From July 2007, anyone with an internet connection can delve into Tate’s archive material and watch a Barbara Hepworth home movie from 1935, or listen to Robert Morris being interviewed by David Sylvester in 1967. The BT Tate Player has made a huge range of material available online. It includes interviews, discussions, and other film and audio from Tate’s Collection.
The BT Tate Player is one of a range of pioneering initiatives from Tate Media, a division formed in 2006 to reflect new-media developments over recent years. Tate Media’s strategy is to create content which does much more than simply reflect events in the galleries. It encompasses film production – with a team making programmes about art for broadcast both on television and online – and Tate Online, which is home to an increasingly rich variety of multimedia content. Developing these channels opens up Tate to a different, global audience who might otherwise not be engaging with us.
As well as the BT Tate Player, the past year has seen the How We Are Now project, the Great Tate Mod Blog and ongoing editions of TateShots.
TateShots launched early in 2007, with monthly editions providing highlights of Tate’s exhibitions, events and performances. It’s available to view online, and can also be downloaded to view on iPods or other devices. TateShots, which is sponsored by Bloomberg, has produced and released 70 short videos over the year, which have been downloaded more than 300,000 times from various sources such as iTunes, as well as from Tate Online.
How We Are Now marked the first time that the public had been invited to interactively contribute to a Tate exhibition. This was a competition to tie in with How We Are: Photographing Britain. It asked people to contribute their own photographs to illustrate one of the four themes of the exhibition: portrait, landscape, still-life or documentary. Thousands of photographs poured in, and they were displayed using an online slideshow, and on screens in the gallery itself. Forty of the images (ten from each of the categories) formed a final display in the gallery.
A mood board is something you’d usually associate more with a designer than a gallery. But in the past year, the Great Tate Mod Blog invited the public to create a massive, online mood board for Tate. People sent photos of their favourite spaces to suggest what they thought the interior of Tate Modern’s new extension should look like. Clicking on one of the many images brings up a huge variety of ideas, from the Hoxton Street Bakery in London to graffiti on a brick wall in Amsterdam. The forum is informing the design process for Transforming Tate Modern.
16,708,415 unique visits in 2007–8
The number-one arts website in the UK*
Half its visitors are overseas
*(source: Hitwise)
