London, November 2007

Antenna Audio at Tate

This Autumn / Winter sees a whole range of activity for Antenna Audio at Tate, with educational projects and a British sign language tour coming to fruition, in addition to new audio tours for exhibitions.

The Education Multimedia project is an exciting development in museum based learning, with trials currently being run to enable it to become part of examinable coursework.  Pupils age 11-18 years will be able to take the specially designed free multimedia guide for the permanent collection, provided on a handheld PDA. The guide encourage pupils to explore, evaluate and contextualise works in the collection through interactive tasks, opinion polls and questions.  Students will be able to record their own responses and create content on the PDA using drawing, audio recording and note taking tools, selecting work they want to save to study back in the classroom or on their own.  Tate staff will upload each student’s content to a personal webpage that they can later access with a login and password, adapting and enhancing that content to create their own presentations.   Once trials are complete, a website will be set up where teachers and pupils can get practical information about using the guides, as well as suggestions for lesson plans and a set of learning objectives.

Antenna Audio has been at the forefront of improving disability access to cultural institutions and our new British Sign Language Tour to 70 artworks across Tate London and Liverpool’s collections is groundbreaking.  Launching mid-December, the multimedia tour will give unprecedented access to the collection for the deaf and hard of hearing, allowing them to be independent and enjoy on-demand access to the gallery in the same way as other visitors.  As well as signed explanations of the artworks, the tour includes film snippets of ‘vox pops’, with deaf signers giving their personal responses to some of the works in the galleries and access to a text glossary that gives more detailed information on art historical terms and references finger-spelled by the signers.  Antenna Audio worked with a deaf production crew to produce all the content. 

Meanwhile at Tate Britain, we have created a mobile phone tour for the Turner Prize retrospective exhibition.  Visitors can dial up from their own phones and, at a cost of only £3, listen to art critic Francesca Gavin interviewing Ekow Eshun (Director ICA), Waldemar Januszczak (Sunday Times art critic), Jamie Shovlin (artist), Ossian Ward (arts editor Time Out) and Chris McCormack (critic, Art Monthly) about the pieces on display.

Finally, there is a playful take on audioguides in Tate Modern’s recently opened The World’s a Stage exhibition (24 October – 1 January), where American artist Andrea Fraser has created a ‘tour’ of Tate’s fifth floor exhibits.  She has amplified and re-arranged sound and image from our Tate Modern permanent collection multimedia tour to give an alternative ‘guide’ to the artworks.

About Antenna Audio 

Antenna Audio (www.antennaaudio.com) is the world leader in audio and multimedia tours and is  an innovator in mobile and cultural interpretation, expanding into podcasting, cell-phone tours and downloadable walking tours.  Each year, more than 20 million visitors, in 12 languages and across 20 countries, experience Antenna Audio's award-winning productions at 450 of the world's most  famous, fascinating and frequented destinations. Acquired in April 2006 by the number-one nonfiction media company, Discovery Communications (www.discovery.com), Antenna Audio now offers its clients unprecedented access to Discovery's expansive library of original content and 100plus worldwide networks, which reach more than 1.5 billion cumulative subscribers in over 170 countries through TV and digital media.

For information on other Antenna Audio productions, please contact

Matthew Vines     020 7740 1155