Engaging constable: revealing art with new technology

Museums increasingly deploy new technologies to enhance visitors' experience of their exhibitions. They primarily rely on touch-screen computer systems, PDAs and digital audio-guides. Tate Britain recently employed two innovative systems in one of their major exhibitions of John Constable's work; a gestural interface and a touch-screen panel, both connected to large projection screens. This paper reports on the analysis of video-recordings and field observations of visitors' action and interaction. It explores how people interact with and around the systems, how they configure the space around the installation and how they examine and discover their properties. It suggests that designers of interfaces and installations developed for museum exhibitions face particular challenges, such as the transparency of the relationship between people's actions and the system' response, the provision of opportunities for individual and collaborative experiences and the interweaving of technological and aesthetic experiences.

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