What Visitors Do With Their Phones in a Gallery
Visitors arrive holding the device the guide should run on and are handed a paper map instead. Audio guide hardware sits in a cabinet because it has to be cleaned, charged, and staffed, and most institutions can only justify it for one exhibition at a time.
The constraint has never really been content. Curators write more interpretation than any venue can deliver, and it ends up compressed onto wall labels that visitors read for four seconds. Deliberately left off screen is named collections and loan agreements: what is on display, what is on loan, and from whom are details a venue controls tightly and should not appear in a supplier's video.
Six scenes carry the visit: one on the current experience from the visitor's side, one on scanning a code at the object without an app download, two on what the visitor hears and sees at one work, one on what the venue learns about how the exhibition was actually walked, and one on what setting up a first exhibition involves.
