Projects

“I find working with Dan on gallery interpretation projects not only easy but a pleasure! Crucially, he can be fully engaged with a project’s content due to his background as an art historian and his broad experience working within museums and galleries. This enables him to be a true collaborator, helping to realise the project’s critical and creative aims while finding solutions that are always accessible, engaging and often technically innovative.”
Caro Howell, Head of Education, Whitechapel Gallery

Archive Adventures

Archive Adventures is a groundbreaking eLearning project designed and produced by Giant Thumb and DUNK for the Whitechapel Gallery. The Whitechapel’s extensive archive will be an important part in the new, much extended gallery’s activities when it reopens in 2009. In the meantime, the Archive Adventures project brings the history of the Whitechapel Gallery and the surrounding area into East London primary schools, providing a cross-curricular resource that covers art and design, citizenship and history for key stages 2 and 3.

Designed in response to the ideas and suggestions of a focus group of students from a local school, Archive Adventures offers a interactive timeline and and archive section, in which each school can enter the archive cupboard and log in to their own scrapbook. Each book is a repository of writing, photos and artwork, an ever-growing record of the students’ explorations into local history.

Folkestone Triennial

“Dan Porter’s educational work for the inaugural Folkestone Triennial is an important and fitting contribution to an exhibition that aims to reach the widest group of people. Since the first day of the exhibition, it’s proved to be a big hit for all… All of the tools devised and delivered by Dan enhance and enrich the Triennial enormously, and help spread the word about the art and artists in imaginative, eloquent and involving ways.”
Andrea Schlieker, Curator, Folkestone Triennial

An exciting and ambitious show of contemporary art right on the doorstep, the first Folkestone Triennial in the summer of 2008 presented a unique opportunity to produce a broad range of interpretation material.

Almost every young visitor to the Triennial picked up and used the Young People’s Guide, a fun and engaging fold-out booklet written and illustrated by Dan. The guides were a big a hit with local schools and youth groups, and quite a few adults seemed to enjoy it too.

Written and produced by Dan and recorded locally at Hidden Track Studios, the Triennial audio guide provided an accessible, thought-provoking accompaniment to each of the 23 artworks. The mp3 files were made available on the Triennial website for visitors to download onto their own devices, or alternatively they could borrow one of Giant Thumb’s mp3 players from the visitor centre. 

Finally, the Triennial Photo-Map was an online tool enabling visitors to upload their photographs of the Triennial to an interactive map. Images were plotted to the exact location where they were taken, forming clusters of photographs documenting each of the artworks. Located on the Triennial website, the Photo-Map provided a living record of the summer’s activities.

Reaction to the Triennial:

“The most refreshing show of public art I think I have ever seen. I can’t recommend it enough.”
Financial Times

“Magical moments as Folkestone emerges from the waves … witty, thoughtful and definitely worth a day at the seaside.”
The Guardian

i-Map: The Everyday Transformed

“This site does what seems impossible to many people, by making modern art accessible to blind and partially sighted people… The judges were unanimous in selecting the winning site, which they agreed had yet more ground-breaking qualities and was destined to set the standard in global best practice. The site is already the world leader in making online collections accessible to blind and partially sighted people.”
Mark Wood, MLA Chairman, Jodi Awards 2006

The second generation of 2002’s successful i-Map project (see below), this version focused on seven key 20th century works in the Tate collection by artists with a keen interest in the material reality of everyday life. Choosing works containing representations or fragments of commonplace objects – magazines, newspapers, domestic objects and appliances for example – would provide a few familiar touchstones to help our visual impaired audience orientate themselves, as well as introducing key concepts such as transformation, collage and the found object. 

Accessibility best practice changes very quickly and useful feedback on the original project had been received, so there were numerous new design features we were very keen to implement, despite the approval that i-Map: Matisse Picasso had received at the time of its launch. A major change was a switch from using tables to CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) for layout, which by this time had become an accessibility standard. There are a number of advantages to this, but the key one from an accessibility point of view is that it completely separates the content of your webpage from the design. So rather than sifting through a melange of code, some governing the layout, other parts providing content, the user’s screenreader is able to get straight to the content, as the design side is all neatly contained in an independent file. The other big change we made was to use an audio commentary alongside the animation, rather than text. The feedback we’d received suggested that although our target audience were happy using screenreader software, they’d always prefer listening to a real voice. And given that a key component of i-Map is it’s precise and descriptive use of language, it made a lot of sense to make it sound as good as possible. The RNIB’s Talking Book studio did a fantastic job of recording the audio for us.

Portraits and Portraiture

The Museum Network is a partnership formed of five important collections of art across the UK: The Wallace Collection, Compton Verney in Warwickshire, the Holburne Museum in Bath, Waddesdon Manor in Buckinghamshire and the Bowes Museum in County Durham. The partnership aims to utilise their combined expertise and rich collections to co-develop educational resources, both for in-gallery workshops and online. Given the many outstanding examples of portraiture these museums house between them, Portraits and Portraiture was a natural choice to be the first e-Learning module commissioned by the network.

The website is based around a wide and varied selection of 40 portraits from the partner museums, from Frans Hals’ iconic Laughing Cavalier to a folk art portrait of the 19th century prize fighter Tom Sayers. The primary aim was to build a comprehensive resource for teachers around the artworks. Each work has its own page, where artist and subject are profiled, technique is analysed and historical context is explained. Hints and questions provide the teacher with potential ways of exploring the work in the classroom and a high-resolution image enables them to produce printed handouts.

This set of 40 image pages is cut a number of ways to allow the user to view them in a variety of contexts. They are arranged thematically, under headings such as Colour and Technique, Pose and Expression and Materials, they appear chronologically on an interactive timeline, and they are grouped by museum. We created an interface that allows the user to move easily and intuitively between these areas, creating pathways that can form the basis of successful lesson plans.

Finally, a shift in colour scheme signals an area dedicated to children rather than their teachers. There are six Flash based activities, all based on works explored elsewhere in the site, offering the opportunity, amongst other things, to change the Laughing Cavalier’s facial expression and to take Queen Victoria out shopping!

Frida Kahlo

Dan worked with regular collaboration partners DUNK to produce touchscreen content for the hugely popular Frida Kahlo show at Tate Modern in late 2005, the first major exhibition of her work in the UK for over 20 years. 

Located in the interpretation areas outside of the gallery spaces, the screens allowed visitors to view archive film footage, explore Kahlo’s studio, view her sketchbooks and see her eventful life and career in context on an interactive timeline.

Value of Art

An online resource aimed at community group leaders and support staff, exploring frequently asked questions about modern and contemporary art. Designed for Tate Online, the content and functionality of the Value of Art site reflected the outcomes of workshops at involving community group leaders from Crisis, Shelter, City Lit and the London Borough of Southwark.

The resource offers a range of gallery-based activities for workshop leaders to use at Tate Modern, many of them illustrated by Dan. Other features of the site include a Casebook, where participating organisations can detail their own experiences of using art as a means of community engagement.

i-Map: Matisse Picasso

“What an impressive site this is! It simply represents a quantum leap in the tiny universe of online collections for visually impaired people…it is a masterclass in visual seeing for everyone. It should be studied with great care by anyone developing educational websites. In the interactive age, we need such examples to show how interactives can be a servant to both purposeful and personalised learning…The use of technical resources is highly creative. Some ideas are simply a delight…this site [has the] potential for becoming a kind of matrix for future developments.”
Marcus Weisen, Disability Development Officer, Resource, The Council of Museums, Archives and Libraries