The Cartography of Participatory Arts Practice and the Art Museum – Pilot Project

The Cartography of Participatory Arts Practice and the Art Museum is a one-year pilot project in collaboration with Tate and the University of Exeter, which aims to investigate how digital technology might support the documentation of experiences of participatory arts engagement.

Participatory art is a term that describes a form of art that directly engages the audience in the creative process so that they become participants in the event.  The Cartography study is timely for Tate as it wishes to address urgently what is perceived to be a gap in knowledge about an under-representation of socially engaged participatory art practices in the art museum.

The pilot project will explore the following research questions:

• What methods and technologies are required to create a collaborative cartography that maps participatory art practices associated with art museums?
• How has our understanding of participatory arts practices changed by opening up and democratising the documentation and research of this field?
• In what ways can the new knowledge generated through the cartography shape and be informed by the practices that will be playing out simultaneously in the museum within Tate Exchange?

Additionally, the following questions will be of relevance:

• How can such a platform support public involvement in documentation and archiving practices?
• How can the digital footprint generated by such a platform be harvested so that it visualises trends?
• What are the values of such participatory research and mapping exercises to the art museum?

The main outcome of the pilot project will be the prototype of an online interactive platform used to host an evolving visual and textual repository of documentary materials, memories, ideas and perceptions of participatory art practices associated with art museums. This one-year experiment will provide the preliminary insights for the further development of the prototype into a working platform open to the public.