Cultural Authority and the Art Museum:The Use of Digital Video in the Visitor's Encounter with the Work of Art.

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The application is for a research student to work on an extended programme of practice-led research and video ethnography mapping and testing approaches to the uses of video related to the production and reception of art works at Tate. The aim is to develop new knowledge for museum professionals on how digital video mediates and relays meanings and experiences of art. It is envisaged that the research will be of direct use in practical approaches to learning, interpretation and marketing and media.The rationale behind this programme lies in a wider grasp of how digital technology is rapidly bringing about a cultural convergence between producer and user generated content. Digital Video, is an integral component of digital mobile media and online media in new cultures of participation, (Jenkins.2009) Digital video is a powerful medium through which meaning is constructed and communicated and its increasing use by both museum professionals and the public forms the basis for the proposed research in looking at how forms of media practice can inform the art museum of the relationship between professionals and visitors digital mediation of art.Tate along with other international and national museums is increasingly turning to the use of video for a variety of informational as well as engagement purposes, ranging from: interviews with artists; qualitative education documentation and evaluation; market research; interpretation and online exhibition feedback. The use of digital video in these different contexts across Tate is generating a wealth of visual data for which there is currently a limited overview of the differing methodologies which underpin the use of video. Further, whilst there is an increasing use of video related to the professional production and exhibition of works, there is only limited access for the visitor to use mobile media as part of their gallery experience.The research will produce new understandings of the use of digital video in the mediation of the experience of and value for the art museum and draw upon the conceptual insights of the AHRC/DMI funded Tate Encounters research programme (2007-2010) in furthering the application and reach of the concepts of transvisuality and the transmedial. These related concepts will form an initial hypothesis for developing new practice-led approaches to meaning formation in the art museum experience given that they represent a challenge to any unproblematic notion of video providing unmediated or indexical knowledge of events in time and space. Importantly the approach to practice-led research will also develop methodological understandings in the area of digital video practice as a reflexive research form capable of producing new analytical knowledge, rather than being understood as a medium for gathering research material for subsequent textual analysis. The research proposes to look at this broad analytic and theorised context of cultural change in digital culture through an extended empirical study. The research will systematically explore the staging of mediation in terms of premediation, (Gruisin.2004), remediation (Bolter & Grusin 2000) and transmediation, (Siegal 1995), which will provide the methodological basis for a micrological and qualitative focus upon how meaning is constructed in the encounter with and interpretation of works of art displayed and exhibited at Tate. This proposal also develops from the work of Tate Encounters and aims to develop and extend understandings of how visitors from a wide range of cultural backgrounds construct meaning in their encounters with works of art in a gallery space and what experiential and cultural resources they draw upon. The partnership will continue the fruitful and productive collaboration between Tate and the Centre for Media and Cultural Research at LSBU.