Visitation enhancement research for art museums and foundations

The first three research projects listed below are suitable for volunteers to conduct additional research which may be beneficial to interested museums and foundations. Please submit findings to info@tfaoi.org. If we accept your research applicable to a project, we will publish your name and contact information, accompanied by a disclaimer notice.

1. e-gallery touring exhibitions

This project, separate from the "Frame" project referenced below, contemplates touring exhibitions of artworks via life-size electronic simulation of gallery rooms in a physical museum. Multiple rooms containing interlinked "television" screen "tiles" in a micro-bezel grid pattern covering each wall, plus software and hardware support, will produce life-like simulations. The electronic content on the walls will simulate paintings placed on brick and mortar walls, complete with extended wall labels and reasonable space portrayed between paintings. Photographs of actual museum gallery walls may be also used. A more sophisticated application involves video and sound presentation of a curator touring guests through each room. A potential exhibition may be named "The (name of the collection) of (type) of art."

For instance, six 85" 43.375" x 75.25" 4K television screens with two screens stacked vertically and three screens horizontally per wall yield an overall dimension of 96.75" high by 225.75". This converts to 8' x 18.8'. Four walls per room times, say, five rooms requires 24 screens per room times five rooms for a total of 120 screens.

If the average width of the depicted paintings is 2.5' with a horizontal separation of 1.5', then four paintings may be shown per wall. This arrangement yields 16 paintings per room or 96 paintings per exhibition. Accompanying extended labels may be placed underneath or next to the paintings. Some screen surfaces would have wall panels in place of paintings. For instance, one 3' wide panel per room would leave 91 net paintings for the exhibition. Transportable demising walls may be made of floor-mounted modular frames. 

In the case of a collection of paintings, if there are 240 paintings selected from the collection to be shown in an e-gallery of 10 rooms containing four six-screen matrixes per room with a capacity of sixteen paintings per room, an iteration of up to 160 paintings may be presented. If a casual viewer spent realistically eight seconds on average (1) viewing each painting, and viewing eight wall panels at one minute per panel, it would take around 40 minutes to view the entire collection. An initial iteration of 160 smaller paintings followed by another of 80 larger paintings presented back to back would allow the collection of 240 paintings to be experienced comfortably by 130 people, allowing an average of 13 people per room over the course of the two iterations. 

A J. Paul Getty Museum study estimates that average adult spends less than 30 seconds per object. James Elkins, art critic and historian, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, says: "There have been a number of surveys of how visitors interact with paintings in museums. One found that an average viewer goes up to a painting, looks at it for less than two seconds, reads the wall text for another 10 seconds, glances at the painting to verify something in the text, and moves on. Another survey concluded people looked for a median time of 17 seconds. The Louvre found that people looked at the Mona Lisa an average of 15 seconds, which makes you wonder how long they spend on the other 35,000 works in the collection."

Our conservative average of eight seconds per painting for a set of 240 paintings is based on 130 viewers spending 15 seconds per painting and label of interest and glancing at about 110 paintings. This adds up totaling 32 minutes of viewing time. An additional eight minutes may be allocated to  viewing eight wall panels. The viewing time for the entire 240 paintings would therefore be around 40 minutes.

When capital and production costs are spread over multiple closed schools rooms, surplus museum space, unleased office or retail space venues across the nation, the overall pilot project may serve audiences at a fraction of the cost of traditional methods. Exhibitions may be sponsored by institutional derivative means and site-specific support. And let's us face it, why not enjoy the pride of being first to travel, via the marvels of 21st century technology, soul stirring art depicting our nation's heritage?

2. Airport long term e-wall installations or rotating exhibits

In our travels via numerous American and international airports, we are aware of vast expanses of concourse wall space that is underutilized or vacant. Most airports lack long horizontal e-displays. Innovative and forward thinking museums may joint venture with airport authorities to install horizontally tiled, large (currently up to 85") low cost television displays widely available in big box stores. Integrated displays may cover tens to hundreds of lineal feet. If twenty 85" diagonal, 43.375" high  x 75.25" wide OLED 4K television screens are tiled horizontally, the horizontal dimension of the  display is 1,505 inches, which converts to 100 lineal feet. At 2024 retail prices the cost of each screen is about $3,500. Therefore, twenty screens would cost $70,000 plus taxes, mounting and wiring costs. Much larger screens are available at higher prices. 

Horizontal displays can replicate portions of walls of current exhibitions. Alternately, they may feature highlighted treasures from permanent collections. The vertical band of space for typical groupings of artworks and labels on physical gallery walls is usually more than can be accommodated by the 43.375" height of 85" television displays. If so, the electronically replicated wall segments may be zoomed out by software to fit the horizontally tiled screens. If larger screens are purchased, zooming out may not be needed or be significantly reduced. The ideal situation is to have artwork labels be readable by passersby.

Ongoing cost per view is relatively attractive since large amounts of travelers pass by concourse walls daily. Airports maintain passenger logs, so counts are readily available for computations. Ongoing costs include screen cleaning, content input and equipment maintenance. Capital costs are low, since individual television sets and related hardware are inexpensive. Security expense for the hardware is negligible since airports already have security personnel. Off the shelf software is available for linkage of tiled displays. System software for remote control is also readily available. An example of a consultant providing full service solutions, referred to by a faculty member of UC Irvine, is Steve Woo of Hiperwall. We have no relationship with the firm, and provide his name only for reference purposes. Images on the linked displays may be remotely controlled by educational staff of museums at their main campuses or by a consultant. The presentations may be rotated in terms in terms of minutes, days or months. 

From a marketing perspective, these installations will serve as a magnet for physical visitation. There may be few less expensive way to expose visitors to a local museum. Museums and other users may utilize the same display if an airport authority is the lead provider of hard costs and system control. 

3. The Frame touring exhibitions

Samsung's The Frame television products provide proprietary technology for consumers to be able to display self-curated collections of artworks. The company also owns an Art Store which is an online subscription service based on its library of images. The images are available in thematic sets. Alternatively, subscriptions may be based on sets of images drawn from collections of art museums. 

In perusing Art Store museum collections, we sensed that collaborating museums are largely Eurocentric. Addition of artwork sets from American art museums, galleries and art centers will provide access to the works of many historic American artists. 

UCI Jack and Shanaz Langson Institute and Museum of California, for which we have provided funds for exhibition grants, deploys cutting edge technologies to better educate ongoing visitors and reach new audiences. This institution is amenable to exploring collaborations with Samsung and off-campus venues such as large shopping malls. 

We envision "pop up" exhibit spaces for short term exhibits. For instance, imagine an unrented retail space within a regional shopping mall. The space would be secured by the stakeholders and have temporary galleries with demising walls made of black curtains. The lighting in the galleries would be subdued. The Frame TV screens would be hung from a temporary ceiling lattice. The artwork images on the screens would be sourced from the permanent collection of a nearby participating museum.

Benefits accruing to a collaborating museum could include Art Store subscription royalties and favorable publicity. Samsung would receive publicity plus income attributable to television set and subscription sales. The venue would receive additional foot traffic, possible revenue and publicity. If guests would be admitted without charge, we are interested in providing funds to cover a portion of a museum's out of pocket expenses.