Artist Audio Stories
Why We Built Artists' Audio Stories
We've added something new to the fair this year: Artists' Audio Stories.
It's an audio guide, built with a accompanying digital map of the galleries. Scan a QR code at the Info Desk, no app, works offline once loaded. As you walk the floor, clips from the artists play automatically based on where you're standing. Right now it covers over 45 artists. and cost the price of a coffee. Takes 30 to 45 minutes if you do the whole thing, but most people dip in and out.
Here's why we built it.
Not everyone wants to talk to a dealer. Some visitors find that first conversation the hardest part of a fair, an unfamiliar room, someone they don't know, a piece they're not sure how to ask about. Audio Stories gives them a way in first. They hear the artist talk about the work before anyone asks them a question. By the time they do talk to someone on the stand, they're not starting from zero. They have some knowledge they can lean into to engage meaningfully.
It's also a way to move through the fair with some shape to it. 115 galleries is a lot to take in. The guide gives people a route, and a reason to slow down at certain stands rather than walk past.
The bigger vision: to built a library of 100-plus artists stories across the fair, something people can come back to before the fair to plan, during the fair for context, and after the fair to remember what they saw. For galleries, we see real use in that last part. A gallery can send a client the artist's own audio clip alongside their digital catalogue after the fair, as part of the follow-up. It does some of the storytelling work for them.
Now the honest part. We've run this across a few editions and learned some things.
The AI voices still sound a bit robotic. We know it, we're working on it.
And timing matters. A fair is a place to discover art, often with someone else, a partner, a friend, your kids. Headphones in both ears pulls you out of that. So we're promoting this for the quieter slots, a Thursday afternoon, Friday afternoon, not the Saturday/ Sunday when we’re at capacity. Audio Stories is there to add a layer, not replace the fact that you're standing in a room full of people looking at the same things you are.
