Any time BootUp gets the opportunity to work with ALMA|LEWIS, we get excited because we love all the amazing cultural vibrancy and artistic visibility ALMA|LEWIS brings to the city of Pittsburgh. BootUp was contacted by A|L’s chief curator, Kilolo Luckett and asked if we could provided some community based app development skills for a talented visiting artist, Lizania Cruz.
We told Kilolo we were definitely interested and scheduled a meeting between all parties. Lizania Cruz art has a focus on being participatory and she was bringing her exhibit Performing Inquiry to Pittsburgh and needed its app Civilian Reviewer to be customized to a new set of prompts for the audience.
Lizania’s work explores the history and complexities of racial identity in the Dominican Republic in the African Diaspora. Her exhibit had many historical elements educating and exposing the audience to aspects of the Dominican Republic’s connection to the African Diaspora. The Civilian Reviewer app was a key element of the exhibit that connected the exhibit’s audience into work itself. The audience would become “civilian reviewers“, unbiased enough to judge and determine if the Dominican Republic has in fact repressed and erased African heritage. As participants tour the exhibit they used their phones to scan QR codes that would allow them to respond to prompts designed to uncover their suitability as a civilian reviewer.
BootUp was tasked with making sure the Civilian Reviewer app was updated with the questions for the current iteration of the exhibit. To work on the logic of the app and make sure the app would correctly output whether the person was biased or unbiased and eligible to be a civilian reviewer. Once the app decided the status of the participant it would then send their scores to a printer on site and print out the results of whether they qualified or not while also providing them an artistic keepsake.
We had a little under a month to get everything working and there were a number of technical issues that we had to navigate. Fortunately, we believed in our ability to deliver results for Lizania and A|L. Self-efficacy is one of the most important concepts that BootUp stands for and seeks to empower youth and community with. You have to believe you can do the task at hand, even if you do not know each aspect of road ahead. You must believe you can figure it out.
And that is what we did! The BootUp team met with the app’s developer Matt Ross, got access to the github and files used to make it work and then we had about a month to figure it out, make a copy of the app for the Pittsburgh exhibit, customize it, troubleshoot it and deploy it at the exhibit!
Needless to say we had a lot of work ahead of us and that is exactly what we did. We brought together our team of BootUp software developers including Community Forge co-founder and physicist, Dr. Patrick Cooper, Jeremy Richardson and my dear friend, Mr. Rafiq Kamal. Together we were able to get the application working just in the nick of time for the opening night of the exhibit! We really happy to provide our friends at A|L with community based app development that solved a problem and filled a need. We also developed our development skills in the process. Learn more about the Civilian Reviewer app.
Here from Lizania Cruz as she speaks with Kilolo Luckett about her exhibit Performing Inquiry.
Visit the ALMA|LEWIS exhibit slideshow for some amazing photos of the exhibit.
