Page 25 - 21_Bafta ACADEMY_Alistair McGowan_ok

“The other very important respect in which this was different and innovative is that an appli- ance-server environment is by def- inition interactive,” says Nugée.
“As the recipient of data in the gallery, you are both sending and receiving data. The server knows where you are [via sensors in the gallery], knows what you are looking at, knows the route you’ve taken and is registering responses to questions that you are answering as you stand in front of the picture.
“Toby Jackson, who’s Head of Interpretation and Education at Tate Modern, likened it to closing the visitor loop. There is a move- ment in the museum and gallery industry to try to link the visit to the gallery to a pre-visit and post- visit experience.
“And this was a way in which we could link what people were doing in the gallery to an email follow-up which links them back into the website, which therefore ties together the pre- and post- visit and ties the gallery – in this case The Tate – to the visitor.
“It allows for a one-on-one dialogue between the centre and the visitor. This is what is excit- ing the imagination of museums worldwide.”
It’s also what excited the judges at the BAFTA Interactive Awards. “Genuinely groundbreak- ing – an exciting demonstration of how new technology can be used to enhance museum and gallery visits,” was the verdict of the judging panel when they awarded the Tate Museum tour the Technical Innovation award at its latest ceremony.
“We’d been nominated in two categories [the other was Offline Learning],” remembers Nugée with a smile. “We felt confident that what we were doing was genuinely different and ground- breaking, but we were counting no chickens and therefore were surprised at the ceremony when we won!”
Antenna Audio came into existence in 1998. “We’re the result of a merger between Antenna Theatre in California, which was an experimental the- atre company, and a manufac- turer of hardware in London.
“So, we’re both left brain and right brain in a sense. That means we’re able to empathise with gallery and museum curators on their own artistic level, but at the same time we’re able to develop hard technical expertise.”
With offices in North America, Europe and Asia, Antenna Audio supplies traditional audio tours to venues as widespread as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Museum of the Terracotta Warriors in China. The London branch employs around 60 people and worked on the Tate project for about four months.
“Four months sounds like a very short time, but the pieces have been coming together for some time,” says Nugée.
The increasing sophistication of handheld devices over the last few years was one factor that opened up the possibility of a sys- tem like that at Tate Modern (“During the course of the Tate project we went through at least three generations of the PDA devices,” remembers Nugée).
Another was the availability of reliable, high-bandwidth connec- tions that could be used to link the PDAs to the central server and various advances in loca- tion-sensing devices.
“Then there were secondary considerations like battery con- sumption,” says Nugée, “which are very important for a mass device operator. If you have a 1000 devices on site which you rent out then recharge when they come back, then battery life suddenly becomes a very impor- tant consideration.
“We followed all these factors and saw that they’d come to a point where we were confident that we could put it together. And having decided to do it, actually doing it didn’t take that long.”
The Tate system may be unique at the moment but don’t expect it to stay that way for long. For a start, Antenna plan to try and interest other museums and galleries around the globe in the system. Then, they’re going to start looking at other areas in which it could be employed.
“There’s no reason whatsoever why the same set of applications and technologies should not be applied in non-cultural, leisure locations,” says Nugée. “To give you a couple of random exam- ples, Madame Tussauds which is not specifically cultural, but has exactly the same way of group- ing individual visitors, or theme parks like Disney.”
“But we’re also looking at retail,” continues Nugée. “Shopping centres and so on. Imagine a store where you carry a handheld device which knows where you are and which there- fore brings up a location sensitive list of the products which are in front of you so you can select which ones you want.
“The device knows who you are and that, say, you are a gold- card-holder for the store. Without any further ado it could have your selections delivered to you or if you actually pick the things up the device can automatically debit your account and you can simply waltz through the check- out without queuing.
“The range of possibilities is,” Nugée concludes, “extremely exciting.”
obituaries
DHame Wendy Hiller OBE
er first love was the theatre but ever since making her film-starring debut as Eliza Doolittle in Pygmalion (1938), Dame Wendy Hiller’s disappoint- ingly rare screen appearances were nearly always memorable.
She won an Oscar nomination for the role but after appearing in Gabby Pascal’s Shavian follow-up, Major Barbara (1941) there would often be years between films.
The Cheshire-born actress, awarded an OBE in 1971 and created a dame in 1975, won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress in Separate Tables (1957) and yet another nomination a decade later for A Man For All Seasons (1966).
Those familiar, slightly clipped tones will also be remembered from I Know Where I’m Going (1945), her BAFTA-nominated Sons And Lovers (1960), Murder On The Orient Express (1974) and The Elephant Man (1980).
Dame Wendy, who was given the Dilys Powell Lifetime Achievement Award by the London Film Critics in 1996, made her final screen appearance last year in the BBC’s The Countess Alice. She was 90.
MAatthew Allwork
ward-winning aerial cam- eraman Matthew Allwork who won Emmys for his work at the Sydney Olympics and on a Janet Jackson TV special, died tragically in a helicopter accident aged 39.
Inventor of the ‘jockeycam’, Allwork, who took over the run- ning of his cameraman father Peter’s successful company Aerial Camera Systems in 1990, was filming the Dubai endurance horse race at the time.
Equally adept at sports and feature film coverage (Indiana Jones & The Last Crusade, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein etc), Allwork also received an Royal Television Society ‘product inno- vation’ award for his use of the wire cam.
assively researched, Warriors, writer Leigh Jackson’s 1997 BBC TV
film about British peace-keeping soldiers in Bosnia won a BAFTA, an RTS award and the Prix Italia.
Jackson, who died in March aged 52, collaborated again with director Peter Kosminsky on last year’s The Project, a controversial two-part drama about the cre- ation of New Labour.
JTocelyn Herbert
hough best known for her innovative work in the the- atre, designer Jocelyn Herbert also flirted with film from time to time with her director friends like Tony Richardson, Karel Reisz and Lindsay Anderson.
An Oscar nominee for her work on Tom Jones, her credits also include Isadora, Ned Kelly, If, O Lucky Man!, The Hotel New Hampshire, The Whales Of August and Tony Harrison’s Prometheus. She was 86.
JNeremy Sandford
ot many television writers can claim to have changed society’s thinking but Jeremy Sandford, who has died aged 72, did so with Cathy Come Home for the BBC in 1966.
Directed by Ken Loach, it dealt graphically with destitute families and homelessness leading to the creation of Shelter. Sandford’s fol- low-up five years later was the powerful Edna, The Inebriate Woman, starring Patricia Hayes.
Berkeley Smith
erkeley Smith, who has died aged 84, started his TV career in front of the camera as a commentator and interview- er at events like the 1948 Olympic Games and the 1953 Coronation.
After switiching to network management with the BBC and the fledgling Southern Television, he eventually he moved on to become chairman of the ITV secretariat.
MFichaela Denis
or years glamorous Londoner Michaela Denis and her Belgian-born husband Armand (who died in 1971) were the faces of BBC wildlife coverage.
Their popular series, On Safari, started as 15-minute slots in the Fifties and was extended to a primetime half-hour format throughout the Sixties. She was 88.
LAewis Greifer
prolific TV, film and radio scriptwriter, Lewis Greifer who created the Love Story and Who –Dun-It? series for ATV, also wrote for The Prisoner, Crossroads and Dr Who.
His other work includes The Man Who Finally Died, The Voodoo Factor, Gentle Killers, Five Names For Johnny and Suspense. He was 87.
eigh Jackson
LM
23