ArtMaps: A Technology for Looking at Tate’s Collection

This article presents ArtMaps, a crowdsourcing web-based app for desktop and mobile use that allows users to locate, move and annotate artworks in the Tate collection in relation to one or more sets of locations. Here the authors show that ArtMaps extends the ‘space’ of the museum and facilitates a new, pluriperspectival, way of looking at art

ArtMaps: interpreting the spatial footprints of artworks

Creating and utilizing simple links between items and locations in map-based systems has become a mainstream component of modern computing. In this paper, we explore support for ‘art mapping’, an activity that requires consideration of more complex interpretations of spatial relationships as users engage with identifying locations of relevance to artworks. Through a user study of the ArtMaps platform, and an exploratory study with professional artists, we identify diverse interpretations of spatial meaning in relation to art. We find that art mapping highlights potential for more active engagement with art through technology, but challenges existing systems for spatial representation. Through connecting our findings with work on designing for interpretation, and on space and place in HCI, we contribute new understanding of creating engagement through the spatial interpretation of art, and define potential characteristics and uses of holistic ‘footprints’ for artworks

Playing in the dark with online games for girls

Pregnant Rapunzel Emergency is part of a series of online free games aimed at young girls (forhergames.com or babygirlgames.com), where dozens of characters from fairy tales, children’s toys and media feature in recovery settings, such as ‘Barbie flu’. The range of games available to choose from includes not only dressing, varnishing nails or tidying messy rooms, but also rather more troubling options such as extreme makeovers, losing weight, or a plethora of baby showers, cravings, hospital pregnancy checks, births (including caesarean), postnatal ironing, washing and baby care. Taking the online game Pregnant Rapunzel Emergency as an exemplar of a current digital trend, the authors explore the workings of ‘dark digital play’ from a number of perspectives – one by each named author. The game selected has (what may appear to adults) several disturbing features in that the player is invited to treat wounds of the kind of harm that might usually be associated with domestic violence towards women

Dare to dada: an argument for visual and verbal avant-garde poetry in the nursery

This article reports on our ongoing exploration of children's responses to working with contemporary and avant-garde art and ideas. Our research began with the development of two CD-ROMs in collaboration with artists, pupils and teachers. Building on this collaborative research material, this article focuses on our use of one small element of each CD-ROM, featuring Takehiko Iimura's performance video art and Dada poetry as a teaching and learning 'trigger'. We worked with a culturally diverse group of predominantly English and Bengali early years children in the nursery unit of an East London school, exploring relationships between sound, feeling and meaning in young children's playful uses of language in the interdisciplinary modus operandi of the Dada movement. A positive finding was that working in a multilingual context and avoiding treating the letter as a phonic imperative gave some EAL children a sense of freedom and confidence to some EAL children, but a lack of confidence and scepticism about what counts as poetry seems to exist among the adults

Art maps: mapping the multiple meanings of place

Digital technology enables us to prospect, generate, assemble and share eclectic materials, creating virtual journeys, stories or exhibitions through the internet, viewed on computer but also on location via mobile devices. How does the ability to create and curate in this way enhance or transform our access to and understanding of art, as well as our experience of place? What kind of meanings are we making for ourselves and others? And how are the creative responses of audiences viewed and valued in relation to the museum's curated collection? This article explores these questions through the development of Art Maps, a web and mobile application that enables people to locatively and creatively explore the relationship between art and place. Through participant research we are examining possibilities for a more open approach to interpreting Tate's digitised collection of art, testing the notional democratic shift from the museum as keeper of knowledge to co‐creator with the audience