NODEM 2014 Proceedings

ArtMaps: Framing Public Engagement
These tasks, however, still prompted quite personal replies that revealed participants had reflected on the
relationship between a work and the location they were in:
Based on the visual clues I am reminded of driving in France. With that lodged in my mind, the more emotional
side of the image narrows it down to long treks to the south along the motorways through middle of France,
heading off with a fully loaded car on a family camping holiday. Are we nearly there yet?
Even though much of the landscape is wrong, the first place I thought of when looking at this road was Canada, when
friends took me for a drive up through the Rockies. The highways and landscape are so different to home I was quite
taken with them. Location obviously not ‘correct’, landscape doesn’t even match, but was the first road that came to
mind when I saw the work.
Carletti’s third online study specifically aimed at researching how users dealt with the illustration of multiple
locations by looking into how they would geocode artworks representing more than one place such as Capriccio
by Marlow, and Various Steeples, Salisbury, Oxford and London by Turner. The task also looked at locating
the same place in multiple representations by showing how users may assign a location of the same site in
several artworks. Artworks listed here included Waterloo Bridge by Constable, Turner, and Kokoschka; Big Ben
by Steazer, Kokoschka, and Topolski; Tate Britain by Lavery, Beerbohm, and Methuen. Feedback from these
studies showed that more than the majority of the participants who completed all the tasks and the final
questionnaire ‘agreed/strongly agreed’ that using ArtMaps facilitated new ways of engaging with locations
and artworks (85%); increased their understanding of a particular artist’s work (71%); facilitated new ways of
exploring the Tate collection (95%); enabled them to interpret artworks in new ways (71%) and learnt something
new (95%).
A public engagement event held in March 2014, built on findings from the first workshops, re-examining how
people can explore places through art by creating mobile journeys for others to experience. This event used
another WordPress-based platform developed at Horizon, Wander Anywhere, and structured the event as
a collaborative design for user experiences on location. The starting point was the Ruins Lust exhibition at Tate
Britain (March-May 2014), which examined the fascination with ruins, past, present and future as a subject
for art. Participants were divided into interest groups around three London-based artworks, selected from
the show: Keith Coventry’s Heygate Estate (1995), Rachel Whiteread’s Clapton Park Estate, E5 from the series
Demolished (1996) and Joseph Gandy’s An imagined view of the Bank of England in ruins (1830). The event,
run by artist Ania Bas and Tate curators, confirmed findings from previous workshops and provided further
evidence that people’s understanding of the locations where they devised their trails, as well as those they
explored on other’s trails, were subsequently seen in a new light. Participants, who had been prompted to reconsider
the overlooked within the urban landscape, in light of its history, were then motivated to revisit the
work of artists who had been the starting point for their ideas. Feedback indicated that participants felt that
they were involved in a social activity and employed various forms of social media to plan, share, test, prompt
engagement and disseminate experiences, throughout and beyond the event.
In July 2014 Rebecca Ward from Tate charted how artists represented or interpreted the terrain that the Tour
de France cyclists passed through, focussing in particular on the UK stretch between Leeds and Harrogate.
She noted that the following works are on route: Harold Gilman’s Leeds Market; Turner’s Addingham Mill on
the Wharfe; John Piper’s Buckden in a Storm; Turner’s Grinton, Looking West; the painting after Thomas Girtin,
The Rivers of England (‘River Scenery’): Ripon Minster on the Rivers Ure and Skell, engraved by T. Lupton; and
Peter de Wint’s Knaresborough Castle. Users responded well to this juxtaposition, which suggests that ArtMaps
could be used more widely to reach new audiences (see Figure 3).
NODEM 2014 Conference & Expo
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