A unique approach to experiencing art

MEDIA & EDUCATION

SMK, The National Gallery of Denmark, has a clear strategy to activate target groups and reach a wider audience. As such, they wish for art to go beyond the physical confines of the gallery and into the digital sphere. The result is a digital experience with a unique approach to experiencing art.

User-based approach

We set out to uncover what matters to people before visiting the gallery. We tested a host of challenges, desires, and needs with a wide variety of test persons to find solutions that could help users with key challenges without overloading them with unnecessary information.

Bridging the digital and physical design

The frame inspires the digital visual experience as a metaphor for exclusive focus. The structure offers certain pieces of content with a complete guide and calls upon the viewer to exclude everything else. Correspondingly, the absence of the frame widens the perspective and brings us back into the practical realm.

The general design drew inspiration from the physical features of the museum itself. The structuring of images in the website's grid echoes the free composition of paintings on the walls in the gallery at Østre Anlæg.

SMK Open

We are proud to have helped create SMK Open - an immersive digital catalogue making the entire art collection of SMK accessible online, including a comprehensive collection in their vault, which is rarely exhibited.

Visitors are able to search through 89,000 different pieces of art and explore them in detail. Users can filter the pieces by colours, artists or subjects along with a number of other choices. By leveraging SMK’s own public API and adding Machine Learning, artworks can now be experienced, studied and utilized in your own time and place.