An Augmented Reality Tour Guides Visitors to the Museum’s Margins
The de Young Museum in San Francisco accurately describes Ana Prvački’s Detour, a new commission developed in collaboration with Google Arts & Culture, as an “alternative” tour. I’d add a few other adjectives: decentralized, wide-ranging, irreverent, semi-private, and technologically advanced. Available through September 29, Detour is a series of videos meant to be viewed on one’s smartphone at nine specific points in the museum, offering Prvački’s take on the museum’s architecture, gardens, and the views its tower affords. Her videos are activated by the magic of Google Lens, an app most commonly advertised as a way to identify species of flowers and dogs through a smartphone camera. Though Prvački’s tour, as an artwork, is a refreshing and adventurous addition to the museum’s contemporary exhibitions, the requirement to view it through one’s phone via an app often felt like rigmarole invented for the sake of collaborating with a major tech company rather than the future of expanded art viewing.
The app is free. The spaces you traverse in the course of visiting Detour’s stops are unticketed. There’s even Wi-Fi to let you download Google Lens without incurring data charges. But the de Young does not provide loaner devices for those without the correct technology who might wish to view Prvački’s work on-site. While Google Arts & Culture has a presentation of the project on its website, the charm of the tour is having a personal guide in your pocket. It wouldn’t make sense as a series of video stations scattered around the museum, either. Not all art is viewable by all people—barriers to entry include geography, admission fees, personal comfort, and social pressures. The de Young is very clear in its positioning of the collaboration with Google Arts & Culture, which includes both Detour and “lensable” items in the permanent collection, as an experiment. But when a museum embraces new technologies and offloads the burden of hosting those technologies onto the user, it limits access to an artwork not by ticket price, but by personal possession. And that’s a shame, because we could probably all use a bit more copper in our systems.
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