"Follow Through" is a mobile audio-visual artwork accessible to museum visitors on handheld, portable computers. This project references the structure of an existing museum audio tour and invites visitors to engage in a set of exercises that bring well-established behavioral codes of museum attendance into relief.

We were approached by the Whitney Museum of American Art to make a proposal for a project on the fifth floor permanent collection galleries using a Pocket PC handheld device. Our first inclination was to learn more about the Museum surroundings, the artwork, and the people who visit the space. We observed a sharp contrast between the work in the collection and the passive, languid behavior of visitors in the gallery – even those using the museum's audio guide. There was a distinct set of behaviors and movements that we observed that, while not necessarily predictable, were more or less universal.

The biggest challenge was to come up with a rock-solid art project during the brief proposal phase. Our on-site pre-proposal research, as well as the limits of the space we had to work with, created a very distinct framework in which to operate. We spent several weeks formulating the project in advance. After we won the proposal and began creating the project itself, everything fell into place with relative ease. We spent many hours observing visitors at the Whitney and distilling their movements, gestures, and behavior into discreet "exercises." We developed an interaction model that was as uncomplicated as possible so people would spend time doing the exercises and not figuring out the interface, or the intention of the piece. We paper-tested our interaction model from day one, so that even before we began coding, we knew exactly where we were headed and had a pretty good idea how our audience would react. Following the initial prototype, we tested and revised extensively prior to the installation. We worked closely with Stephen Baker, who did most of the programming, to tweak the code to reflect the feedback from numerous testing sessions.

Given the scenario for the project (on a hand-held device, on the fifth Floor of the Whitney Museum) we stuck to certain tenants as we moved forward in our investigation. These presented us with many challenges:

1. You can't touch the art on the fifth floor of the Whitney. The permanent collection's exhibition structure surrounds the viewer and is already established. We weren't able to change or add anything to it.
2. We weren't able to really train people to use the device. The audience had to figure out how to use the device and how to understand the project with minimal outside input.
3. The project needed to be experienced from multiple access points across the space and could not be linear, since museum visitors always follow different paths.
4. Above all, this project was an artwork and not just an audio guide with a visual component. It needed to be conceived, presented and perceived as such.

We needed to find an interaction model that people were already familiar with so that we wouldn't need to spend a lot of time explaining how to use the device. That way, the people could jump right in to doing the activities that comprise the actual artwork. There was a very small window of time we had in which to grab the audience and make the invitation to act clear. If we couldn't get the viewers going on the artwork immediately in a comfortable and natural progression, the project would fail faster than it began.

Use of the audio guide in the context of our artwork creates a temporary autonomous zone in which the interaction described in our artwork can occur. The artwork expands the interpretive realm of the audio guide to be about not just the artworks present, but the overall experience of visiting the museum and existing as a body within that space.

We invited museum visitors to execute simple "exercises." To borrow a term from Erwin Wurm, these "ready-to-be-made" performative acts became a set of scenarios for the handheld device that operated within the existing behavioral vocabulary of a typical museum visitor.

The goal of this project was not to interpret the works in the collection, nor did we want to push visitors outside of their comfort zones. Rather, we wanted visitors to gain a new perspective on being a viewer and participant in a museum space. We also wanted to express our fondness and fascination with museums, the act of museum going, and art collections through the humor in this artwork.