Becky Manson was presented at We Are Museums 2014 the most recent Art Maps workshop, Wandering Ruins. Taking the recent Ruin Lust exhibition at Tate Britain as a starting point, participants used Tate’s online collection, locative media and a variety of digital content to create online trail experiences, via mobile devices. This collaborative project encourages both authors and users to explore the connections between landscape, landmark, art and a sense of place, as well as interrogating the what technology might add to and detract from this process.

1. Wandering Ruins
Becky Manson
Assistant Curator, Digital Learning, Tate
We Are Museums
5th June 2014, State Ethnographic Museum, Warsaw

9. Joseph Mallord William Turner
Norham Castle, Sunrise, c. 1845

11. Anish Kapoor
As If To Celebrate, I Discovered A Mountain Blooming With Red Flowers, 1981
© Anish Kapoor

12. ‘I think the red colour remind of red chill famous place named Patan, the city of
Ahemdabad where Saris are made’
-‐ Art Maps participant

14. Banner credit:
Louise and Jane Wilson
Azeville, 2006
© Jane and Louise Wilson, courtesy 303 Gallery, New York

15. Tacita Dean
The Wreck of Worthing Pier, 2001
© Tacita Dean, courtesy Frith Street Gallery, London and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York/Paris

16. Patrick Caulfield
Ruins, 1964
© The Estate of Patrick Caulfield

23. Rachel Whiteread
B: Clapton Park Estate, Madeville Street, London E5; Bakewell Court; Repton Court; March 1995, 1996
© Rachel Whiteread

27. How did mobile
technologies facilitate
connections to new or
familiar locations?

28. “it’s amazing how much you don’t notice
about your own environment”

29. “I was able to explore the history of a certain
area… different historical facts… and issues
around gentrification and regeneration”

30. “to explore what’s not necessarily visible”

31. “peeling away the layers of the different
spaces and showing… things that had
already happened”

32. “We ended up having a fantastic
conversation with a person who had… grown
up in, or been part of that community since
1976. [She] was able to tell us so much, being
[part of the ] church, at the heart of the
community… and what she had seen across
the years”

33. What did mobile
technologies add to
participants’
understanding of the
collection?

34. “the ideas around art and the concepts that
artists create don’t come out of nowhere…
They’re created in society and they’re
influenced by things that happen in society”

35. “within the walls of the Tate, every artwork is
compared to another artwork, whereas there
is this other influence, which is the world
outside of art”

36. “putting it in the environment and creating
[an] opportunity where people can explore
the artwork… in a different context that’s
particular to them”

37. “You can actually get something which is part
of an institution and… use your imagination,
your creativity and your ideas to make
something [else] out of that. It’s like taking
an archive and using it to create something
new. And I think that’s the future really. Get
it out of the gallery, put it out there and
make people interact with it”
-‐ Wandering Ruins participant

38. artmaps.tate.org.uk/artmaps/tate
wanderanywhere.com
tate.org.uk
becky.manson@tate.org.uk