Gilbert & George
It was Ludwig’s turn to plan an outing last week and he took us to see the Gilbert & George exhibition at the Tate Modern. A great choice and a nice place for us to step back and reflect.
I’ll spare you the art discussion and we spared ourselves, too. What was the first thing the team talked about after we had finished walking through the exhibition? No, not Spunk Blood Piss Shit Spit but the Dell PDAs that were being used for the £3.50 guided tours (geeks). Dell has been a bit of a running theme through our first month and maybe I should post this comment on the Dell’s Ideastorm web site, but I’m pretty sure anyone who had been considering buying a PDA before taking the Tate tour is now putting money down for a Palm.
The Dell machine was slow. It was unresponsive. It was hard to tell if it was loading information or if it was in the midst of crashing. For some reason, the stylus wasn’t included with the PDA which made it difficult to touch the screen’s different menu items. I guess a lot of people have stolen the styluses but, still, it’s hard to tap the screen with your fingers. Stew took the stylus from his own PDA and said that the experience was much better. Surely they could have provided disposable styluses with the tour.
On the positive side, however, I thought the content included with the tour was fantastic (you can see some of this on the Tate web site). It contained the usual talkovers from the artists and the art critics and sometimes there were even short videos of G&G. When I saw Shitty from Shitty Naked Human World I immediately thought “What would an evangelical Christian think of that?” and, surprisingly, the tour had a short audio piece from the “Christian art critic” (although I thought it was too polite and diplomatic and, sadly, there were no comments from Muslim art critics). As a resident in Beijing, I was expecting the Roger Moore audio tour of the Forbidden City!
We talked a little about how that experience could have been improved. Surely, instead of having to type in the number of the room you are entering to start the tour for that space, the PDA should just deliver the content according to where you are standing or where you are heading to. It would have been great to have had comments or more information on every piece in the exhibition. It’s also not inconceivable that, in the near future, G&G will be walking alongside you and offering their comments or answering your questions when you have them.
We then finished the visit off by washing George the Cunt and Gilbert the Shit down the slide.
