This new smartphone app it's here to connect the passion of museum visitors.
Museums are so incredibly cool.
Museums are one of our favorite things! In fact, we think they're awesome. Literally: they inspire awe. Awe at what humanity can do. From artists labouring on exquisite treasures, to whole generations working together to discover new techniques and technologies.
Long before the internet allowed us to collect knowledge, and before we could store whole libraries on SD cards the size of a fingernail, there were museums. They made knowledge publicly accessible and physically present.
In London, we are lucky that so many of these institutions are open to all and free to visit. Regular returns help us engage with their permanent collections - like a library of objects you can keep coming back to and reading stories from!
But you know what makes museums even more incredible? People!
Everything inside museums was made and collected by humans. Endless conversations and emotions fill each room, with hundreds of stories hanging in the air. As we walk among the displayed artworks, new narratives are created, connecting the dots between the objects in unpredictable ways.
There's a constellation of unexplored stories out there, just waiting for us to string them all together!
So how does ArtString add to the museum experience?
ArtString is here to crowdsource all the wonder museums inspire. We want to take the passion - from staff, volunteers and enthusiasts - and make it visible to visitors that walk into the silent halls of museums. To encourage conversations and interactions, we've created a digital space where loud ideas can be articulated and shared within the contemplative space of a museum. Where learning and creating extends past the museum walls.
With access to the public collections from the British Museum, the National Gallery and the Science Museum, ArtString will build an endless, ever-changing resource for empowered learning and engagement, put together by museum visitors for museum visitors.
We invite users to leave comments for specific objects, add hashtags for improved thematic navigation, save favourite artefacts as souvenirs and create "strings' of artworks. Biblical Highlights, Women Inventors, Cute Butts or simply My Favourites, to name just a few... ArtString is open to all and free to visit, just like the museums we love.
ArtString was built to make museums into places of shared human emotion:
spaces where unique interpretations can be exchanged across the multitude of human experience, and users can guide each other’s curiosity into investigation, allowing them to navigate a constellation of previously unexplored stories. In this digital space created by ArtString, loud ideas are articulated and shared inside the contemplative space of the museum, making users part of a larger conversation.
Shall we begin?