Four seasons of slow looking
Sound, music and mindful art appreciation with Cogapp’s new IIIF tool
Slowing down is hard to do digitally: speed is fetishised in connection speed, post rates, skimming content and almost everything else online. At Cogapp however, we’ve been thinking about ways to encourage slow looking for a while. This post offers four lovely slow looking examples, paired with sounds and music, for you to try.
But first, a little background. My team mate Gavin wrote about how we built slow looking into the Clyfford Still Museum’s online collection: Deeper, more meaningful art-experiences with digital.
We’ve now taken this further with a slow looking viewer that works for any IIIF* image:
* IIIF — The International Image Interoperability Framework is the technical wizardry behind our slow looking viewer. It allows zooming, keeps image metadata and images together and enables annotation. All sorts of cleverness perfect for online collections and high resolution images.
So, where should you start your slow looking journey? There are now dozens of organisations with IIIF images but finding their compatible images is still a bit tricky.
Here are four seasons of slow looking to get you started: four very different images paired with sound and a little information on things to look out for. When you’re done, learn how to slow look at other images from these four collections.
NOTE: The Cogapp slow looking viewer displays images directly from their original sources. Copyright and any other intellectual property rights remain with the holders. Please refer to the sources for details.
Spring
Here in Brighton, we’ve just had our first really hot weekend of the year. Spring has sprung. People relaxed, had fun, swam, ate ice cream… But the weather has been pretty crazy lately and we had unprecedented snow just a few weeks back!
All the feelings of topsy turvy growth and change are in this first image:
Barbara Morgan (1900–1992)
Art Institute of Chicago
Before you dive into the marvels of Morgan’s pioneering photomontage, hit play on the track below. This is Bach’s Easter Oratorio. Not only is it perfect for spring, the dancer in the centre of Morgan’s photo is (I believe) Charles Weidman: one of the many avant garde dancers Morgan photographed. I’ve paired the works as Weidman created dances for Bach’s Easter Oratorio in the 60s. The timeline doesn’t quite match up but the sentiments are perfect.
Summer
When was the last time you looked at a flower? Really looked. At the structure, the textures, the colours. Great art can make us pay close attention to the details of the world— and vividly transport us to moments when those details were luminous.
Jacques-Laurent Agasse (1767–1849)
Yale Center for British Art
Agasse was most famous for his paintings of animals. But this detailed study of summer flowers really shows off his skills as both painter and naturalist. The poppies, dahlias, foxgloves, irises and roses have been carefully and exquisitely painted: they were planned, sketched and layered up with precisely mixed colours.
Now Agasse has done all the work, I’d like you to join me in a summer garden: cutting some of the choicest blooms, laying them on a table and really appreciating them. Why not listen to this to complete the effect?
Autumn
Rococo. I’m rubbish at remembering the names and meanings of artistic styles but the absolute silliness of Rococo always sticks in my brain: if you were rich in 1700s Europe, bling went on everything. It was Liberace’s dreamworld.
Corrado Giaquinto (1703–1766)
National Gallery of Art, DC
This vision of Bacchus in drunken autumnal revelry is perfect. This moment of slow looking is less about contemplation and more about enjoying the silliness. Therefore there are two party pieces to go with it — one of the time Domenico Scarlatti’s opera about Narcissus, and one that takes a similar mood and brings it into more recent times…
Scroll down, it’s up to you! 🕺
Winter
With all the marketing of **sshhh** Christmas… it can be hard to look at wintry scenes of Europe without being immediately drawn into that nostalgia. But the idea of enjoying oneself in snowy mountains is pretty new — basically no one would dream of paying to exert themselves in cold, hard-to-reach places, until the late 19th century. It only really got going in the early 20th.
Agence Rol staff photographer
Bibliothèque nationale de France
The jumpers, moustaches and headgear are undeniably ridiculous. The motivation to toil up, or fling oneself down icy slopes was pretty ludicrous too — especially considering the dangers. That’s the thing that sticks with me: how quickly people go from inventing a sport (the 1870s for bobsleigh) to pushing it to lethal limits. I could speculate about the hubris, toxic masculinity or just plain stupidity of this. But I prefer to take a slow look at this picture and think about how these guys braved cold (where are their gloves!?), pulled muscles, bruises, broken bones and even possible death. Just to see if they could get down the fastest. One word comes to mind:
Badass.
I hope you’ve enjoyed slow looking with me. I zoomed right into dozens of amazing images while selecting these four, and was thrilled each time pairing different images with different sounds created a new mood.
If you want to try the slow looking on other images from these institutions (or your own) see How to use Cogapp’s slow looking viewer.
I’d love to hear your thoughts! Other pairing suggestions? Rembrandt and Rihanna? J.M.W and Tina Turner? Claude Monet and the Arctic Monkeys?
We’d love to add sound as an integrated slow looking feature. What else does it need? Scent would be fantastic but it seems like it’s going to be a while before your laptop can squirt sandalwood and ocean breeze up your nose! Could we use it to help with mindfulness or should it be left simple for people to use as they wish? How do you like to slow down online?
Get in touch here or on twitter (@PatHadley, @Cogapp) or through all the usual channels.
