Tasty new stuff from the Tate

I've been having a play this week with the Tate's beta collection site, Art & Artists.

I'm liking the way the Tate have built in lots of powerful search tools, while also making the browse experience enjoyable. The thumbnails on the homepage, for example, are generated from the items with the most views, meaning the most popular collections items appear (and allowing for sudden peaks of interest to be recorded and communicated to site visitors) (and, yes, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy, if you want to be picky about it).




The Artists tab is also ordered by Views. It has the nice option to let you order artists by number of works in the collection, which is how I discovered that there are nearly 42,000 items by JMW Turner - which seems astounding.



The above screenshot shows the homepage of the site with all the initial facets expanded. Facets and metadata currently play quite a large role in my life, and I appreciate how the Tate has tucked them away. They're there for the power user, but hidden from the casual browser. I do find some of the facets odd. For example, you can split artists by gender, and I can't think of a use case for that (apart from doing a comparison of number of works in the collection by men and women). Nationality and time period might be more informative here (but then, of course, how do you deal with someone born in Italy who worked in Belgium and France and died in England, or who painted between 1888 and 1934?).






Individual item pages have a simple and roomy display, and once again you can also hide and expand more filters/links/facets. I quite like the stepped approach taken towards the subject descriptions.



Some collection items have multiple views - a basic info page, a detailed catalogue entry, and another page titled 'summary' but which is more like 'interesting context-rich short essay'. The Tate has traded off keeping the first page simple and focused on the image with the chance that people might not click through to the following pages for even more, even richer information (and god knows we're all about even more information).

As this is a beta release, I'm expecting incremental changes and the addition of more functionality over time. In particular, all forms of user engagement and social media integration (from Facebook like buttons to commenting) are currently missing, and I betcha they'll start to dribble out.

The Great Tate Mod Blog

Tate Modern have launched a blog inviting the public to submit images & ideas to help them "create a photographic 'Mood Board' of the kind of interior spaces, ambience and designs that people would like to find" in the Herzog and de Meuron-designed planned extension.




Currently the blog features "posts" by Jacques Herzog, Nicholas Serota and Culture Secretary James Purnell. It'll be interesting to see what the take-up is like: the "best photos and ideas" will be displayed at the Tate next year.

A more low-tech way of approaching this would be just to put comment boards up in the gallery, and allow visitors to scribble ideas, tack up images, or draw. An interesting idea Auckland Art Gallery and City Gallery Wellington could look into for their redevelopments, as a way of engaging their audiences.

Image from the Guardian website

Follow my mental leaps

Over the net have dissected today the over-done ( under-done?) lighting of the Bill Hammond survey show Jingle Jangle Morning at City Gallery Wellington. As they point out, the lowered ambient light and strong spot lighting in one of the galleries has created some problems: glare which makes the works harder to see, dimness which prompts visitors to step over the lines to see details and read wall texts, and an unfortunate side effect of turning some of the works into lightboxes.

So far, the lack of lighting does not appear to have caused injury - for example, people walking into walls. You may scoff, but take the example of the Tate's current installation by Doris Salcedo, Shibboleth, a crack running the length of the Turbine Hall which has, in the first 4 weeks of showing, resulted in 15 reported accidents.

Dennis Ahern, the Tate’s head of safety and security, said: “With Shibboleth this hazard differs from equitable ones in that physical protection measures which would normally be applied to a gap of this nature are not deemed appropriate due to its artistic nature.” By which I think he means: "apparently it's art, so we can't board it up like we normally would".

In other art-related danger news: you would need a very large piece of board indeed to cover up Urs Fischer's latest work in New York, (as reviewed by Jerry Saltz). A sign at the door says: THE INSTALLATION IS PHYSICALLY DANGEROUS AND INHERENTLY INVOLVES THE RISK OF SERIOUS INJURY OR DEATH.

BYO white gloves

I was quite excited when I first saw the Tate's 'Your Collection' feature. From the blurb:

Tate Britain displays British art from 1500 to today. Yes, it's a museum, but it's also like a big living room. All those works of art are yours.

Tate has devised a new way of looking at the Displays with a range of themed 'Collections'. These suggest a number of personal journeys you could take, reflecting different moods and enthusiasms and revealing the extraordinary breadth of work on show.

The general idea of Your Collection is that you can use it to virtually curate your own selection of works from the Tate's collection. This is a feature many galleries, museums and online image databases are interested in.

The Tate's sample Your Collection collections include like 'The I'm in a Hurry' collection, and 'The Rainy Day' collection. At first I thought these were 'user-generated content' (i.e. made by visitors to the site) which had been created, submitted and posted.

Then when I had a play at forming my own selection, I discovered a few things:

1. You can only pick from about 40 images - not from the Tate's online collection
2. Your 'exhibition' must have 6 images - any less and you're sent back to the storeroom
3. You can't submit your collection, although the site will auto-generate a (heavily branded) leaflet in PDF format, and allow you to email this
4. You can only submit a generic blurb, not a comment on each work you've selected
5. The details of each work (artist, date, title) are not available.

So - despite a very slick interface, and that lovable Tate branding - the Your Collection feature is a disappointing outcome of an interesting and useful idea.