Scott Benesiinaabandan’s "shke! waboose/look at the rabbit", 2021, as seen in Geofenced (2021), curated by Katie Liao for InterAccess. Augmented reality for mobile and site-specific installation. Photo by Natalie Logan.
Benefits for Audience
Accessing artwork either through a browser, platform, or custom application occurs through smartphone interfaces and practices that are already part of daily routines. However, the vast range of hardware and operating systems on the market can create some frustration when projects don’t work on a user’s particular device.
File size and optimization are a factor in the success of mobile experiences. By using such a familiar device for the display of artwork, the trade off is that audiences expect similar interactions to their other mobile applications. A slow loading, glitchy application will quickly frustrate audiences accustomed to endless smooth scrolling—even if it’s an integral part of the artwork’s design.
Experiences that can be accessed through the web browser of a smartphone will be preferred to downloadable applications if audience members are using their own devices. Downloadable custom applications will offer greater customization and support for the artwork, but the additional step of downloading may turn away audiences with limited data or phone memory space.
Benefits for Artwork
Like web browsers, mobile devices technically support many categories of digital media. In addition to this support, they also have smartphone hardware like cameras, accelerometers, gyroscopes, and gestural touch screens available—all of which can be used to contribute to an engaging interactive experience.
Why Consider Mobile Experiences
- If the artwork is something the audience can spend time with over multiple sessions, with durational or habitual qualities, a mobile presentation is a compelling route to follow. For many people, smartphones are where life happens, whether it’s social, economic, political, or leisure time, so art that intervenes or comments on the day-to-day or quotidian is well suited for this technology.
- Mobile technology can encapsulate other platforms, such as browser, augmented (AR) or virtual reality (VR), but in a more accessible form than the dedicated hardware for those technologies. Special considerations must always be made for special applications, such as mobile VR.
Implementing Mobile Experiences
- If the experience is presented across smartphone web browsers, the same design considerations apply as for browser-based interactive media experiences. While mobile support is increasingly common for web design, make sure that this access goal is clearly stated when working with any web developer.
- Additional considerations for font size, and the limited screen space of a phone should be taken into consideration with the designer.
- The major challenge of implementing mobile experience is the development of custom mobile applications and their publication to the major app stores:
- App stores pose technical and financial barriers. Apple requires an ongoing yearly fee of over a hundred dollars and will require updates be made to the application with iOS software upgrades. The Google Play store has a lower, one-time fee.
- Both platforms have an approval process that can add additional months to the timeline of a project. If you go this route, try to publish as soon as possible before your project launch (months in advance), even if key features or artwork is missing.
- These platforms have the right to remove your application from their stores at any time. Political and counter-cultural content is often flagged for automatic removal. They will also remove your application if it has not been updated in recent years.
- Unity is the primary video game engine for building smartphone games, but is also capable of creating a wide range of applications beyond gaming, and allows the developer to take advantage of many affordances of mobile technology.
- App stores pose technical and financial barriers. Apple requires an ongoing yearly fee of over a hundred dollars and will require updates be made to the application with iOS software upgrades. The Google Play store has a lower, one-time fee.
- Test the software with as many devices as possible, and suggest which devices should be used to access the experience. There are critical hardware differences between devices, and audiences will be frustrated after going to the effort of downloading an experience just to discover their device does not have the correct camera, etc.
Additional Considerations for Interactive Media Exhibitions
Access and Planning Considerations for Interactive Media Exhibitions
Art games, expanded reality, and other interactive media art forms offer exciting immersive and participatory experiences for audiences. With this potential comes a number of challenges for organizations who often need to find new methods to share such works with their audiences. Exhibiting interactive media forces the organizer to think like a designer.
Browser-based experiences of interactive media art
Chances are, you’re probably reading this through a web browser right now. Browser-based exhibition solves a lot of problems for audiences; it is most likely a piece of software already on your computer, no downloading is required, and it can be agnostic of the user’s operating system and hardware. It might even support mobile access, depending on the artwork’s features and constraints.
Augmented Reality (AR) experiences of interactive media art
As AR generally occurs on smartphone devices, the same advantages of pocket-ready accessibility apply as for mobile experiences of interactive media. AR continues to be a novelty to most audiences. While many will be familiar with the technology from games like Pokemon GO or social media filters, it can be challenging to those who have never experienced it before.
Virtual Reality (VR) experiences of interactive media art
VR presents the most convincing rebuttal to the so-called immersive fallacy by integrating audiences with the digital experience mere centimeters from their eyeballs. However, mass adoption of VR hardware is a vanishing horizon, as demonstrated by Meta’s lackluster Metaverse results of 2021-22. These specialized devices are not common household items. Instead, developing VR that has cross-platform compatibility adds significant overhead in terms of design and programming time.
Multi-user experiences of interactive media art
The space of a gallery is often shared with other audience members. A multi-user digital interactive experience elicits a similar social function. Multi-user digital experiences make explicit the primary quality of a computer network, to connect people, and multi-user digital exhibitions add art into that mix. If accessed remotely on personal devices, multi-user experiences can bring the feeling of an art gallery experience to the user’s device by seeing (and possibly hearing) other synchronous visitors.
Implementing interactive media in onsite installation
Organizations with dedicated exhibition space should consider if their project would benefit from an onsite installation. Depending on resources, onsite installation can offer audiences an enhanced experience by providing them with pre-loaded hardware or a gallery attendant to facilitate access. Installation of these projects will often require the artist or a knowledgeable technician to assist with setup. Any onsite installation will benefit from a set of written instructions. Write tech instructions as plainly as possible—leave artspeak for artist statements!
Digital Exhibition Collaborators
In the development of digital exhibitions, it’s important to understand an artist’s relationship with their technology.
Pilot Projects
A critical part of developing DETAIL was the pilot projects. These three digital exhibitions informed the prefabs and templates.
Resources
Build your own digital exhibition spaces with our step-by-step guides and technical resources.