Mobile Learning and Art Museums: a Case Study of a New Art Interpretation Approach for Visitor Engagement through Mobile Media

Nowadays Mobile technologies in Museums and especially in Art Museums are a popular way of communication with their audiences. These kinds of technologies have a high communicative potential and also could be a tool for marketing, information, engagement and learning as well. However with regards how these resources explain the meaning of works of art, generally they maintain the same language of the traditional and passive resources like texts, labels or brochures, especially when the involved audience is general public. This means that Art interpretation is still based on formal description. On the contrary, Mobile Media provide new opportunities of interaction with audiences; the visitors could visit a Museum from their couch; or even they could create content about a painting through their mobile devices. Therefore, if the media of communication with the audiences of Art Museums are changing, there must be a change of how art is explained. Accordingly, this paper examines a case study developed in a wider research about Art interpretation and Mobile Media in which a new message to explain Art is explored. This new Art interpretation approach combines the contributions of Cognitive Phycology about Art perception and the possibilities of interaction of Mobile and digital technologies. The case study has been conducted in a local museum whose collection consists mostly of sculptures and paintings from the Nineteenth and the Twenty centuries, especially Catalan Art from this period. A blog called “A small exhibition of Deu Museum”, tablets and QR codes were used for the development of the fieldwork. However, according to the conceptual framework of the research, the most important thing is the content that is behind the QR codes. Also the preliminary results are exposed in this paper.