BMAC brings its galleries to a wider audience through technology

Visitors to the Brattleboro Museum & Art Center no longer necessarily have to travel to southern Vermont to step inside one of its galleries. Through virtual walkthrough technology, BMAC is offering an alternative way for people to explore exhibitions remotely, allowing viewers to navigate a three-dimensional recreation of gallery space from a computer or other device. The technology is part of the museum's broader effort to make art accessible beyond an in-person visit, particularly for people who cannot physically reach the museum. BMAC, an independent, non-collecting contemporary art museum located in Brattleboro's historic Union Station, has incorporated virtual tours and other online resources into its programming alongside its exhibitions, events and educational programs. Erin Jenkins, marketing and communications manager at BMAC, said the museum creates the walkthroughs using Matterport, a platform commonly used to produce interactive digital representations of physical spaces. "For the virtual walkthroughs, we use a platform called Matterport and a specialized camera that captures 360-degree scans of the exhibition spaces," Jenkins said. "I take multiple scans throughout the galleries, and the Matterport software stitches those scans together to create a navigable virtual version of the exhibition." The finished product allows an online visitor to move throughout the gallery rather than viewing only a collection of still photographs. Users can change their perspective and explore different portions of the exhibition, creating an experience designed to more closely resemble physically moving through the space. For BMAC Director Danny Lichtenfeld, one of the primary purposes of the technology is reaching people for whom an in-person museum visit may not be possible. "The way we're doing it now, our focus is on reaching people who cannot physically get to the Ticket Gallery or perhaps to the museum whatsoever," Lichtenfeld said. "An ancillary benefit is that the virtual walkthroughs are accessible to people all around the world who might never otherwise visit BMAC or see our exhibits." That reach complements BMAC's mission to connect people from different backgrounds with contemporary art and ideas. Although the technology cannot completely reproduce seeing artwork in person, the virtual gallery can provide another avenue for encountering an exhibition. Jenkins said the experience also goes beyond documenting what an exhibition looked like before it was taken down. "The result is more than simply a digital record of the exhibition," Jenkins said. "It gives people an opportunity to explore the physical space virtually while also accessing many of the same resources and content they would encounter during an in-person visit, including material that might not otherwise be accessible to them." Determining exactly who is using the technology, however, remains a challenge. BMAC can monitor some information about traffic to its virtual exhibitions, but Jenkins said the analytics available through Matterport do not provide a comprehensive picture of the audience. "We have some basic tracking capabilities through the Matterport platform that allow us to see general numbers of people viewing the virtual tours," Jenkins said. "We can see that people are accessing the tours, but the data available to us is fairly limited." Even without detailed visitor data, BMAC has received indications technology is reaching people beyond those who regularly walk through its doors. "It's been hard to track the data on who's taking advantage of the virtual walkthroughs, but every now and then we hear anecdotes about someone far away checking them out — and also upcoming exhibiting artists and curators using them to really get a feel for the spaces where they will be exhibiting their work," Lichtenfeld said. That use illustrates another potential benefit of digitizing gallery spaces. In addition to serving museum visitors, the walkthroughs can give artists and curators a better understanding of a physical gallery before arriving in Brattleboro, potentially helping them visualize how future exhibitions could occupy the space. BMAC expects the virtual option to remain a complement too, rather than a replacement for, physically experiencing artwork. "As for the future, we're continuing to see value in offering virtual access to our exhibitions in the Ticket Gallery as an alternative way to experience that space," Jenkins said. "While it can't replicate an in-person visit, it provides an additional point of access to those exhibitions and the museum itself, and we're glad to be able to offer that option."