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Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum Re-opens
After a four year restoration program and £27.9 million of investment, Glasgow’s famous Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum has re-opened to the public, with over 1000 square feet of new space and 50% more objects on display than ever before.
The museum has made extensive use of new technology to provide visitors with a deeper insight into the objects on display and an experience truly fit for a twenty first century visitor. Integrated Circles were selected to install all of the audio visual and touch screen interactive interpretation hardware, which caters for almost fifty individual displays spread throughout the museum’s many galleries.
In the run-up to the centenary of Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum in 2001, Glasgow City Council began to prepare for a complete restoration of the building and radical redisplay of objects under the title of Kelvingrove New Century Project. The restoration offered the ideal opportunity to try out new ways of providing information about the objects on display, and to change the way people could interact with the building.
After extensive customer research was carried out, it was decided to target different displays at different visitor groups throughout the museum. The groups focused on are families, under-5s, teenagers, non-experts and schools (ages 5–14). The interpretation, the labels and panels of information in each gallery, as well as film, audio and interactive activities all have a slightly different feel and approach for each target group.
Many people visit Kelvingrove several times a year, so the staff wants to make sure that there’s always something new to see. It was decided to design all the displays to be flexible and modular, so that each year several of the displays can be changed.
In keeping with the modular approach, Integrated Circles custom designed mounting arrangements for projectors, video screens, touchscreens, loudspeakers, effect lighting sensors and smells. This allows an individual display to be broken down into component parts, without affecting the operation of other active displays, and equipment to be redeployed in a new configuration with updated show content. Integrated Circles renowned SoundStores, VideoStores, lighting and show control equipment provide the reliable backbone of the audio visual displays, and being solid-state provides reliable daily operation without staff intervention and simple reloading of content for redeployment.
Integrated Circles Technical Director Simon Beer explains “there were many varied and new techniques of interpretation used at the museum, and many challenges to overcome with the modular mounting arrangements. In areas such as Italian renaissance art for example, we had to work very closely with the software producers and the furniture suppliers and conservators to ensure precision line up of interpretation projections over paintings, with just the right amount of light, while in displays with audio such as Violence against women, we ha to design an automatic volume control, to adjust the level of the audio, so that it could always be heard when a group of people approached, or when the organ is being played and not too loud when the gallery empties”.
One of the main flexible spaces is the Object Cinema, which features flexible programmable lighting, video projection and sound effects to offer contemporary interpretation of cased objects. The opening show interprets objects from the Arctic region.
Together with the fifty or so displays, Integrated Circles also installed a study centre, with robust screens, keyboards and headsets, a lecture theatre with microphones, video/ data projection, and video conference facilities, and a flexible education space with video and date projection.
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Paul Nolan, Integrated Circles Project Manager says “ as you can imagine, with so many displays being assembled and historic object being moved by the museum, we needed to have very close contact with the museums internal teams and other contractors, so we had a presence on the ground for almost a year, to ensure that our equipment could be fitted and commissioned in sequence with the fit out program.”
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