Press Release: ARTXSENSE  

• Orientation – From providing a sense of place within a gallery or museum, room or location to conveying the situation, position and movement of an element, object or character in a work of art ARTXSENSE offers insights of atmospheric nature, contextual, historical and social relevance.

• Navigation – Acting as your advisor and navigator ARTXSENSE will guide you through gallery and museum rooms telling you where to turn in order to achieve the ideal experience.

• Emotion – The guide will act as an audio descriptive guide allowing individuals, regardless of their visual ability, to gain insight into the work whilst providing emotional and creative insights. In performative nature it will, like directors’ commentary, instruct movements that allude to shapes and actions enhancing understanding for sighted and visually impaired users alike.

• Knowledge – Offering everything common of the regular audio guide such as historic context, personal background, key motifs and more ARTXSENSE puts its content up for discussion via audio messages that enable public interaction. ARTXSENSE ensures key facts and the works contexts is interwoven with emotional and creative insights enhancing understanding of a work of art. The app is narrated by artists, curators and practitioners bringing expertise and personality to the mix.

   

ARTXSENSE was the brainchild of Lili-Maxx Hager, a Culture, Criticism and Curation student at Central Saint Martins looking to redefine efforts of inclusion. Coming to the end of a three-year course it occurred to her that accessibility and inclusion of those with disabilities, a key consideration for curatorial planning and artwork production, often fails to do justice by those unable to see. Likewise, reflecting on popular culture and the ways in which information is digested today, it also felt like a new method of information intake for individuals with visual impairments was in order, to change the way emotional responses, knowledge and creativity is relayed in gallery and museum settings. The curation student thus set out to change the mindset that blind and visually impaired individuals needed extra treatment and focused her efforts on creating an app that transforms the museum experience for all. Reconstructing an experience that was once, at the very least accommodating to those with visual impairments, the app shines a new light on efforts of inclusion reconfiguring the definition of experience to one that targets everyone art interested who wants more than your average factual reiteration. From youngsters to academics ARTXSENSE conveys a world once out of reach, reinventing ways of experiencing culture. With the support and initial narrations of disability artist and advocate Rachel Gadsden, who will soon be joined by others, ARTXSENSE is an audio guide with personality that is captivating and opinionated to say the least. Each path is designed with individuals with visual impairments in mind and through analogies, performative instruction, narration and navigation provides them with an understanding that goes beyond your average audio guide. Offering its user an insight into elements once overlooked. Through expertise and charisma ARTXSENSE becomes a vessel conveying the essence of an artistic experience to everyone.