The Cleveland Museum of Art Wants You To Play With Its Art

The digital-savvy museum is using more than a dozen interactive games to collect data on how visitors digest artwork

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It wasn’t that it was the first museum to attempt to “go digital.” It was that the Cleveland Museum of Art did it in a meaningful way that went beyond augmented reality phone apps that, when you point your phone toward an object you like, superimpose an informative fact over the piece. CMA worked with creative firms, such as Design I/O, to create ARTLENS, a gallery that incorporates physical artwork with their digital representations in interactive, gesture-based games.

In a game called “Line Shape,” for instance, you create a squiggle with your hand movements, and ARTLENS will automatically locate similarly shaped details within the objects of CMA’s collection. Say you draw a little corkscrew in the air, and Line Shape will find and display sculptures, paintings and more that feature a corkscrew as a design element, even if it’s impossibly small and unnoticeable.

“We find that play is a very uninhibiting way to engage people to talk about art and learn about art,” says Lori Wienke, CMA’s associate director of interpretation and one of the creators of the ARTLENS gallery that debuted in September 2017.

ARTLENS’ predecessor was 2013′s prototype Gallery One, in which more than 4,000 pieces of CMA’s artwork then on display were also digital thumbnails on a 5x40-foot touchscreen of more than 23 million pixels. Patrons touched a thumbnail and it blew up large with a description, or searched by theme (melancholy, or shades of blue, etc…) to find related artwork. Nearly every major museum in the world visited CMA to study how the future of their museums would incorporate digital.

Gallery One was always meant to be a prototype. Its touchscreen wall was carried over into ARTLENS, a permanent gallery that replaced it; only the radio-frequency connection to CMA’s smartphone app, now called ARTLENS app, was replaced by Bluetooth. The big change was the new ARTLENS exhibition, where 20 pieces of artwork are physically on display. Every piece has two interactive games. In a game called “Zoom Wall,” your body becomes the pinch-and-zoom you use to manipulate the artwork. Walk to one side, and it enlarges the piece. Backtrack, and it zooms out. When you bump into another visitor, two bodies become one control and it enlarges the artwork together.

Jane Alexander, CMA’s chief information officer who oversaw ARTLENS’ technologies, talks about patrons who’d come as strangers and often end up laughing together and sharing control in the interactive games. “People are truly engaging together, of all ages, without knowing each other,” she says, “and that’s not what happens at museums.” Exhibitions in ARTLENS will rotate every 18 months to keep up a steady flow of new pieces. The back-end software that runs the games was built from the start to allow creation of new games for incoming artwork without the downtime typical to exhibit changes.

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