5 Case Study 1 - Leicester Research Archive - University of Leicester

take advantage of this new technology, but more importantly that we thought that
this would be a forum for integrating multiple voices. We have so many creative
people in our community, artists, musicians, writers, poets and we felt that the
format of podcasting would allow us to integrate the variety of those voices.
Peter Samis (SFMOMA): Yes, I think it was definitely a gut feeling. Also we
saw the difficulties with the Tuttle prototype. It’s always like that; you try
something out without knowing what the problems are going to be. You bring
your equipment to the gallery and at first you don’t know all the problems that
are going to come up. We felt like we are reinventing the wheel of how to make
an audio tour. Then we thought that this is not something that we liked. With the
Robert Adams we realised that its more successful if we disengaged the visual
track from the visitor’s itinerary through the show. We were making it more by
having the user in mind, which is sitting at home on their computer.
Stephanie Pau (SFMOMA): Yes, we wanted to say something that could enhance
the visitor’s experience, even for an audience, which is not in front of the
artwork. That approach was less didactic and allowed us to provide a more
creative perspective about the works on view.
Peter Samis (SFMOMA): It’s not that we necessarily always gotten it right. Even
once we came to those conclusions, and we created the format of the Gallery
Exploration, they are still a little bit problematic and they are still in flux. For
example, we had a great Gallery Exploration for the Tomatsu exhibition. Yet,
you would probably be a bit frustrated, if you would listen to it in the Gallery.
Sometimes things just don’t work as you might have imagined at first. The
problem with the Tomatsu Gallery Exploration is that it doesn’t at all reflect the
order of the sequence, the photographs are hung. Now, with the Matthew Barney,
for the first time since the Tuttle, we have reverted to putting a formal sequence
gallery tour, an audio tour and we are going to see how people are going to
respond to that.
When you define the format and the content of a programme, do you think about
what kind of hardware users are listening on? Do you think about what users are
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