Today, I’m talking to Sasha Igdalova about the exciting research she’s been conducting over the past few years around aesthetic experience, slow looking and social interaction in museums.
Aleksandra (Sasha) Igdalova is an interdisciplinary researcher in the final year of her Psychology PhD at Goldsmiths, University of London conducting large-scale, experimental studies on slow looking within exhibition spaces at Manchester Art Gallery.
Her work investigates how popular engagement strategies may be used to increase aesthetic experience and well-being
Listeners to this podcast will know that slow looking has gained in popularity in museums worldwide over the last decade or so. But there hasn’t been much research on its effectiveness, until now.
In today’s chat, we explore two studies – the first study to look at the impact of slow looking in an online environment. This study explores how different audio contexts and types of art affect people’s moods and engagement levels in online viewing.
The second study is the first large-scale experiment to investigate how social interaction impacts the art museum experience. This study took place in Manchester Art Museum’s fabulous dedicated slow looking space known as Room to Breathe.
We discuss the implications of both studies for educators..and so much more!
This episode is essential listening for anyone interested in slow looking, aesthetic experiences in museums, and the benefits of group interactions for overall well-being in museum environments.
Listen to Episode 132 or read the transcript below:
Links
Episode 24 Using art and objects to learn wellbeing skills and improve mental health with Louise Thompson
Aleksandra (Sasha) Igdalova Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aleksandra-sasha-igdalova-a66770106/
Website: www.aleksandraigdalova.com
Researchgate profile: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Aleksandra-Igdalova
Articles on slow looking:
First ever study examining how social interaction impacts art viewing: https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/x9wrt
First ever study looking at slow looking in an experimental manner (online study): https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2023-59333-001
Free access to it here: https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/33048/9/Igdalova%20&%20Chamberlain%20(2023)%20Slow%20looking%20at%20still%20art.pdf
CREA interdisciplinary workshop: www.crea-workshop.com
The Art Engager Links:
The Art Engager: Reimagining Guided Experiences in Museums – sign up for the waitlist to hear when my book will be published!
Sign up for my Curated newsletter – a fortnightly dose of cultural inspiration
Join the Slow Looking Club Community
Support the show here https://www.buymeacoffee.com/clairebown
Download my free resources:
How to look at art (slowly)– 30+ different ways to look at art or objects in the museum
Slow Art Guide – six simple steps to guide you through the process of slow looking
Transcript
Claire Bown: Hello and welcome to The Art Engager podcast with me, Claire Bown. I’m here to share techniques and tools to help you engage with your audience and bring art, objects and ideas to life. So let’s dive into this week’s show.
Hello and welcome to The Art Engager podcast. I’m your host, Claire Bown of Thinking Museum, and this is episode 132. Today, I’m talking to Sasha Igdalova about the exciting research she’s been conducting over the past few years around aesthetic experience, slow looking and social interactions in museums.
But before our chat, don’t forget in last week’s episode, I was talking to Sofia Colette Ehrich about how to engage our sense of smell in the museum. A fascinating listen for anyone wanting to build a strong olfactory narrative, or to incorporate more multi sensory approaches into their practice. If you haven’t listened to it yet, do head back and download episode 131.
And don’t forget, The Art Engager has over 130 episodes to choose from, so take your pick from the back catalogue of different episodes to brush up on your skills, be inspired and learn new techniques. And if you’d like to support this podcast and help it to thrive into the future, you can buy me a cup of tea on buymeacoffee.
com forward slash Claire Bown. First, some news before I introduce today’s guest. This is actually the last episode of The Art Engager before the summer break. This year, I’m taking the whole of July and August. Off. So this will be plenty of time to research and chat to new guests. I currently have lots of wonderful people lined up to speak, but no time to chat to them.
So this time off will give me time to have a break, but also time to talk to new people and time to give the show a little bit of a refresh too. The next episode of The Art Engager will therefore air on the 5th of September 2024. So you have July and August to listen to all those episodes in the back catalogue that you may have missed.
I’ll be highlighting some wonderful episodes on social media over the summer break too. Now this mini break will also give me space to focus on my book. My first publication is currently in the final editing stages and due to be released in just a few short months. This project has been years and years in the making and I can’t wait to share it with you all.
And if you want a sneak peek of the new cover, head to the show notes or my website thinkingmuseum. com. The book is now named after this podcast. It’s called The Art Engager. Reimagining guided experiences in museums and it will be available soon. Now, if you want to be the first to hear about the book, don’t forget to sign up to my book waitlist via the link in the show notes.
And for those of you keen to get a copy, I’ll have release dates soon. Thank you for your patience. All right, let’s get on with today’s show. My guest today, Aleksandra, Sasha, as she’s known, Igdalova, is an interdisciplinary researcher in the final year of her psychology PhD at Goldsmiths, University of London.
She conducts large scale experimental studies on slow looking within exhibition spaces at Manchester Art Gallery. Her work investigates how popular engagement strategies may be used to increase aesthetic experience and well being. And these might be mindfulness meditation, different types of guided content, the influence of special versus regular gallery spaces, and social interaction.
Sasha is an advocate for closer collaboration between artists and scientists and she’s currently setting up an annual expertise exchange workshop for researchers and museum educators to better bridge this gap. In today’s chat we talk about the exciting research she’s been conducting over the past few years around us.
Aesthetic experience, slow looking and social interaction. Listeners to this podcast will know that slow looking has gained in popularity in museums worldwide over the last decade or so, but there hasn’t been much research on its effectiveness until now. So today we talk about Sasha’s research with Rebecca Chamberlain, which was the first to look at the impact of slow looking in an online environment.
This study explores how audio context, things like background noise, meditation, historical information, and types of art affect people’s moods and engagement levels in online viewing. We’ll talk about what the study did, what it found, and what the implications are for us. In addition, we discuss the common assumption that art viewing is visual.
Solitary. Research actually indicates that the majority of museum visits involve groups with only 5 to 20 percent of visitors attending alone. And most research in this area tends to concentrate on the interactions between individuals. and exhibits, and it often overlooks the social factors and what influence they have on the art viewing experience.
So this brings us to our next study the first large scale experiment to investigate how social interaction impacts the art museum experience. This study took place in Manchester Art Museums. dedicated slow looking space known as Room to Breathe. And this experiment had visitors viewing two paintings for 10 minutes each with slow looking prompts.
They were either alone with headphones, in silent groups of three with the speaker, or in groups of three discussing the prompts. So we talk about the exciting outcomes of this research and what it tells us about group experiences in museums, especially those involving discussion. And also as an addition, Louise Thompson from the Manchester Art Gallery, she was a guest on this podcast way back on episode 24.
She talked about using art and objects to learn well being skills and improve mental health. And that’s a highly recommended early episode to listen to. So today’s episode Essential listening for anyone interested in slow looking, aesthetic experiences, and the benefits of group interactions for overall well being in museum environments.
Here’s our conversation. Enjoy. Hi, Sasha, and welcome to The Art Engager podcast.
Aleksandra (Sasha) Igdalova: Hi, Claire. Thanks so much for having me.
Claire Bown: So Sasha, could you tell us who you are and what you do?
Aleksandra (Sasha) Igdalova: Yes. So my name is Aleksandra Igdalova, but people call me Sasha, and I am an interdisciplinary graduate researcher in the final months of my PhD in psychology at Goldsmiths University of London.
And specifically I work in a subfield called neuroaesthetics or psychology of art. So it’s all about applying. Empirical investigative ways of looking at a variety of topics of how we look at and engage with art, how art can foster well being, what is happening within kind of audience engagement and museum education spaces.
And all of that I do within this context of a co produced framework by working really closely with museum professionals to, from point A to point B in the research process.
Claire Bown: So I’d love to hear what brought you to this point. What led you to this specific area of research?
Aleksandra (Sasha) Igdalova: That’s a great question because it is quite a specific area of research, but it started from a general love of the arts and sciences. So I’ve been a practicing artist. since I was about five years old, but I’ve also really loved the sciences and, would go to art classes and math classes at the same time.
And I was training for medicine and Then I switched to philosophy and then I was able to combine my love of all things visual, artistic scientific in this major at the University of Pennsylvania called Visual Studies, which really just tried to tackle what is vision and seeing and understanding the world through this visual sense through all these kinds of angles of cognitive neuroscience, philosophy of perception, actually making art history, all of these different angles.
And that was amazing. And I really don’t think a program like that exists right now. Anywhere in the world that I’ve heard of because it really is quite general in its approach of how it covers this topic. But upon graduating, I found that the world doesn’t work along those general interdisciplinary lines.
And I then focused more on the science side. I worked in research. visual neuroscience neurology labs at the University of Pennsylvania for four years, while also taking many art classes and humanities based courses on the side. And by that point, a master’s and the Goldsmiths University of London, which is where I’m currently am came about called the Psychology of Arts, Neuroaesthetics and Creativity master’s, which was like the next step in a postgraduate way of combining kind of the arts and sciences and.
exploring art, music, aesthetics, et cetera, through this scientific way. And after I finished that master’s, I then stayed on to do a psychology PhD with the same advisor, Rebecca Chamberlain, and that’s where I currently am now. So it’s been this real struggle but also in some ways it’s so easy when you know what you love and you know where that light is when it’s been hard to see where it is through these different kind of pathways.
So yeah that’s how I got here today.
Claire Bown: Yeah. And nodding along to lots of the things that you’re saying that quite the journey getting to this place, but this niche, perhaps finding you in the end throughout all the different pathways that you took, but what are the values?
Aleksandra (Sasha) Igdalova: What are the guiding principles behind what you do? Cause it sounds like you’re very passionate. Yeah, you have to be passionate. I think you have to be passionate to continue on this bridge that you’re constantly building at the same time as you’re walking on it.
I think without passion, you’re going to crumble because it can be demotivating sometimes. But I would say the values that really guide me are one of the things I took away from the visual studies program, which isWhat we see and how we look at the world, it really defines so much of who we are and how we feel about ourselves and the people around us, and really studying that process through this variety of angles from art to science it really can help us get closer.
I to that understanding of who we are and how we connect to ourselves and others around us. And in recent years, also, as we’ve been learning more and more about how arts engagement can foster social change and well being benefits and more connection to ourselves. I want to use all these tools that I have in my belt of which science is one of them, to get at that process.
And it’s interesting because you wouldn’t think experimental psychology to be an intuitive kind of tool you would use within museum environments. Butone of the things I’ve really learned and, love about this process is that in trying to get at, how do we get at that better connection by looking at artworks?
How do we get at these impacts, et cetera? There’s been this beautiful exchange of knowledge that I’ve seen also happen between the arts and sciences while trying to get at that process. I think there’s so much I’ve taken away from the museum professionals I work with about how to look at experience, how to look at the, visual meaning and social meaning in the world in a way that really informs my science that I don’t think I would have had if I wasn’t trying to trying to study, what the individual can attain from having this kind of visual connection with the world their world and others around them. So yeah it’s this meta process of you’re trying to get at the thing, figure out the connection that’s happening there between the individual or the group and the artwork. And at the same time, you’re learning and changing because of the connection that you’re fostering by working in this interdisciplinary collaborative manner.
And that is just, it’s one of the best feelings in the world, I think.
Claire Bown: I love that. Beautifully put as well, the way you describe that and you are working very closely with Manchester Art Gallery. Louise Thompson was on this podcast episode 24. So way back when she talked about using art and objects to learn wellbeing and improve mental health.
So tell us a little bit about the work you’ve been doing with Manchester Art Gallery.
Aleksandra (Sasha) Igdalova: Yeah Louise Thompson and Fiona Corden is the curator that we work closest with there. They’re absolutely amazing And they have such a wonderful view of how to approach what their gallery and what their programming does for their audiences in such a way that it allows these unintuitive approaches like experimental psychology to have a place there in, in terms of how they, Look at what they’re doing.
But my advisor, Rebecca Chamberlain, she collaborated with them in 2019 when they had their exhibit called And Breathe, which was just which was this kind of immersive, mindful approach to, instead of having a curated collection Curated not by, theme, but more by how immersive or easy to get lost in these artworks it was through their own research process that Fiona and Louise were engaged in of asking their audiences of which artworks made them feel which way they had this, very unusual exhibit and my advisor, Rebecca worked with them to look at how mindfulness may impact the art process.
And then after I finished my master’s with Rebecca and she introduced me to the concept of slow looking. So I had a different project with her and then COVID 19 hit and all kind of, in person research stopped being an option. And so we already had a bit of a slow looking project that we were going to do with the Tate Modern going on.
And she said, We have to do an online project anyway, why don’t we pivot and just fully pursue the slow looking idea. And then when I finished my master’s and was looking at possibly continuing to do a PhD with her, she proposed that we could reach out to Manchester Art Gallery again and see if they would want to collaborate with us.
And since then I took over on working really closely with them and particularly with their mindfulness space called Room to Breathe. So using that as our primary research space and then also over time looking at that also as its own type of intervention that we are investigating that became the research object at a point
But interestingly enough, the very first study I ran with Manchester Art Gallery which was on mindfulness and looking at the impacts of mindful breathing. Before you look at artworks, we actually ran our very first day of testing on slow looking day on 2020. 22. So it was a nice little like wrap up of things that came before and this kind of meandering yeah, process through world events that in some ways led there like COVID to then having this deep collaborative relationship that I have with them now.
Claire Bown: Yeah and lots of things pointing you towards slow art and slow looking there. What I found quite interesting working as I had done since, or I think 2011, 2012 with slow looking is that that period the COVID period, the pandemic, there was a real increase in slow looking awareness. It gained in popularity.
There were lots more museums who were working with it. Yeah. Online, which we’ll talk about in a minute, but there hasn’t been a huge amount of research on it. So I discovered that you’d done quite a lot of research in this area and did a study in 2020 about its effectiveness in an online environment.
So can you talk to me a little bit about that study you did with Rebecca Chamberlain?
Aleksandra (Sasha) Igdalova: Yes. so this was an online approach to slow looking. Of course, we would have done it in person, and most of my studies, which have been with Manchester Art Gallery, have now been slow looking based.
But it was the very first study to actually quantify and in an experimental manner. So experimental really meaning that, You’re not just saying, this is me doing this and this is how I feel afterwards. You’re comparing across different conditions. You have a experimental kind of ‘between subjects’ design, we call it.
So this was the first study to really just look at slow looking in any kind of quantifiable manner where we used reliable kind of tools that are out there in the world to look at mood, to look at aesthetic experience. And specifically, we wanted to look at these aspects of different ways that slow looking is carried out in galleries around the world, and sometimes it has, a kind of
art historical component where, you’re looking for a long period of time and you are also hearing about the cultural history of the artwork, the background of the artist. And then sometimes you have a more, in the study I called it a meditation condition, but really based on visual thinking strategies
And thinking about, okay, if we take it out of the context of needing to know anything about the artist or the artwork or the period of time in which it was made and just look at what we actually see in front of us, from the forms to the colors to the act of looking itself, which kind of component would possibly complement slow looking better, or just nothing, just looking for three minutes at a time. Yeah, we had people looking at a series of still lives and they got to choose which kind of stimuli they wanted to look at, whether it was a photographic still lives or artistic representational ones or whatever. artistic, meaning like painted abstract ones. And then they would get randomly put into one of these conditions of art historical VTS or the control based.
And then we looked at differences in mood and aesthetic experience between the groups. And we found that across everybody. So regardless of which group they were in. Even though they were doing this, online in a pandemic on their laptops, participants reported feeling better and more relaxed after completing the exercise, so which just contributes to how we already are growing to understand how the arts can have these positive, being impacts in the short term way.
just from engaging with them in that kind of context for a period of time. And then when we looked at between the groups, we found that the art historical condition led to participants saying that they had more sense of cultural understanding and they understood the work better. They really thought about the artists more.
And that seems really intuitive. Of course, that’s what you want to see. But In science, you have to start from the bottom and show everything has evidence. So that was evidence that this psycho historical approach that’s used within galleries is really effective and also makes sense.
because I think there’s a familiarity that people already have with that kind of approach. They’re used to it. in a way. And one of the things that prompted me to continue in terms of the real studies, like the live studies within a gallery that we’ve made so since then is that I always put in that more VTS based approach because I think with an online study, we weren’t able to as well capture how successful that approach can be.
But what’s interesting is that when we looked at the time that people actually spent Looking at the videos because some people wanted some people click through faster and didn’t stay for the whole time or some people stayed a longer time, some people stayed a shorter time. Those participants that were listening to the more VTS based videos condition, they always looked for longer than the other two conditions. So something about that kind of component prompted them to look for longer, to want to look for longer, but yet our scales didn’t capture what some of those differences were. So that was a few of the takeaways that we learned from that first online study, looking at slow looking.
And also what you said about uh, during the pandemic, that there was this growth in slow looking programming because it was, it’s something that can translate even through this kind of context when people are just looking at their laptops. I really actually found that in my study too, in terms of the feedback that people just we had this bit for open ended feedback that didn’t get published.
But yeah, people said that it really just transformed their day, or it made them start, they said that I think I’m going to look at, paintings in my house in a different way now, like I realize that there’s all these visual stimuli around me, and I can engage in this process, and it’s something that, can be beneficial to them, and it’s a tool that they can now have in their own pocket.
I actually even had a it was a person, actually I know it was a friend of mine who took it, but she forages for mushrooms in the forests of New Jersey, and she said that her foraging got better after she did that online practice of just, looking at a series of still lives for three minutes each.
Claire Bown: Yeah. Anecdotally, I hear these kinds of comments all the time from people expressing surprise. I didn’t know you could do this in a museum. It’s made me appreciate and more aware of noticing and observation and all these sorts of things. I think what’s super interesting about that study is that You looked at those different kind of conditions that you called them.
You looked at providing historical information, which we talk about a lot on this podcast. when you include information what effect does it have on the viewing experience, on how people feel, what they understand, what meaning making they do?
But also comparing it with that context as well. I was just thinking about different forms of slow looking I’ve done my own definition of what I see happening within slow looking and a more, introspective approach, I would call a meditative kind of approach where you might use elements of mindfulness and a more extraspective approach might be that is focused more on the object and the art historical context, for example.
So I really love that, thinking about all these different contexts and conditions and how they might affect the experience Super interesting. Out of that, I think that slow looking is very difficult to define as well. But this is something that I’ve tried to define. I think lots of other people are trying to define. So based on your research, how would you define it?
Aleksandra (Sasha) Igdalova: Wow. What a question. I completely agree that slow looking is hard to define.
So I think when people ask me what slow looking is. So whenever I speak about my research, I say, Oh yeah, I design experiments around different engagement strategies around slow looking, and then I get what is slow looking. And that is very basic. I just say it’s literally just looking at an artwork for a longer period of time than you normally would.
But I would say for, let’s say three minutes or more, but you can go up to an hour, you can go up to two hours and it’s just observing what happens as a result of that. And it’s letting that process happen. And then I think you can build on the concept of slow looking in all of these different ways.
Personally, and this is something that I have, recently researched in my social interaction study. I think that having an element of interaction that’s also happening, around or during that act of slow looking really, I think, is one of the Most obvious ways to evidence how powerful that process can be for people who are new to it.
But I think when I have said to people who don’t super engage with artworks or feel like they don’t I think that, a lot of people don’t like art, or that they can’t participate in art. That’s kind of the homework I give them, is ‘okay, next time you’re in that space, don’t look at anything on the walls, just walk into a gallery room, pick a work that that calls to you, because you hate it, because you love it, if you’re there, I would say definitely go with a friend, set a timer for a minute, Look by yourself for a minute and then two minutes spend discussing anything you thought about it’.
And the first thing I usually start with is, okay what’s like the first thing you noticed about it? Or what’s the thing you were thinking about a lot for this one minute? And if you’re alone, you can do that same process. and I think it’s also important to give people an out of, you come up to it and you realize that oh you don’t actually want to look at this one, then you leave.
And I think there’s so much power that. And I think that’s something that the individual can have when they approach a gallery visit with, okay, I’m going to do a series, or maybe even just one kind of slow looking session with an artwork, and it’s going to be something I want to look at. And just that first feeling of, I want to look at it, is, I think, really important.
I think it’s a feeling that not a lot of people let themselves have in a gallery, because it’s more about what ‘should’ I be looking at, and what should I be reading from it, and what should I be taking away, am I allowed to not like it, am I allowed to like it? And yeah, that feeling of, what power do I have in a gallery, is something that I, really want to get at with the studies that I design and coming from the world of, psychology and visual neuroscience, I have done my fair share of horrible experiments where you’re detecting, 2000 trials of one light being there or not, or you’re getting a migraine induced or some things that can be, quite painful.
And I really want to make it so that Anytime that somebody’s participating in one of my psychology experiments, they’re walking away feeling like they got this amazing experience, this fun event that they did at a gallery, but that one that also teaches them something about their own process of looking or about a new way that they can look at art in a gallery.
And at Manchester Art Gallery, I have had people participate in my study who have never stepped foot in an art museum before. And they’re like, oh, I just came here for football and my daughter dragged me in here, but sure I’ll do the study because I want a cup of coffee. And I’m like, great, you’re exactly who we want in here.
And those people are usually the ones that come up to me afterwards and say, I’ve never been asked anything about, how I felt while looking at the artworks and
for People who haven’t really engaged with those kind of instruments before, it really is an empowering way to add language and vocabulary to an experience that they have just had,
And I think there’s something really wonderful about that process of empowerment that slow looking can offer for individuals.
And that’s a really long winded way to say, I think it’s just looking at an artwork for a longer period of time than you normally would and seeing what happens and letting yourself feel like you are valid for having all of those things happen.
Claire Bown: Yeah. Yeah. And that agency that you talk about, that empowerment, that getting rid of the should, I should like this.
I should look at that. I should look at the label and really going with the artwork, choose me. What do I want to look at? That’s a really important distinction there. And also I like the way you’re talking about that it can be an individual experience. It can be a group experience as well, and it can be about the duration and a lot of people talk about the duration, but.
There’s more than that. It’s about the activities and the approach and that goes along with it. And you mentioned there, Your most recent study which I’m super interested in, about what effect social interaction has on viewing art, and this is something that I’m passionate about.
So can you tell me a little bit about how you got started with this study?
Aleksandra (Sasha) Igdalova: Yeah interestingly enough, we often think of art museums, and I think this is also one of the reasons they become exclusive or exclusionary to people, as these kind of places for solitary, aesthetic observation and contemplation, but groups actually account for the majority of museum visits. And across different studies I have ran, for example, in that online still looking one that I ran, when I asked participants, do they tend to go to the gallery with others or alone? 89 percent said that they tend to go with another or more people.
And also conversation can play a big factor in these kinds of social contexts that museum visitors find themselves in. Andwe surveyed over 400 participants in National Gallery in London and Manchester Art Gallery asking if, while they were doing this kind of solo viewing artwork experience with us, would they have preferred to be talking about it with somebody else?
And about 83 percent said that, yeah, they would have preferred to be talking about it. So we don’t think about, museums or art museums as kind of social places. And yet, when we look at the statistics and the experiences people actually have, they seek out those contexts. They want to have conversations.
And yet most kind of museum psychology and kind of empirical research has really just looked at the individual and the exhibit. So there’s this big gap there, right? And specifically within art museums as well, like when you survey all the literature that has happened, looking at groups. In museum context, most of that has been in natural science or history museums, looking at family groups, and really just looking at the conversations as a kind of tool to get at social learning or to get at engagement, but never really looking at what is the impact of actually having a conversation versus not?
This study was the first one to ever quantify and experimentally look at how social interaction on its own may be impacting that art museum experience. And we had people Looking at two artworks, so it was a representational and abstract version of a landscape, and this was in that room to breathe space in Manchester Art Gallery, and they were slow looking for 10 minutes at each work and listening to a series of guided prompts based on mindful viewing practices or VTS practices that we wrote in conjunction with Louise Thompson at the gallery.
And we had individuals either sitting by themselves, listening to that guide with both paintings in headphones, or sitting in a group of three people, and they either had the guide played out loud, like you would have with a museum tour or they had the guide played out loud, but then they could also respond to different.
questions that the guide was asking in open conversation with each other. And we looked at, differences in mood change, engagement change, social connectedness change, a whole series of metrics across these three groups. And we found that again, Across all the groups, so not considering these different conditions that we put them in, we saw that participants had an increase in valence or positive feeling, an increase in positive affect.
We saw an increase in social connectedness overall. They felt an increase in emotions like being moved or feeling a sense of wonder. So just doing the exercise in that space led to these nice well being impacts. And we always try to show that across all the studies that I do, I really try to make sure that We also look at that because that just contributes to this pool of evidence we have that, hey, art is good for you, and here’s all the different ways we can show that in this instance, here, here’s the kind of before and after effects that participants felt.
But then when we looked at between the different conditions, we found that the condition that performed the worst was those people who were sitting in a group, but not talking. And the condition that performed the best was. Those people who were sitting in a group, but talking so specifically when we look at, for example, aesthetic experience or how beautiful, meaningful, enjoyable they found the experience participants who are viewing completely by themselves with headphones and participants who are viewing in a group and talking reported the best experience, but then Yes.
And with regards to emotional engagement, for example, so like the diversity of emotions and how strongly they felt, let’s say, moved or etc. by the work, again, that individual group and the discussion group reported the biggest impacts. And so if we just look at the kind of people viewing on their own and people viewing with others but not talking, we see that something about Having people there but not having any interactive element actually just dampens the experience that you might have on your own.
But when you are in a group and you are talking, that individual aesthetic experience, that emotional experience, can still be felt by those individuals in the group. And on top of that, we saw that when you looked at the group who was talking versus not talking, you had increases in positive affect, you had more increases in social connectedness, and like global connectedness to the to the group.
to society, to others. It wasn’t just how close do you feel to members of your group, which also was increased in that group. It was across this comprehensive 20 point scale, asking about like your connectedness to the world around you. We saw increases in that group who was talking. We saw more change in perspective in that group who was talking.
And they also perceived the time that I’ve gone by, so 20 minutes of viewing, to be shorter than both of the other two groups. So they were able to look for longer and not experience it as looking for longer. And I’ll very briefly mention, we did that in the gallery at Manchester Art Gallery, and then we replicated that entire same design, did everything the exact same way, and we did it in the in a laboratory setting, and this time it was with an undergraduate population, so the demographics weren’t middle aged kind of UK people, but undergraduate US people, and this was at the Wharton Behavioral Labs in the University of Pennsylvania with Saab Johnson.
And so we replicated that entire study there, and we found that in that setting, we didn’t see any kind of benefits of the individual viewing, rather the discussion group alone had the highest aesthetic experience, the highest emotional engagement, the highest kind of social connectedness and changes in positive affect, and of course, the shorter perception of viewing time, which reveals a little bit about where these different engagement strategies may be useful, how they might be different across contexts, so possibly with when we look at, Viewing online or more digital outreach that galleries do, having this interactive element is going to be the best thing that you can do.
And also when we look at the values that we saw. Of how high people can score on the different scales.
the group that was talking in this lab context, had values that were the closest, almost there, to that of the museum experience. Otherwise, everywhere else, they were dampened, which makes sense. You’re out of this kind of, like physical presence, day out, kind of sacred museum context, and you’re in just a regular laboratory on your lunch break, trying to get a credit for psychology class.
And we were amazed that actually, That people could feel, those high levels of awe, or being moved, or just feeling like it was a beautiful experience, even though they’re just sitting in a laboratory looking at those same works, not real, but on a laptop. And still that discussive element okay, it could just be that people are having a nice time socially connecting.
And it’s not really about looking at the artworks and that’s something that we’ve thought about is it just about having the conversation, but there’s an element of it doesn’t really matter because something about having that conversation gets them to report their experience of the artworks as more meaningful and their whole experience of engaging with this kind of aesthetic setting as better.
So it’s like that strategy on its own. It might just be that it’s having a conversation. Okay. But having a conversation seems to really change something about the aesthetic measurements that we’re looking at for people, even outside of the context where we would normally think of most beneficial.
Claire Bown: And this is so important because it’s things that museum educators have seen in practice and have felt for many years.
So we now have evidence that says having conversations in groups, in museums, looking at art is beneficial for us and for the groups. Which is fantastic.
Aleksandra (Sasha) Igdalova: Yes, it really is. And I can say also, anecdotally from having run that study and been there for months doing that, I have never had So many participants come up to me after one of my studies, and it was participants who were in that conversation group specifically, in the discussion group, not the other two groups.
The other two groups had a nice time. Some people did come up and say it was really enjoyable to have the space to myself, to sit with headphones and to be able to have a really, peaceful, slow looking experience. But the ones who really felt like there was this huge change were those in the discussion group.
And they said, some people, for example, continued actually talking with their group members for the next like half hour while they went to get a coffee. Strangers that they had met, because it was a mix of people who know each other, people who don’t know each other. We let anybody participate regardless of, how well they knew the people in their group.
And I’ve then met up with some of the folks that had participated in the studies in London, actually, since then. And they said that, yeah, it just had changed the way that they really approach museum viewing. And they said, now when I go to museums, I always, I just want to talk. I want to talk about it.
I want to get these new perspectives. And I think that’s, when you think about the question of okay, but is art really special? Or is it just conversations? I really think that art is special because art is something that is ambiguous enough that you can have this process that’s going on while you’re looking at it.
And let’s say you see the artwork, as this one way, and suddenly you have this other voice coming in and giving you this other perspective. And within a moment your grounded reality can shift because the thing you’re looking at that you thought you understood is suddenly not what it was.
And I think that moment, it can open you up to so many other things, it can open you up to more group sympathy, it can open you up to empathic relationships with other people, it can open you up to a whole range of other benefits. But this is something that we have to now go and explore, because I can say all these things, but as a scientist, I’m like, Oh, yes, but there’s definitely a way we can measure that.
it’s this process of, okay, did you feel a change in perspective and then did it lead to these other things that we can measure and what exactly is going on with, what might be the reason for why conversations are successful or like why they’re so helpful as an engagement strategy?
Of course, you could also. Probably have it that just connecting with other people feels so good, and that feeling good then, has this feedback process with the thing that you’re doing, and it makes that engagement stronger overall, and that engagement becoming stronger then leads to those better mood impacts down the line, too.
So these are the next steps of. What, working as a scientist in museum engagement, what we really need to figure out is, okay what are the strategies that are in use? How how are they being used? How can we design interventions that look at these strategies and manipulate them in ways that we can better figure out the mechanisms and the processes that are getting people from point A to point B and then how do we strengthen that? How do we add more options to that? How do we get more people involved who are different audiences and how do we get them to get the strongest impacts for them.
So it’s, yeah, I think it’s going to be like a lifetime of work hopefully that I get to continue doing.
Claire Bown: Exactly. So this wonderful research just begets more research questions. Oh, absolutely. It’s an ever perpetuating cycle of research that you’ve got yourself into.
But it’s fantastic results. And if anybody ever needed Any evidence to say this is why we do what we do, then please read this research because it really lays it all out for you. I’m interested to hear whether the experience in groups actually helped people to look for longer.
Was there any evidence around that and viewing times?
Aleksandra (Sasha) Igdalova: So the viewing time was set for each group, so it was 10 minutes per painting for each group and we did not deviate from that. And this is just a little point about doing, applying experimental psychology to these viewing contexts is, we want it to be as freeform as it can be, but at the same time for it to be experimentally valid, it can’t be too freeform, because of course, a person viewing on their own for 10 minutes, who has never done slow looking before, might get very bored.
Right? Which is why we added the guide aspect. They probably needed something there to help them think of new ways to keep looking at the work, whether it’s color, shape, or how they’re feeling, emotions, etc.
Three people talking about what they’re experiencing when they’re looking at an artwork. Ten minutes might be very short for them.
You have this kind of difference in what that experience will be like, but we want to measure across those experiences. So we need to design something that is as much in the middle and valid for both kinds of contexts. So they did not get to have actually varied viewing times, but when we asked them, how did you find the timing of the experience?
This is where I say that people who were talking in a group reported the experience as like too short towards the side of too short people who were not talking in a group. So just sitting silently with other people near them, they’ve reported it as too long. And then that person viewing on his or her own reported it as right in the middle.
So yeah, it’s interesting, even as a takeaway from Just what can adding conversations or interaction to group viewing do is it can enable a higher tolerance for a longer viewing time. And again, where can that longer viewing time lead? That’s where we can see these variety of impacts that you as museum educators find all the time of, engagement or changes in the self or changes with regards to the artwork, all the benefits of slow looking can then be felt more because you’re not walking away from the experience faster because you’re not exasperated by so much time going by.
Claire Bown: Exactly. And time does seem to go fast when you do this in groups. People say this to me ‘Oh the time flew by’. Whereas on your own, as you say, 10 minutes can seem an eternity without any structures. Even with a structure, 10 minutes is a long time to look individually.
Aleksandra (Sasha) Igdalova: Absolutely. And
we were amazed that.
The individual condition reported such high scores as it did because that’s, 20 minutes of slow viewing for a lot of people who had, never done that before who did the study, and they still reported something really amazing about it. And with that, I don’t think that every person viewing by themselves in the gallery is going to get that.
There’s obviously conditions around that. They were alone in a viewing space. Room to Breathe is a really special setup in that it has only these two works at a time that we have in there, really comfortable seating and like low lighting and a very like intimate viewing experience.
Somebody by themselves looking in a gallery for 10 minutes at each artwork with people all around them I don’t know. They might not have the same experience. That’s, what we saw in the laboratory replication is that when you take it out of that special context that is superior to just the group viewing without talking. But that discussion group one still was heightened as compared to the other two. So it seems like that social interaction, that conversation element really translates across and out of these special contexts. And for that, I think it could be a really promising tool for museum educators and programmers.
and exhibition designers and anyone thinking about the way they use a space and the way they design a space as well,
I think. Yeah, absolutely. And at the Tate Modern the Yoko Ono exhibit and I actually haven’t been yet because I’m saving to go with a list of people that I need to go.
there with. But I have had so many friends come up to me and say, you are going to love this exhibit, Sasha, because apparently there’s a lot of social interaction that happens there. And people walk away from it feeling something different than what they normally do in a gallery because of that social interactive element.
And I was like, oh, there it is. I haven’t even been there yet. And I feel like I’m sure that it’s already at work, that principle.
Claire Bown: Perfect. So tell me what are you working on now? There are a thousand different alleyways that you could go down as a result of this research, but what are you actually working on now and into the future?
Aleksandra (Sasha) Igdalova: Yeah Down all of those thousand alleyways, as you said, at the moment My thesis is set to be submitted in the fall. So I am writing that up. I am working on writing up the social lab replication study. Also, we ran a whole series of projects on mindfulness. whether the mindful breathing or actually looking at the mindful effect of room to breathe. Writing that up, getting that ready for publication. I also ran another study looking at, again, different types of guided content, art historical or VTS actually in the gallery, in room to breathe, and also with eye tracking glasses, so literally looking at viewing behavior and also looking at the difference of what happens if you have a curator actually delivering the content to you in a group, versus you listening to it in headphones.
Yeah. Lots of analysis, lots of write up happening for that at the same time I am consulting and helping on a few more art based projects of how to incorporate some research aspects, how to incorporate more well being elements from this kind of research way. Into art design. I’m also founding a workshop called CREA, or Crossroads of Research and Experience of Art, which will be held in Liverpool in September of this year.
It’ll be an annual workshop where we are bringing together psychologists who work in empirical aesthetics and museum educators, arts educators who are interested in collaborating. And we are basically just having round table discussions where we figure out how do we make this collaboration happen.
How do we strengthen this interdisciplinary bridges and make sure that artists and museum educators are getting the most out of these collaborations that they can be. That’s in the process, and also, yes, I am one of the co founders of a new international consortium called Arts for Public Good, which is between University of Vienna, Goldsmiths University of London, and University of Pennsylvania, where we are basically Collective of folks in psychology who are interested in, again, strengthening these networks between kind of artists and museums and psychologists, but also really collating our research measures, how we look at art engagement in these real spaces, how we look at art for good, and how we can strengthen our own research network of approaching yeah, approaching that kind of work.
Claire Bown: and at the same time as I’m graduating I am looking for my next post position etc and I’m very excited to see if it will be in academia and more of the arts based or something in between.
Aleksandra (Sasha) Igdalova: I just love working in this kind of intersection so I hope whatever I do it will continue in that manner.
Claire Bown: Perfect. So you’ve got a lot of things ongoing. We will wait with a bated breath for more of that research to come out. In the meantime, how can people get in touch with you, find out more about your work?
Aleksandra (Sasha) Igdalova: Yeah. I have a newly made website that is available. It’s called aleksandraigdalova. com. So just my name. You can find me on LinkedIn. And on my website and on LinkedIn, there will be links for the workshop that I’m founding and all of my different research papers, all of which are also available on Google Scholar and ResearchGate.
Claire Bown: Brilliant. We’ll include links to everything in the show notes as well. That just leaves me with time to say. Thank you, Sasha, for coming on the podcast today.
Aleksandra (Sasha) Igdalova: Thank you
so much,
Claire. This was a blast.
Claire Bown: Thanks. So a huge thank you to Sasha for joining me on the podcast today. Go to the show notes to find out more about Sasha’s work, get in touch with her, and to read That important research.
That just about wraps up this episode. Thank you for tuning in. The next episode of The Art Engager will air on the 5th of September, 2024. Have a good summer break. See you then. Thank you for listening to The Art Engager podcast with me, Claire Bown. You can find more art engagement resources by visiting my website, thinkingmuseum.com. And you can also find me on Instagram at thinkingmuseum. where I regularly share tips and tools on how to bring art to life and engage your audience. If you’ve enjoyed this episode, please share with others and subscribe to the show on your podcast player of choice. Thank you so much for listening and I’ll see you next time.