On September 10, 2005, a list of works to be photographed was compiled by visiting all the exhibited sculptures in order, from the lowest floor of the Museum to the highest. Works for which it would not be possible to take an extreme close-up photograph were omitted. For example, some works that were enclosed in a case or monitored with an alarm (to prevent close observation) were excluded. Each artist was represented only once in the list; after one work of a given artist had been added to the list, subsequent works by that artist were skipped. This yielded a list of 77 sculptures.^*

On the following day,^† these 77 works were revisited in numerical order. Each was photographed once. After that, a second pass was made through the Museum, from the highest floor to the lowest, to photograph some sculptures that had been skipped in the first pass. Here, works were chosen for which it was believed that the resulting image might be interesting. For this pass, no limit was placed on the number of works to be included by a given artist. Through this, 21 additional sculptures were photographed and appended to the original list.^‡

A Vivitar Vivicam 10 camera was used throughout. For each shot, the camera was positioned within a few inches of the sculpture being photographed. The camera settings were as follows: focus mode: "Macro"; shooting environment: "Indoor 1 (Bright)"; and resolution: 320 by 240 pixels.

The 98 photographs were uploaded from the camera to a computer (running Windows 98 SE) using the software program PhotoImpression 3 by ArcSoft. The resulting JPEG images were copied directly from the "My Pictures" directory in which PhotoImpression 3 stores photographs. These were converted to two-color (black and white) GIF images using the program LView Pro 1.B2/386/16-bit for Windows 3.1. Finally, the color of all black pixels was changed to blue. (Note: The images were not cropped.)

A random 2-digit number was assigned to each of the 98 images. To generate a number, a 10-sided die (with faces labeled 0 through 9) was rolled twice. The first roll was for the most-significant digit; the second was for the least-significant digit. In some cases, the same number was assigned to more than one image. For such images, the 10-sided die was rolled one more time. The resulting digit was appended as a decimal digit after the image's 2-digit number. Additional decimal digits were generated and appended as needed until a unique number was assigned to each image. The images were sorted in numerical order using the randomly generated numbers. Then, they were renumbered in that order from 1 through 98.

* It was not decided that the objects to be photographed would be sculptures until a few items had been added to the list. Consequently, some paintings were included in the list as well.

† September 11, 2005 was the closing date of the Museum's exhibition titled Visual Music: Synaesthesia in Art and Music Since 1900.

‡ For a list of works that were photographed, see Bibliography.