Tate Modern sets up interactive screens for visitors

The Tate Modern Museum in London once again impressed the art world with an unusual innovative project. Now, each visitor to the London gallery can leave his comments about what he saw. Thus, the museum management announced a new course on the development of digital strategies.

Over the next five years, Tate will devote as much effort to mastering and expanding new digital strategies as during the past five years he spent on expanding and improving his galleries in London and St Ives, at least so said the director of the network of museums Nicholas Serota (Nicholas Serota).

As part of this new trend, 75 interactive screens have already been installed in Tate Modern. They will allow children and adults to leave their comments about what they saw, as well as possibly improve something by taking the opportunity to draw their own version on an interactive screen that displays your work on all screens installed in the gallery. “If you ever wanted your work to hang on the walls of Tate Modern or your cherished dream was to try yourself as an art critic, then this is your chance,” said Jane Burton, creative director of Tate, to the media.

The launch of the new digital strategy was carried out immediately after the publication of the new annual report of the museum, which recorded that during the reporting period, four Tate branches were visited by the largest number of people than ever before. The number of visitors was 7.74 million, 5.5 million of whom visited the Tate Modern, making it the most popular art gallery in the world after the Louvre.

The report also showed that Damien Hirst’s exhibition in 2012 was the artist’s most popular solo exhibition in the history of Tate, with more than 463,000 visitors. For comparison: a retrospective of Liechtenstein collected about 316,000, and an exhibition by Edward Munch (Edvard Munch) - 192,000.

It is noteworthy that such a huge number of people visited the museum amid falling government subsidies for each visitor to the lowest level in the last five years.

Chairman Tate, Lord Browne, reiterated his call on the UK government to provide better financial support for national museums and galleries, introducing long-term fixed-funding contracts, and he said that government money going to art does not take into account significant inflation. Tate alone lost nearly £ 9 million, which is “equivalent to 25% of the real terms of the reduction compared to the usual turnover,” Brown said.

In fact, the amount of money invested in the construction and expansion of the museum’s galleries has been very significant in recent years. Thus, 215 million pounds were spent on upgrades, which are still ongoing in the Tate Modern gallery, £ 45 million went to Tate Britain, and Tate St Ives should be closed for reconstruction in January-May next year, it has already allocated 12 million pounds.

Now, as Serota stated, the same amount of effort, albeit not material, will be aimed at investing in digital galleries designed to attract new audiences.

The main idea of the project, called “Bloomberg Connects”, is for each visitor to leave their comments, which will be displayed on all the rooms of Tate Modern on special screens. Well, the greatest pleasure from the project will be given to those who use the line of digital drawing, which the artist Michael Craig-Martin has already experienced, quickly creating and criticizing his work in plain sight.

“It’s much more interesting than I expected, to be honest,” said Craig-Martin, who raised and trained many of the YbAs (Young British Artists). “There is something very impressive about how it works - very easy to use, and it’s not giving you the ability to focus on the details.”

“I think that children will spend all day here. They will never be about to leave, because as soon as you make one picture, you want to make another right there. Many people are artists at heart, and this is a very easy way to show it. ”

Anna Sidorova © Gallerix.ru