The Tally Room (see Figure 3.7) was a large room at the west end of the gallery space with an arch window framing a view of Mount Ainslie and the Aboriginal tent embassy, which has staged its protest since 1972. This was transformed into a stark white room. Everything, including the floors, walls and ceilings, was white, except for the original timber picture rails and architraves, the colour coding on the column installations and the chalk on the graffiti wall. At the centre of the Tally Room were four clusters of column installations, or tangible data visualisations, that illustrated the results of the Ipsos national baseline survey of Australians’ attitudes to democracy. These
installations were designed by the project partners from the University of Canberra Faculty of Architecture and Design. Like each of the generation rooms, each cluster represented the headline findings of the research, including likes, dislikes, how Australians participate and the changes Australians want. According to the installation’s designers, the aim of the tangible data visualisation was for visitors to ‘locate themselves in a field of data’. Visitors were observed spending time interpreting the data on the columns and reading the graffiti wall, secret ballot display and message tree. In this room, numerous comments, messages and marks were left by visitors in response to the different participatory activities, including tangible, open-ended, self-directed and anonymous (see Table 3.3). Table 3.3. Summary of the participatory activity of the Tally Room. Graffiti wall Complete the sentence, ‘My voice counts because …’ Secret ballot Complete the sentence, ‘I’d fight for my right to …’
Message tree Visitors can write anything they want. Ballot box Use a ping-pong ball to answer yes/no to a changing question (e.g., the voting age should be lowered to 16). Complete an online survey (takes 10 minutes), which replicates the question in the national survey. Tangible Structured (limited by space available) Self-directed Public (very public— a large-scale performative act to contribute to this wall) Tangible Open-ended (but could run out of space)
Self-directed Anonymous (completed in a private voting booth and staff install the cards for display)
Tangible Open-ended (but could run out of space)
Self-directed Public, but can be completed discretely Tangible Structured Self-directed Public Digital Structured Self-directed Anonymous
The secret ballot included a voting booth, pencils and thick card that visitors used to privately (in an election booth-style structure) complete the provocation statement, ‘I’d fight for my right to …’ Visitors then posted the card through a slot. A museum staff member installed the cards on the pegs on the wall to create an attractive and large-scale display (see Figure 3.7). To the right of the secret ballot was the message tree (see Figure 3.8), an abstract tree structure made of plywood with a very open and unstructured provocation, ‘I want to say’. It was often overloaded with comments from visitors.
Figure 3.8: The message tree (left) had a very open and unstructured provocation for visitors to respond to, ‘I want
to say …’ and the graffiti wall (right) invited visitors to complete the sentence, ‘my voice counts because …’ Photos R
Coghlan
The graffiti wall (see Figure 3.8) was a giant, white chalkboard that invited visitors to complete the sentence, ‘My voice counts because …’ Often visitors commented on previous contributions from visitors and it became chaotic and dynamic. At times, staff cleaned the wall and the comments became neater and more controlled. The wall was often commented on by visitors when they mentioned other visitor contributions. Visitors left some of the most thoughtful comments or engaged in conversations on the secret ballot and message tree relating to democracy, politics, politicians, current affairs and human rights (see Figure 3.9).
Figure 3.9: Visitors left a range of thoughtful comments on the secret ballotand message tree, sometimes engaging
In the early days of the exhibition, there was a large, rectangular-shaped vertical plinth in the corner of the Tally Room housed iPads that visitors could use to contribute to the SBS web-based survey interactive and review the digital visitor contributions (see Figure 3.10). Around March 2015, the plinth was removed to make space for an evening public event in the gallery and was not replaced. An iPad was later installed on the verandah space to encourage people to complete the survey interactive. The web-based survey interactive reflected the questions that were asked during the Ipsos national baseline survey and took around 10 minutes for visitors to complete.
The Tally Room also included a ping-pong ballot box (see Figure 3.10) with a question that was designed to change every month, although I only saw two different questions during my visits. One provocation in the ping-pong ball interactive stated that ‘representatives should be part-time and work in the real world’, and visitors could answer either yes or no by placing a green ping-pong ball in the slot that represented their answer. Visitors could see how others had voted before they cast their own vote.
Figure 3.10. The online survey interactive was originally located on a column in the Tally Room (left) (image courtesy Mark Nolan 2014). The ping-pong ballot (right). Photo R Coghlan