With falling visitor numbers, galleries and museums are being pushed to find ever-more innovative ways to entice people in and to give them a more engaging and meaningful experience. The introduction of tagsmArt delivers on all fronts.
Art appreciation should be accessible to all, but too often visitors to an exhibition can feel distant and unconnected. The tagsmArt Connect app removes some of the mystique around art and artists as it makes it easier for visitors to explore the art they see.
It does this by enabling visitors to explore, interact with, share and save artworks in a fun, engaging and highly personalised way. Once opened, this free app works across all tagsmArt enabled museums and galleries that have installed iBeacons – a single app for the entire art community to engage with art wherever they visit – it’s the ultimate art discovery app for gallery and museum-goers.
tagsmArt Connect is the first element of a new IoT platform created specifically to meet the needs of the art world in the modern age. Initially working to transform the visitor experience, but then moving quickly on to launch digital tags for art works themselves, which will solve the problem of authentication and allow each artwork to really tell its own story.
Lawrence Merritt, CEO at tagsmArt, explains, “Our technology offers users the same freedom as an Oystercard or contactless payment, unobtrusively interacting with art works through your smartphone by simply being near the art work. This is just one way that the tagsmArt platform has the potential to be very liberating for the art world. With tagsmArt we are contributing to the physical internet, amplifying and enhancing the experience of the real world, while also adding much-needed context – and content – for everyone to be more inspired by art. All of this starts with ‘Connect’ but we have a very clear vision of all the other problems we plan to solve.”
tagsmArt’s proprietary iBeacons are already live in art galleries across London, including Saatchi, Gagosian and The Fine Art Society, with many more joining in the coming months. Just by opening the app visitors to these galleries now instantly receive information about the art on show, allowing them to take the exhibition home with them, in what becomes their own, personally curated art collection.
And the tagsmArt system is a proven concept, having successfully installed iBeacons across an entire town centre for the Folkestone Triennial 2014 – which was quite possible the biggest undertaking of it’s kind in Europe.
