Tate Media: State of the Art
Tate, the UK’s national museum of British and Modern Art, has created a brand new experience for their visitors - interactive tour guides on the iPhone and iPod touch. Tate Liverpool introduced them for a Gustav Klimt exhibition earlier in the summer; it was so successful it was repeated for the Turner Prize 2008 at Tate Britain. From conception to execution, both tours were built and created by a small team using the powerful capabilities of the Mac Pro and Final Cut Studio.
Jane Burton, Tate Media’s Head of Content and Creative Director
The impetus for the project is the belief that a modern museum can do more than just hang pictures on walls and throw open their doors. Visitors can be engaged with the artworks in new and exciting ways, as Jane Burton will readily attest. “We have all these interesting things to show people when they’re going around the galleries - whether it’s a film of an artist talking about their work or some archival images to provide some context - but we don’t want to put big screens up around the gallery. They intrude upon the integrity of the space and can detract from the art on show”.
Burton is the Head of Content and Creative Director of Tate Media, the division of Tate Galleries responsible for building the tour guides. Her talented team of film-makers, editors, writers and designers worked together to place this supplementary content on a portable device that visitors would find a pleasure to use - the iPod touch. “The resolution of the screen is fantastic and the interface is very intuitive”, says Burton, and the wireless capabilities meant they could stream very rich media to each device.
Distribution of the interactive tour is especially clever. Visitors have either the option to hire an iPod touch on-site that's preloaded with the tour, or they can download an abridged version from iTunes for free and load it onto their own iPod touch or iPhone. A third method was wireless streaming in the gallery, which caters for those visitors who already have an iPhone or iPod touch but for whatever reason haven’t downloaded the tour beforehand.
Tate Britain already has dedicated wireless routers dotted around the building, but the requirements were markedly different for Tate Liverpool. “We used Airport Extreme for the Klimt show”, says Douglas McFarlane, Digital Production Co-ordinator. “In Tate Liverpool there was no network wiring where the exhibition was situated, and we needed to serve everything from one computer”. The solution was Airport Extreme, which “does very good wireless distribution bridging”, says McFarlane. “We had one connected to the server and then just dotted all the others around the gallery to extend the reach of the signal. I was up on ladders, sticking them between walls. You didn’t need a network point, just a power socket in the wall”.
So, what were the initial reactions to the interactive tour guide? “It was so popular, there was never any time to recharge them”, enthuses McFarlane. “We went from 50 to 100 iPod touch units, because when we had just 50 they were hired out the entire time”. Even more surprising was the length of time visitors spent in the gallery: “The average visitor gets round an exhibition in about an hour, but with the tour on an iPod touch they’d be in there for three hours. People stayed for longer because the content was really good and they were enjoying the experience”.
Given that the team hadn’t worked with the iPhone and iPod touch before, did they find building the guides much of a challenge? “We’d been doing podcasts for a long time now, we’ve got a section of the Tate website dedicated to it”, says McFarlane. “The interactive tour was a natural progression, because it’s not much more complicated than creating a normal podcast. Plus, you can build a very good looking site for the iPhone or iPod touch very easily without much prior knowledge”.
