 3-D native artifacts that are sculpted through Blender/Unity. This station gives people the ability to view a wide range of Jemez artifacts, while 1.) The artifacts don’t have to physically be at the site, and 2.) They can move the objects all around in 3-D space to get a full view.

This was one of our big projects for the video team…probably the bigger of the two, really. What you’re seeing here is a projected mapped story of the Jemez People. Composed out of high quality images and text to aid the story, it uses three ultra short throw projectors to cover the 36 feet of wall inside the visitor center. We covered the whole length of the wall plus the curve at the end, in order to give visitors a more immersive feeling while going into the story of the Jemez.

Another big project for the video team was a wall-mounted video showcasing the history of the Jemez People, with the narration being spoken in the Toa Language. Jacob Erickson primarily worked on this, while having interview assistance and creative editing advice to aid him with completion.

This poem is a very popular poem with the Native People of Jemez and with those of the public who visit the site. It was mentioned that a print out of this poem is nearly always requested by people who visit. We decided it deserved its own place on the wall.

This is definitely one of the bigger draws to the site, I’d say; a ton of love went into this wooden floor map. What you see is a map of the Jemez Historic site carved into wooden panels and placed on the floor. The map is surrounded by hand drawn native patterns provided by one of the site rangers, Brenda Ortega. Future plans for this include an installation of a whole new wooden floor, so you can imagine how that would make this piece look!!

With all of that covered, there’s still more to talk about. During many of our meetings, it was explicitly stated that they wanted an exhibit in the bathrooms. While I did take photos, none of them really came out…so I’ll tell you what we added to the bathrooms. In one of them are high quality images of the surrounding landscape, with nature sounds playing in the room. In the other bathroom, a few of our students constructed and installed a lava wall. So…imagine a wall of black, cut through with strands of red, yellow, and orange. Behind the strands are strips of LED lights, lighting up sporadically, to give the visitor the sense of flowing lava.

Other things done at the site include: painted patterns on the wall of the entryway, the whole front desk torn out and replaced, a redesigned junior ranger guide, a redesigned trail guide, newly designed time availability poster for the front, newly designed brochures, an added weekly newspaper featuring local events and art, etc.

Our main challenge of this project was to take a site that hadn’t been improved upon for 40 years…bring it into the modern era and to give honor to their story, through our work and what we present. We made the installation update friendly, so that anything new that comes to light for the site can be incorporated into the exhibition fairly easily. I’m happy with all that we did for the Jemez people and their historic site. The staff loved our work and would love to work with our class again!

One other quick surprise…a lot of places covered our work, check it out!

Seattle Post Intelligencer https://www.seattlepi.com/business/article/New-Mexico-students-help-redesign-Jemez-Historic-13827644.php

Albany Times Union https://www.timesunion.com/news/article/New-Mexico-students-help-redesign-Jemez-Historic-13827644.php

My San https://www.mysanantonio.com/business/article/New-Mexico-students-help-redesign-Jemez-Historic-13827644.php

KRQE News 13 https://www.krqe.com/news/news-briefs/new-exhibit-opening-may-18-at-jemez-historic-site/1987034579

NMHU Panel Discussion at International Museum Conference in California https://www.nmhu.edu/students-present-jemez-historic-site-project-at-international-museum-conference/?fbclid=IwAR3vZTIMQS64Ejou_stRiEcO5EgISTgphsjw9hnwO9SAlTbjGm4etY9xMzg

Update #2: Nearing the Install Date

Chiming in to give an update,

It’s been a crazy month and a half or so, with all of the teams really busy on our respective projects. I have the say, things have been taking a bit of a down turn, but that doesn’t mean that we won’t put out a good end product. What do I mean by that? Well, the faculty over at Jemez Historic Site have really been dropping the ball when it comes to communication, often leaving our teams with very little information to go on in order to complete their work. With regards to the video team, we’ve been unsuccessful with properly scheduling interviews because of the way the Jemez natives live their daily lives…apparently, time isn’t much of a concept, especially being anywhere “on time”…they show up when they show up. However, that’s not to say that we haven’t shot any interviews, we have..we’ve shot one with Marlon, Brenda and Curtis; all native employees there at the site. We’ve also had the opportunity to speak with a Jemez Tribal Preservation officer about this duties with regards to the Jemez Pueblo. We also interviewed Marlon’s grandfather, but none of his content was useable…what I mean by that is that he answered interview questions in Towa (their language), and when they were translated, none of the content revealed through English translation was useable to the story we are trying to tell. In fact, the majority of these interviews leave a lot to be desired…but we’ll make it work, somehow.

Another thing that happened was that we’ve been plagued with problem after problem with regards to the projection mapping project. The place we purchased the projectors ended up sending us one projector with some “shaky” parts inside and another projector with a warped lens. We’re currently dealing with those issues. Another problem was that this projection mapping project was supposed to show HQ photos of the surrounding areas of Jemez paired with animated museum text panels that highlight various information pertaining to the story of Jemez. The main problem there is that (again, going back to communication problems) the design team hasn’t gotten any of the content in order to put these panels together…AND WE INSTALL THIS WEEK!

Crazy…if you ask me…but ultimately, this is good real world experience and I’m glad that I’m in this class. I think it’s benefitting me both with the planning stages of my field project and with information to guide me and to reference in the future with new professional institutions/projects.

With all of that being said, here are the few photos from the project so far:

Steven figuring out the the projection mapping part of the project. We just received our new projectors!!!

Here I am giving my portion of the project presentation to the Jemez faculty and other important people within the DCA. I’m talking about oral history interviews and their place within the exhibit.

Steven is really starting to nail this projection mapping stuff! (By the way, the software we are using is Mad Mapper)

Here is Rebecca Sharp performing her project manager duties and managing the presentation for us. Also pictured are Eli Gonzales (NMHU video professor), Ethan (our communication link between NMHU and Jemez), Natasha and Frank (NMHU, multimedia team members), and one audience member (name unknown).

Inside of the church ruins at Jemez Historic Site during the Light Among the Ruins public show.

Our spring 2019 PICT class! From left to right (Rebecca, Tianna, Chris, Lilly, Ali, Natasha, Gabby, Stephanie, Jacob ((me)), Frank, Steven, Terence, Adrianna, and Adolfo)

That’s it for now! I will probably have more to update you with when we finish installation day, and then again for the day of the opening! So stay tuned! 😀

First Half of Semester (Condensed)

This semester has been insane, quite literally. I’ve been wanting to start up another blog that follows this project, but just haven’t had the time to do so until now…so if you’ll excuse me, this post will be a condensed documentation of the first half of the semester, and the remainder of the blog will hopefully be separate blog posts highlighting our journey to the end (hopefully more detailed than this post will be).

Some context: This blog is about my PICT class, which is re-designing and installing a new visitor center at Jemez Historic Site, New Mexico. PICT is a class that takes place every other year in the spring and works with clients to redesign and install exhibits in cultural institutions. In the past, they’ve worked with Coronado Historic Site, Los Alamos Bradbury Science Museum, etc. I’ve never been one to opt to take the PICT class because of the scope of the projects, but being that my graduate degree focuses on multimedia project installation I figured I’d better be in this class.

We started the semester with taking a field trip over to the Jemez Historic site. We had a tour of the site by a Native guide. He told us some of their origin stories, took us down into a renovated Kiva and even played some flute music from an eagle bone flute he constructed himself. That was a magical moment!

“Light Among the Ruins” is a popular event in Jemez at the end of the year. A lot of people attend this event!

When we first entered the visitor center, this is what we were presented with:

Jemez Historic Site Visitor Center Entryway.

As you can see from the above two photos, it’s not very exciting. The rest of the visitor center was just like these two images…we had our work cutout for us! lol!

After getting a tour of the grounds and everything, we met up with the rest of the Native council for an initial meeting to talk about who they are, what they would like to see from us, and what feelings they want their visitors to leave with. We took this information back to the university and started work shopping things!

We have a lot of information to work with and to share properly with future patrons to the site! The prevailing theme is that these people, the Jemez People, are still alive today. Their culture still persists, as it always has. We want to showcase their past, their present, and their future.

Work shopping native patterns for design elements!

We spent the next few weeks coming up with ideas, prototyping those ideas, and refining those ideas. Next we had a client meeting over skype with them during a class period, where the different teams took turns to present their ideas. They loved a lot of the initial ideas and were really impressed! We’ve honestly never had an initial client meeting go that well before, which was awesome! So that just means that next it was time to refine these ideas, polish them, and build better prototypes.

Here is a blueprint sketch of the placement for our ideas to give you an initial example of our plans.

And here is an example from one of the groups, they are re-designing the floor of the visitor center to be a laser etched design of the site grounds.

Two weeks ago, we gave our big presentation to the Native Council of Jemez Springs, the Mayor of Jemez Springs, and some cultural affairs people from Santa Fe. We killed our presentation and they want it all!

With classes picking back up this week (now that spring break is over), the real work can begin. This next month and half will be nothing but work work work, produce produce produce, and then INSTALL!!! I’ll hopefully be updating this more frequently leading up to the install day and finally the grand opening!