Colin Brooks – Head of Digital Development @ Whitney Museum

Screenshot of whitney.org with glowing pink text that says "And I'm in bed by 9:00 PM for another slay day. Good night, everyone."

A Realistic Day In My Life Living In New York City

I’ve watched a billion hours of TikTok but unlike Maya Man I have nothing to show for it, who I worked with for the first true On the Hour commission for whitney.org.

Screenshot of Daily Bird app, with a photo of a bird on a phone, and text above that says "a new bird every day".

Daily Bird: a bird a day

I’ve always liked the Wikipedia widgets for seeing featured articles, so I made an app to do that for birds. Daily Bird pulls data from public sources and displays various birds of the day, filterable by endemic NZ birds or only pigeons.

A totoro with orange fur and red braids sits writing on a laptop at a seaside town.

xhairymutantx

For the 2024 Whitney Biennial I worked with Holly Herndon + Mat Dryhurst to build an app that takes user generated prompts and creates images with SDXL and a custom LoRA.

Screenshot of a webpage divided into quadrants, with the same image of a black hand with a ring in the top and bottom left, a close up of someone's eye with a lighter skin tone in the top right, and in the bottom right the back of a black person's head with just an ear and hair visible.

More classic net art

After [too long] all 57 artport “Gate Pages” are properly archived and mostly working again. This series ran from 2001 to 2006, and it’s an interesting time capsule of an experimental era, filled with Perl, Flash, and Java applets.

Ink drawing on paper of animals looking at a fence that says Merry Xmas.

Keyword tagging artworks with GPT4 and Google Vision

Some writing about using AI on the Whitney’s online collection.

A computer generated figure with a brain outside of their head, long white lines for hair, and a distorted rig cage like interior of the body visible, over a black background.

Rachel Rossin: The Maw Of

The Maw Of is an immense, incredible project with a ton of moving pieces. And some of those pieces took a fair bit of work to adapt to the museum’s various systems, including an IRL installation for Refigured.

Large digital screen in the lobby of the whitney museum, displaying content from the 8th floor.

Rebuilding digital signage at the Whitney

It’s webpages. The museum’s new digital signage system is webpages.

Screenshot of Ọnụọha's project, with a description of controls in the center in yellow text over a grid of 4 identical images of men cutting down a tree

Mimi Ọnụọha: 40% of Food in the US is Wasted (How the Hell is That Progress, Man?)

I did the coding for this project which included some slightly tricky video crossfading for seamless playback. The music loop is going to play in my head forever.

Rayyane Tabet: Becoming American

Becoming American is a project for the 2022 Whitney Biennial that includes a technical intervention across all of whitney.org, where visitors are prompted with questions from the US citizenship test.

Stepping into open access

Open access is good. We’re just starting and we should do more of it.

Images of artworks on the online collection replaced with wooden boards, over a black background and greyed-out text

Sunrise/Sunset and letting artists take over the museum

Some thoughts on why the Whitney’s Sunrise/Sunset project is such a good one.

michaelbot.website

Q: what is michaelbot?
A: square adjust placement and save each one alone or something Holy cow I love it

(michaelbot is a TensorFlow ML model served by Flask, trained on texts parsed from iMessage, that crashes a lot on an undersized server)

A screenshot of the Whitney's online collection front page as of March 2020.

Relaunching the Whitney’s Online Collection…again

Launched a bunch of new features on the museum’s online collection.

iPhone open to camera scanning a QR code on a paper visitor's guide

QR Codes: Alive and Well in the Museum?

Some experimenting with QR codes as an entry point into interpretive materials.

Relaunching Softly: the Whitney’s Online Collection

A bit about developing and quietly launching a new version of the Whitney’s online collection.

The Whitney’s Mobile Guide

Some writing by Sofie Andersen on a Progressive Web App we developed to replace the old museum audio guide.

Dimensions of Museum Data

Some thoughts on online exhibition data, and single question surveys.

Understanding our audiences: The Whitney’s Website Visitor Survey and its broader context

I was part of a presentation at MCN 2018 on a visitor motivation survey (VMS) we ran on whitney.org. As a group we covered the context of motivation-based surveys at museums and some key learnings for the Whitney, both in results and in strategy.

Answering the question “what’s on today?”

Some thoughts on the design and development process for a feature aimed at giving users an at-a-glance view of what’s going on at the museum.

Experimenting with what works

A/B testing and experimentation around whitney.org.

How Many Hoppers?

An up to date count of the number of works by Edward Hopper currently on display at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

1/1/2015 — 10/5/2016

An animated mapping exploration of the Washington Post’s fatal police shooting dataset. Locations are geocoded through the Google Maps API, and build up a familiar image of the United States.

“Hey could you give me the numbers on that again?”

MoMA, data analytics, data collection, and dashboard creation.

Neuron

Mixed media enlargement of an imagined neuron, incorporating generative audio and video, projection mapping with Kinect and OpenCV, chicken wire, stainless steel, and acrylic.

Recursion lesson & survey

An experiment in teaching about the concept of recursion to new audiences using an animated Sierpinski triangle. Learners read a brief sequence of paragraphs describing recursion while the animation played alongside, then answered a brief survey on the topic.