"The Visitor's Experience"

"Success really is largely defined by the visitor's experience."
- Amy Schlegel - June 4, 2009

As the Director of the Galleries and Collections at the Tufts University Art Gallery, Amy was our first institutional interview. We chatted shortly before the opening of the Sixth Annual Juried Summer Exhibition, which runs from June 4 - August 2nd (and includes artists such as Resa Blatman who we've subsequently interviewed).

Amy's comments, in several ways, helped highlight a functional difference in the art world, between the perspective of an institution such as the museum she runs, and the perspective of a gallery or artist. Freed from the direct commercial pressures of selling art and promoting artists, institutions such as the Tuft's University Art Gallery focus on educating and informing the public. Consequently the technological needs of an institution encompass a different set of tools, including tools that:

- help educate visitors and the public, providing additional context through mediums such as audio. The Sixth Annual Juried Summer Exhibition takes advantage of a mobile audioguide system, quite similar to that provided by Juncanoo, which enables artists to speak directly to visitors, about their art, their process, their medium, and any sort of additional context that might engage a visitor more deeply in the art they are consuming.

- enables visitors to interact with the institution and with each other, thereby fostering a richer public dialogue. Such a tool would allow users share comments with the museum and the public at large in an "enhanced guestbook" function, and share their experience with friends across their various social networks.

- help the institution evaluate or quantify the impact of their efforts. This would provide data to the institution, showing everything from how often the enhanced content for a particular piece was accessed, to how often users have left comments, what comments they've left, and how, when, and where they've shared their experience.

We're working on tools that do all these things - we'll update the main website and the blog as they come available.

Thanks for reading,
Ayo


"If an artwork can spark you to engage a stranger, [either] standing next to you or near you in a museum, about what you're looking at, that's, to me, interactive, but its also a measure of success. So hopefully you've chosen a work of art that can do that."
- Amy Schlegel, June 4, 2009

Please Visit the Tufts University Art Gallery's Sixth Annual Juried Summer Exhibition, which runs until Augist 2nd!