Augmented | The Tate

The Mill teamed up with Tate Britain and Facebook Creative Shop, who selected a number of artworks in the existing Tate collection and challenged The Mill with exploring their hidden narrative through Augmented Reality. By revealing their Untold Stories, specifically, social and cultural challenges that the artist and subject faced at the time, the art is revealed in a new contextual light to the viewer.

After receiving Tate Britain’s selection of artworks, the team set about researching the historical context around each piece and the biographies of the artists in question. Harnessing the knowledge learned, and taking the gallery descriptions of each piece, they set about designing and animating interactive visuals that spoke to each piece’s hidden narrative, with great care to add context, rather than imply new meaning.

The creative team harnessed a variety of animation & scripting techniques to maximize capabilities on the Spark AR platform with Instagram. These animations could be viewed through the camera on the Instagram app, which tracks the paintings and initiates the experience. The paintings now lie in The Tate’s Virtual Wing, a new concept for the museum, which is the beginning of more AR activations to come.