Artcasting is a mobile application that invited visitors to exhibitions to choose an artwork and digitally ‘cast’ it on a trajectory to a new location, adding stories about their choice of cast and their associations with the artwork, and re-encountering their own or other artcasts in the future.
Artcasting helped visitors make imaginative connections with artworks, and helped galleries and museums understand how people experienced and engaged with their exhibitions. With an emphasis on movement, trajectory and imagination, Artcasting offered a way of experiencing a gallery exhibition as mobile and open to new interpretations and encounters both in and beyond the room.
Project information
Project title:
Artcasting and ARTIST ROOMS on Tour: Using mobilities-informed methods to support new approaches to arts evaluation
Funder:
Arts and Humanities Research Council, grant number AH/M008177/1
Dates:
May 2015 – June 2016
The Artcasting project developed, tested and assessed ‘artcasting‘, a new digital and mobile form of evaluation of arts-based engagement, in the context of ARTIST ROOMS On Tour.
The objectives of the project were to understand how mobilities approaches can enrich arts evaluation; to design, develop and pilot the artcasting platform; to generate a new approach to evaluation that can be built upon in the future; and to influence ARTIST ROOMS evaluation practice.
Two research questions were addressed during this project:
- How does offering visitors a way to align their impressions of the ROOM with specific places help them articulate their engagement with the work?
- How can a mobilities approach which asks visitors to make connections between art and place constitute meaningful evaluation practice?
Project methods included interviews, workshops with young visitors, iterative design of the artcasting application, in-gallery observations, and analysis of usage data and user-generated content shared by artcasting users.
The Artcasting platform was available for visitors to try as part of two ARTIST ROOMS exhibitions in late 2015 and early 2016: the Robert Mapplethorpe exhibition at The Bowes Museum in Co. Durham, and the Roy Lichtenstein exhibition at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh.
Read about the project findings in the August 2016 end of project report: