Robot tours and virtual reality: the new ways artists are connecting with audiences

The Hastings Contemporary gallery opened nine years ago as a home for British contemporary art, but now the doors are closed. The exhibitions are still up, but the galleries are silent and still. One member of staff may occasionally be walking around the black-tiled building that looks out on to The Stade, a shingle beach on the Channel. But there’s something else moving through the space and focusing on the artwork. It’s a telepresence robot. Visitors can’t currently come to the gallery – so the gallery is taking the art to the visitors.

“When you have to close your doors to the public, that’s a disaster,” says Liz Gilmore, the gallery’s director. “Our audiences and the art are the heartbeat of everything [we do].”

Developed by US startup Double Robotics and loaned to the gallery by the Bristol Robotics Laboratory, the robot has sensors in its base and can be controlled via a phone or a laptop – allowing a gallery employee, sitting at home behind a screen, to guide a group, also at home behind individual screens, around the exhibition space. Since April 2020, Gilmore says, they have given hundreds of the half-hour tours.

It’s one of the many innovative ways of dealing with the drastic changes brought about by the pandemic. The cultural sector has been one of the hardest hit by Covid-19: the arts and entertainment industry saw a 44.5% reduction in GDP in the second quarter of 2020, according to the Office for National Statistics. Institutions of all sizes have suffered, as have individual arts workers, many of whom have been made redundant, lost funding or seen freelance income dry up.....

BRL Research: Assistive Robotics