The first thing you notice is how rich and opulent the
images appear, all set against a uniformly deep black background. Next you
notice the silence. The rhythmic kuh-chunk of the slide projectors is
entirely absent, as is the tornadic whirr of the cooling fans. There is
only a barely perceptible hum from the many computers scattered throughout
the room.
Welcome to jury by
ZAPP
On Friday and Saturday, December 17 and 18, Main Street Fort Worth Art
Festival (MSFW) held the second of the inaugural ZAPP juries; it was open
to anyone who wished to attend. On behalf of NAIA, I was present to
observe most of the jurying, arriving midway through the first morning
session.
The event took place in a conference room at a downtown Fort Worth
Hotel. Five screens showing images projected to approximately 3' x 3'
dominated the front of the room. The ROKUs and projectors came next. Two
long tables occupied the center space and a visitors’ gallery of a dozen
or so chairs took up the rear.
The front half of the room was very dark, with the only illumination
coming from the glow of the projected images and the computers. Of course,
jurors had no need to see what they were writing, as everything was
entered into the database via mouse. There was subdued lighting in the
gallery area.
The first table accommodated the five jurors and their laptops and an
MSFW staff member monitoring the whole process with a large desktop
computer. Jurors appeared to be about eight feet or so from the screens.
Two ZAPP staff members and their laptops took up the second table, set
just a few feet behind the first, while the festival’s co-producer, John
C. “Jay” Downie, moved between the two tables, remote in hand. With this
remote, Jay was able to control all five ROKUs together or individually.
Among other functions, he could pause, rewind, or advance the slide show,
as well as change the timing.
The projected images were arranged horizontally, with Image 1 on the
left screen, and the booth image on the far right screen. There was no
discernable difference in image quality, color, or focus between the
projectors, and there was never any time during the jurying itself when
they needed to be adjusted.
The jurors used their laptops to score directly into the Zapplication
system. The images were loaded directly into the ROKU computers from
compact flash cards, and projected onto the screens using Dell 4100
projectors.
The first round of jurying commenced on Friday morning. There were 900
sets of images (similar to 2003) to review. Images were viewed by
category. As a category was introduced, each set of slides within it
received a quick preview in five second intervals. The whole category was
presented again at 15 second intervals while jurors scored directly onto
their laptops using a “Yes, No, or Maybe” scoring system. After 20 sets,
jurors were instructed to pause and officially register the scores before
moving on to the next 20 image sets within the category. (Note: this
proved to be an excellent idea—at one point a juror accidentally kicked a
power strip, shutting off a couple of laptops. But no rescoring was needed
since the data had just been updated.)
For Saturday and the second round of jurying, the pool was reduced to
435 artists. The jury moved to a “1 through 7” scoring method to decide
the final composition of the show. This round began much the same as the
first, with a 5 second preview of the entire category. But the 15 second
interval was cut to 10 seconds during the second day of judging. This
meant that the images of those making it to the second cut were viewed by
the jury for a generous total of 35 seconds each.
By Saturday’s end,166 artists were selected to join the 24 pre-invited
artists for a final total of 190. (84 were given alternate status.) Of the
categories submitted, Painting was top at 148 applicants, followed by
photography and jewelry, each with about 130. Ceramics, 2D Mixed Media had
about 70 each. 3D Mixed Media, Glass, Sculpture, Wood, Printmaking,
Metalwork, Glass, Fiber, Drawing were all pretty evenly divided at 30 - 45
each. The remaining categories filled things out with digital being the
smallest at ten submissions, and leather with 14.
Jay Downie was very pleased with the results. “ From my perspective,
the entire process ran incredibly smoothly, and took the anxiety away from
the jury process,” he says. “It also caused it to be less ‘subjective.’ In
other words, since the scoring is direct from juror to system, and scores
are tabulated immediately, there's less guesswork and less stress in
trying to compile that data and come to a reasonable conclusion as to who
is invited, and who is not.”
“The quality of the images themselves allowed the jurors to focus
solely on the quality of the work,” Jay adds. “There were no distractions
from their core function. I tried to impress upon them that the work was
the element to review, not the quality of the image... but, the jurors
never had a problem with the quality of the images at any time.”
Jay notes that "some artists have taken to sending a ‘collage’ of works
in one image, or highlighting their image with a border or something else
to get the jury to notice the work. Frankly, this was more of a
distraction for the jurors than a benefit to the artist. As a show, we
need to do a better job of policing the images prior to review so everyone
is viewed on an equal footing.”