Why is the number of artworks per room limited?
Why is the number of artworks per room limited?
Tuesday, June 1, 2021
In each space you will find a limited number of placeholders and therefore a limited number of possibilities for hanging artworks. The number is limited for several reasons:
Curatorial (UX) reasons
- In virtual spaces the comfortable attention span of most visitors is about 30 artworks per room.
- More than 3 rooms (with more than ~90 artworks) are challenging for most visitors to navigate and hard to communicate to other visitors. And the use of more rooms/artworks would demand the introduction of a navigation system (signs, maps, etc.), which would additionally increase the cognitive load.
- More than ~90 artworks per exhibition will make the catalogue and the artwork overviews so big, that visitors on mobile devices will scroll uncomfortably long.
Technical reasons:
Our technical goals require some compromise to work. The three main are:
- Make the exhibition run on at least 80% of 3 year old devices. Therefore we balance the introduction of new and computational demanding features with acceptable performance for most visitors.
- Make it available on as many platforms as possible: ART.SPACES is using web browser as platform. Since there are four major operating systems with slightly different browser implementations, we limit our development/testing to the most current versions of each browser. Currently we are testing for Apple MacOS: Safari, Firefox, Chrome; Windows 10: Edge, Firefox, Chrome; Android: Chrome, Firefox, Opera; iOS: Safari, Firefox, Chrome. Some of these browser have lower limits than other concerning performance, features and ressources (mainly RAM). We have to consider the weakest as benchmark.
- Make the exhibitions available to visiotrs with slow/unstable internet connections: we strife for quick loading and therefore deliver the spaces and their content in multiple steps, first low-resolution and fast-loading, then higher-resolutions. And we limit the total size of an artwork and the whole exhibition, to avoid having the exhibition crash due to "out of memory" problems, which are especially critical on mobile devices
Suggestion
Divide your exhibition into multiple sub-exhibition and link them together by using an artwork with a custom link.
- add an artwork (for example with the cover image of the second exhibition)
- enter the URL (web adress) of the second exhibition into the "LINK"->"URL" field ("additional info" tab)
- add an appropriate label for this link into the "LINK"->"TITLE" field, for example "To the second part"
- publish both exibitions to make this effective
Other possibilities are:
Linking the exhibitions via a "teleporter" or - for bigger events - our ART.FAIR system, that huge exhibitions can be implemented with. These two options are not yet included in the standard packages, please contact us if you are interested.