'Gazing Dreamingly Into the Distance'

In the interest of greater inclusivity, many museums are attempting to see how they can better accommodate people with various disabilities. Of particular, and peculiar, interest to me are the attempts to improve the experience for people who are (legally) blind. The mechanism of information transfer in the visual arts is, well, visual in nature, so that these endeavours are likely to fail. That being said, knowing that people are able to recall visual imagery, such attempts might have some value to individuals who lost their sight later in life. Nevertheless, to those born without vision the well-intended efforts of various institutions often only show their own lack of understanding of how others might experience the world.

The title of this post, 'Gazing dreamingly into the distance' is taken from the audio description of a photographic portrait of writer Arthur Rimbaud as made by the MMK in Frankfurt, Germany. This is an evocative description to anybody who knows what such an expression looks like, but a person who was born without sight will have zero reference to what this might mean. The audio description was made with the aim of 'removing barriers on our [MMK's] website by means of alternative image descriptions'. The audio descriptions made by the MMK consistently introduce such poetic phrases that are potentially gibberish to their target audience. This could have also easily been avoided by changing their frame of reference ever so slightly. A sentence like 'He appears involved in thought and disconnected from the world' would cover the same load, for example, without including such intangible references to sighted phenomena.

The MMK is a museum with an international reputation and a strong self-proclaimed focus on accessibility. When I visited the museum two years ago, however, I found their accessibility provisions lacking and even insulting to a degree.

My first introduction to their accessibility program was their 'Leichte Sprache' exhibition guide. Leichte Sprache, or easy language, is a program initiated by the German government to create texts with shorter sentences of commonly understood words so as to make hermetic or difficult to understand topics more broadly accessible. As I'm of the opinion that too many art texts are full of aggrandising and obfuscating bullshit, I naturally welcome these efforts.
On page six of the Leichte Sprache booklet I encountered a QR-code that will take you to a webpage with 'audio descriptions of the artworks for people with visual impairments'. It goes without saying that any visually impaired person is never going to find a printed QR-code on page six of such a booklet, let alone take a picture of it. So even before they got started the MMK already failed to provide an accessible environment that people with disabilities are able to navigate independently. My criticism of the MMK's accessibility program thus could have ended here, but unfortunately it is only the start.

Before we continue it must be noted that the QR-code in question is only found in the Leichte Sprache exhibition booklet. In the regular exhibition booklet no reference is made to these accessibility options. This in turn implies that visually impaired people are also unable to understand the normal exhibition text, or that all kinds of disabilities are meant to be grouped together and separated from what is considered 'normal'. This is of course absurd, as any visually impaired person who desires to overcome the extremely high barriers to better understand visual art must naturally be an intellectually curious person and probably has a lot more experience with text than your average adult.

But if at this point they haven't walked out of the museum in disgust and actually had somebody help them navigate their phone to find the audio descriptions, then they would find that it only gets worse. When I scanned the QR-code with my phone using a screen reader, I heard the following:

What you're hearing is the loading of the webpage and then me, as a sighted person, selecting the play button. What follows is the screen reading software simply rattling off the consecutive numbers of the time indicator. The result of this is that you can't even hear the audio file the MMK provided. I also tried to navigate the website using screen reading software on desktop computers and it they all had some kind of problem with navigating the playback of the audio description, if I could get the software to find or select the play button at all.

These problems are the direct result of the way the MMK chose to set up their website. Its design is sparse and relatively easy to navigate visually, but because of the code that makes this possible, it's almost impossible to navigate with a screen reader. And if you can't navigate a website with a screen reader, then it's going to be impossible for any blind person to find the required information on that website.
The Web Accessibility Initiative provides a Web Content Accessibility Guideline. In version 2.1 of this guideline, under section 1.2 related to time-based media, the broad reaching advice is that a website should 'provide alternatives for time-based media'. In other words, time-based media, like the pre-recorded audio description the MMK provides, should be avoided, because it often, if not always, creates accessibility problems. The approach the MMK has chosen is thus patently wrong. An audio description, if meant to be played back on a user's own device, should have been made available in text format, preferably with some kind of high-level hierarchy for navigation purposes. In this way text to speech software could process it without any problems, thereby providing the user with the information in a way they are familiar with.
Which brings us to another shortcoming of the audio descriptions of the MMK. People using screen readers are often used to the specific flat intonation of the software and are able to listen to it at very high speeds. For their English audio description, the MMK used somebody who speaks very slowly, with a lisp and a far from perfect English accent, making it agonising to listen to when you just want to hear the information the text provides.
As already alluded to in the beginning of the text, the information itself is also by and large unsuited for people with congenital blindness. In the first text I listened to, there were many references to sighted phenomena, like 'black and white', 'out of focus', 'a beam of light directing attention' and things being 'visible through the windows'. In contrast, the quote-unquote normal description of this work had no reference to these kind of purely visual aspects and instead focussed on the movements of the figures in the work and the context in which they were depicted. This provides broader information about the work that is useful to everybody. Instead the MMK's audio description for people with visual impairments is a list of things only sighted people can see. Which might make sense on paper, but by doing that in a way that mostly references phenomena that can only be understood through sight, they completely missed the mark.

With these observations about the web environment of the MMK, it should come as no surprise that navigation inside the museum is likewise poorly managed.
On their website the museum boasts that that they are 'pleased to receive the certification from Reisen für Alle.' They go on to say that 'Reisen für Alle is a nationally valid label in the field of accessibility'. If you, or the museum, would actually read the rapport that Reisen für Alle made, it quickly becomes clear that there is still a lot of improvements that can be made. To give a few quotes from the rapport: 'The entrance area is not recognizable by a tactile change in the floor covering', 'The door or door frame is not visually contrasted with the surroundings',' There is no tactile information about the floor at the beginning and end of the flights of stairs', 'The walkway from the entrance door to the counter/desk/cash register is not marked with visually contrasting markings (e.g. carpet)', 'There are obstacles, e.g. columns, in the room', and so on, and so on. 

The critical remarks that Reisen für Alle have made in their report are very much in line with the things I noticed during my visit. 

This is an image of the entrance to the museum. There are many columns in front of the entrance, a number of unmarked steps, and the entrance itself is a revolving door. This already makes the regular entrance a small obstacle course for unsighted navigation.

Inside, some tactile floor markings are placed immediately after the revolving door. But it's only the warning kind, with nothing following it. They also weren't present on the outside of the entrance. So instead of providing a route to the next important step in the visit, like an information point, an unguided blind visitor is greeted only by a single confusing floor marking and then a large open space with no other indicators.
It must also be said that in the back of this picture there is a 'regular' door for entering the museum. This door, as far as I understood, is closed unless some employee of the museum opens it. This alternative entrance also has a single strip of tactile floor marking on the inside of the building, but for some inexplicable reason this is covered up with a floor mat.

Near the desk is a muted, but subtitled, video of a woman providing the exhibition text in sign language. I personally don't really see the point to show providing two different ways of visual textual information, but hey, that might be me. Sign language provides the benefits of spoken language, such as facial expressions, body language, intonation and so forth. None of these things are essential to an informative text. 

Moving on from this sidenote to the exhibition floors, we see that the mistakes continue. To illustrate this, I would like to focus on the tactile floor plans that are placed on each floor of the MMK:

There are a number of problems with this 'aid' and it has clearly been created by, and for, sighted people.
Firstly, the effectiveness of such a floorplan without any (references to) guiding floormarks in the surrounding area is questionable. Visual impairments don't come with a magical intuition for, and perfect recollection of, distance and proportion.
But let's presume it could be a useful guide. In that case, the only properly marked and textured area is called the 'luftraum', which is translated as 'outdoor'. This really doesn't mean outdoor at all, but simply indicates which part of the building have extremely high ceilings. As most of the other rooms are already four to six meters in height, such a distinction on a floorplan for non-sighted navigation is pointless.
Furthermore, all walls have been rendered as single lines in the floorplan, so that a row of open windows and a row of pillars both appear as single dots. Yet the tactile sensation of a hole in the wall and a solid column is markedly different.
The floorplan also does not account for temporary changes to the layout of the rooms. The presence of sculptures or other obstacles on the floor are not marked, for example. During my visit, there was a temporary wall built right behind the floorplan, and this wall is not marked on this floorplan. As a guide for self-guided movement through the space this floorplan is thus entirely useless.

As we have seen, the MMK has done very little to make its facilities more accessible to visually impaired visitors and in their attempts they might have even actively worsened the experience.
It might seem a bit of a stretch to chastise a museum of visual art for not being attuned to the needs of those with visual impairments. Indeed, I personally believe the only adjustment an art museum should ever make to visually impaired visitors is the availability of well-trained guides who are able to both physically and intellectually walk them through the exhibitions, and wherever possible supervise some amount of physical interaction with the works.

My point is that if one wishes to make lofty claims about accessibility in their promotional material, it is shameful and despicable to merely inconsistently implement a number of measures where the visual design takes precedence over practical use.

I can't stop reading!

I don't think I ever spoke about it here, but I don't particularly enjoy the writing process. In all honestly, I don't really like reading, neither.
Yet I like to learn, so I'm forced to read, and I believe things need to be expressed that aren't said elsewhere, so I'm compelled to write.

In the last couple of weeks, I've bought more books than I have time to read, while checking out some books from the library to boot. My own irrational behaviour puzzled me, until I realised I was feeling particularly anxious and troubled by the world. Ever since I was a child, I've tried to soothe my worries by gaining knowledge, and a greater comprehension would often lead to me to feel separated from the rest of the world. This isolation led me to seek a greater understanding and that greater understanding would make me feel more isolated.

So, for this, my 200th post on this blog, let me paraphrase the lament uttered by Fat Bastard in Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me:

I read because I'm unhappy.
I'm unhappy because I read. 

It's a vicious cycle.

Contributing Factors in a Cheerios-based Adhesive

One day, a few years ago, I ate a bowl of cereal and I haphazardly forgot one piece of cereal in the bowl. I then also neglected to wash the bowl for a number of days, causing the milk to dry out. When I picked up the bowl again, I noticed that the piece of cereal, Cheerios, was stuck firmly to both the spoon and the bowl.

Being interested in the potential of such a Cheerios-based adhesive, I decided to 'glue' a spoon to a window by dipping the Cheerios in milk and clamping it between a spoon and a piece of glass:

 Seen from the side it would look like this:

I didn't really have any idea of how it worked at the time, but knowing that both metal and glass are two materials that are often difficult to stick together, it was striking to me that Cheerios, when combined with milk, would be able to act as an adhesive for these two objects. 

I never quite figured out how to clearly show that it was in fact the combination of milk and Cheerios that kept the spoon in its unusual place, so it never went very far as an artwork.
However, it still intrigued me from a chemical point of view, as it was an odd combination of materials to be stuck together so easily. Adhesion of such dissimilar materials is often very much influenced by mechanical adhesion. In mechanical adhesion, the (invisible) roughness of a surface is filled up with a material that is liquid at first but then hardens to a solid. These two materials are then not chemically bonded together, yet they can't move as there is no physical space to do so. 

It was however unlikely that this is the full story in this particular case, as both glass and metal have relatively smooth surfaces and nothing in milk actively polymerises as it dries. There are therefore very few cavities to fill and no obvious substance to fill them with.

Being interested in surface interactions for another project, it occurred to me that the electrostatic activity on the surface of the metal, combined with the free electron pairs in the silicon dioxide of the glass, could perhaps create non-trivial hydrogen bonds with the sugar molecules in the milk. The Cheerios are in turn largely comprised of long chains of sugars, so that the sugar from the milk can form hydrogen bonds with those and possibly have an intertwining crystallisation structure, providing rigidity. 
This combination is partly illustrated in the following diagram, where (1) denotes the crystal lattice of the metal and the free electron pairs on the surface, (2) are hydrogen bonds with the sugar molecules, (3) are the sugar molecules that are left over when the water has evaporated from the milk, (4) are the hydrogen bonds between the sugar from the milk and the polysaccharides from the cereal, and (5) are those polysaccharides.

 

To test the plausibility of this hypothesis, I devised several experiments where different combinations of materials were tried out iin order to isolate and test a number of variables.

For these experiments, single Cheerios were placed in liquid and left to soak for 30 minutes. The liquids used were semi-skimmed milk, water, or water with an amount of sugar dissolved in it.
The wet Cheerios were then placed on a glass or plastic surface, and a spoon was placed on top. The spoons were balanced so that their own weight pressed upon the Cheerios.
This was then left to dry for ~3 days.
The degree of adhesion was then determined by the experimenter through detaching the materials from each other. This could result in either low, or no, tack (denoted as --), some tack (denoted as +/-) or high tack (denoted as ++).

The results of the various experiments can be found in the following table:

Materials	Result, Expected	Result, Observed
Glass, Spoon (std), Cheerios, Milk	++	++
Glass, Spoon (std), Cheerios, Water	--	--
Glass, Spoon (std), Cheerios, Sugar Water	++	++
PolyPropylene, Spoon (std), Cheerios, Milk	--	--
PolyMethyl MethAcrylate, Spoon (std), Cheerios, Milk	++	+/-
Glass, Spoon (smth.), Cheerios, Milk	+/-	++
Glass, Spoon (std.), Milk	+/-	+/-
Glass, Spoon (std.), Sugar Water	+/-	--
Glass, Spoon (std.), Kitchen Paper, Milk	++	-- & ++

The expected result was the result based on the theory as outlined above and the observed result is what actually was the case. It's clear to see that the expected and observed results match each other closely.
There were a couple of instances where the observed result differed from the expectation, however, namely in the case of the PMMA substrate, a smooth metal spoon, sugar water in the absence of cereal and the substitution of Cheerios for kitchen paper.

The observation that there was high tack in the combination of Cheerios with both milk and sugar water, while there was no adhesion at all when the Cheerios was only soaked in water, shows that the presence of sugar is very important in the adhesive properties of this combination of materials.
That the Cheerios with milk showed high tack on glass, some tack on PMMA and no tack on polypropylene also indicates that hydrogen bonding is very important to the adhesion to the glass substrate, as was expected.

An experiment done with a spoon that had a very smooth surface also shows that the observed adhesion is chemical or electrostatic, rather than mechanical, in nature. It was expected that a smoother surface would give less adhesion to the spoon, yet no discernible difference was observed between a well-used spoon and a new, smooth, spoon.
Two experiments performed with only milk and sugar water in the absence of Cheerios showed that sugar alone can't act as an effective adhesive for these materials. While the sugar stuck firmly to the glass, likely through hydrogen bonding, it showed virtually no adhesion to the metal spoon. Nevertheless, a thin droplet of milk did have some tack to the metal, so that some other component of the milk must be the substance that binds to the metal. The most likely candidate is calcium, as calcium ions are very large and able to form complexes with a high coordination number, thereby binding various molecules together.

To examine the influence of the Cheerios, an experiment was performed where a wad of kitchen paper, made out similarly long polysaccharides, was soaked in milk.
This gave an interesting result, where this wad strongly adhered to the glass, but showed no tack on the metal surface. This is most likely caused by the greater absorbance of kitchen paper, so that the sugars or ions in the milk where in little contact with the metal as the water evaporated.

In conclusion, when using Cheerios and milk as an adhesive for metal and glass, all four components are important contributors to the overall effect. A major contributor to the adhesive strength is the large amount of sugar found in milk, which is aided by other components, where an abundancy of calcium likely aids in bonding to the metal of the spoon. The combination of milk and Cheerios binds to the glass through hydrogen bonding and to the metal by some other chemical or electrostatic force, where mechanical adhesion only has a limited contribution.

Party Pooper

The above photograph comes from the series 'The Action of Matchmaking Photons in Bars' by Voebe de Gruyter. In a conversation with Maria Barnas, titled 'On Art and Science', she says the following about it:

'The.photos I took in the café are real spots of light. I had stuck reflective tape on the people and the interior and took pictures using the flash. I see the spots of light as proof of light's return.'

The premise here is that light originates from the flash, hits an object and then returns to the camera lens and its sensor, rendering the image. But if we assume that this is the case, as the artist does, then the rest of the photograph, or even any photograph taken with a flash, surely is an equal 'proof of light's return'?

Methyl Mercaptan

Artists like to use molecular models for making sculptures. This has already been covered on this blog, but I'd like to expand on the subject a little further in this post.
Molecules have certain stable configurations, which are governed by the distribution of their electrons. This is described by something called valence shell electron pair repulsion theory. It's somewhat complicated, but just imagine that electrons are magnets on a sphere that want to be as close to the centre as possible, while being as far apart from each other as possible. So while atoms are always in motion, this means that on average they are found in only a small number of configurations in molecules:

 

 

This kind of spatial configuration is correctly rendered in the large sculpture 'Gas Molecule' commissioned from Marc Ruygrok by the NAM:

This sculpture is supposed to depict methane, or CH₄, with a central carbon atom connected to four hydrogen atoms. Ruygrok has largely copied the common 'ball-and-stick' molecular model, only taking some liberty with the colour scheme.
Although molecules don't have a 'real' colour, there is a convention, called Corey-Pauling-Koltun colouring, for using certain colours for certain atoms. The central atom in Ruygrok's model is carbon, which in this convention is always associated with black, while blue is always associated with nitrogen. If the shiny purple-ish hue of the central atom is considered significant, then this is traditionally linked to phosphorous, but is today more commonly associated with potassium.
These colours are nothing but conventions, so it's not that Ruygrok's choice is wrong per se, but it also isn't 'right' to use blue in this case. Without any other information, any chemist will think this model represents ammonium, not the intended methane.

As already stated, this example uses the so-called ball and stick model, but a more realistic space filling model exists where atoms are depicted as overlapping spheres representing their Van der Waals surface. Molecules in this model consist of interconnected spheres, so that a good separation through size and colour becomes even more important than it is in the ball and stick model. With this in mind, let me present to you 'Calcium 4-[4-(2-methylaninlino)-2,4-dioxobutyl]diazenyl-3-nitrobenzenesulfonate (C.I.13940)' by Jean-Luc Moulène:

This is supposedly a model of the molecular structure of a pigment, Yellow 62, which is then painted in the colour of this pigment. I already pointed out that without adequate differentiation through colour, such a model is hardly able to serve its clarifying function.
It is however clear that Moulène didn't correctly render the molecule he meant to render. When I looked up and drew a model of the pigment, I came up with the following structure:

Even without knowing anything about chemistry, it's obvious that these are are two different structures. In the correct model, there are 41 spheres present, while in Moulène's sculpture one only counts 29 spheres. I did notice that in Moulène's sculpture no hydrogen atoms were depicted, which is somewhat common practice. I therefore counted the amount of hydrogen atoms that should be present, of which there are 15, so if the difference came from the absence of hydrogen, then the amount of spheres would be 26. I therefore have no explanation of where the artist went astray in rendering his model, but it is clear that the molecular model doesn't depict the pigment that he claims.

This could also already be gleaned from the inclusion of 'Calcium' in the sculpture's title. Organocalcium compounds are very uncommon and so the inclusion of calcium in the name most likely means that this is a salt. The SO₃^1- sulphonate group in the molecule, shown in yellow with red, is very reactive  and needs to be ionically bonded to a positively charged atom, Ca²⁺ in this case, to be stable. The double positive charge on the calcium ion is paired with two single negative charges on the other compound, which means that there must be two of the previously shown molecule in the following configuration:

This is of course looks nothing like the molecule in Moulène's sculpture and anybody with knowledge of chemistry could have spotted the error merely from the first word of the title. 

I then noticed the following drawing on the cover of Keith Tyson's publication 'Molecular Compound No 4.':

Comparing this image with the VSEPR models at the beginning of this post, it should be clear that this drawing is not based on any existing molecule. Upon consulting the book, it turned out to contain no further references to reality and consist only of the fantastical imaginings of the artist, so I won't make any further comment on this publication.

I could list more examples of artists that have attempted to employ molecular models, but in short all of these sculptures I've encountered forgone scientific accuracy in some way.
The only one I know of that isn't necessarily wrong was a sculpture that simply used nothing but a commercially available molecular modelling kit. So while this was possibly accurate, it's artistic value was also negligible.

And the reason I've written all this is because I researched the subject while making the following model of a molecule called methyl mercaptan:

Methyl mercaptan, or CH₃SH, is one of the molecules that make farts smell. This model is made of a tennis ball, a black golf ball and four small roulette balls. These generic, store bought, balls are both the right colour and approximately the right size for a CPK-model for a molecular structure, as can be seen in this rendering taken from a molecular drawing program:

This is thus an indication that it's possible to have a novel approach to creating a molecular model without necessarily having to significantly compromise its scientific accuracy.