IK Prize 2015
Stimulate your sense of taste, touch, smell and hearing as Tate Sensorium, a new immersive art experience, is unveiled at Tate Britain
26 August – 20 September 2015
Tate Britain, gallery 34
www.tate.org.uk/sensorium
#TateSensorium
Galleries are overwhelmingly visual. But people are not – the brain understands the world by combining what it receives from all five senses. Can taste, touch, smell and sound change the way we experience art?
Tate Sensorium is the winning project of IK Prize 2015, an annual prize supported by the Porter Foundation, presented by Tate for an idea that uses innovative technology to enable the public to discover, explore and enjoy British art from the Tate collection in new ways. This immersive display opening on 26 August 2015 allows visitors to engage with paintings from Tate’s collection in a multisensory experience inspired by the artworks. Sound, smell, taste and touch are used to highlight different aspects of each painting and explore the way the senses interrelate to influence our overall gallery experience.
Featuring works by four celebrated figures in twentieth-century painting, Francis Bacon, David Bomberg, Richard Hamilton and John Latham, the display will encourage a new approach to interpreting these paintings, using the senses to trigger both memory and imagination. Key technological components include the use of Binaural and directional audio to produce 3D sounds, a perfume release system to heighten scent and pioneering touchless haptics technology to create the impression of tactile sensations.
Selected from a shortlist of four proposals earlier this year, Tate Sensorium is produced by creative studio Flying Object in collaboration with a cross-disciplinary team including audio specialist Nick Ryan; master chocolatier Paul A Young; scent expert Odette Toilette; interactive theatre maker Annette Mees; lighting designer Cis O’Boyle; and the Sussex Computer Human Interaction Lab team lead by Dr Marianna Obrist at the Department of Informatics, University of Sussex.
Visitors will be given the option to track their response to the display by wearing biometric measurement devices that record the emotional impact of the experience. These wristbands monitor electrodermal activity, a measure of perspiration, which indicates how calm or excited the wearers are. On leaving the experience, each visitor is awarded a tailored summary of how their body reacted to the exhibits and invited to explore the rest of the gallery using the theme of the senses as a guide.
Flying Object said: “Developing Tate Sensorium over the past six months has been a fascinating creative challenge. Our goal is to create an experience that provokes, rather than presents, interpretation of the art; we want visitors to enjoy the experience but more importantly to connect with the art in personal, memorable ways. We’ve been fortunate to work with really talented people on developing the sensory stimuli, and we’re excited to bring cutting edge technology into the gallery space to help bring the experience to life.”
The IK Prize, named in memory of the philanthropist Irene Kreitman, celebrates creative talent in the digital industry. Supported by the Porter Foundation, the Prize is presented by Tate to a team, company or individual for an original idea that uses the power of digital technology to connect Tate’s collection of 500 years of British Art to a wider audience.
This is the second year of the IK Prize. The inaugural winners were The Workers for After Dark, a project featuring robots in the collection displays at Tate Britain.
For further press information contact rachael.young@tate.org.uk or call +44(0)20 7887 8832. For high-resolution images visit tate.org.uk/press
Notes to Editors:
The four paintings featured in Tate Sensorium are:
Francis Bacon, Figure in a Landscape 1945
Richard Hamilton, Interior II 1964
John Latham, Full Stop 1961
David Bomberg, In the Hold c.1913-1914
Flying Object and collaborators are available for interview – please contact the Tate press office
Tickets to Tate Sensorium will be limited and are available for free on a first-come first-served basis from the Information desk on the day of your visit. The experience will last approximately 15 minutes
Tate Sensorium is recommended for children aged eight and over
Flying Object:
Flying Object are a creative studio based in London comprising Tom Pursey, Peter Law, Sarah Ashley-Cantello and Tim Partridge. They seek to connect cultural organisations and brands to audiences in new and original ways, using technology and the web.
Their work to date includes Mix The City, an interactive experience to create music through the musicians of Tel Aviv for British Council and the Space, and The A-Z of YouTube, summarising ten years of YouTube with 75 references and 18 filmmaking styles in three minutes.
Previous to Flying Object, Tom, Peter, Sarah and Tim have launched projects including YouTube Play, a crowdsourced video exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum; Life in a Day, a feature film about a single day on earth shot by thousands of YouTube users around the world; and Papa Sangre, a binaural audio-only iPhone game. www.weareflyingobject.com