WASHINGTON, D.C..- The Phillips Collection’s official App is now available for free download to iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch in the App Store and iTunes. The App provides instant access to the nearly 3,000 works of modern and contemporary art in the Phillips’s permanent collection; exhibition and collection audio guides; concert and artist talk podcasts; behind-the-scenes installation videos; interactive floor plans; exhibition and event calendars; visitor information; and one-click text message donations. Using the Phillips’s new free public Wi-Fi, visitors can download the App in minutes. Android and BlackBerry versions will follow in 2011.
The Phillips App features a fully searchable mobile collection that takes advantage of touch screen technology to magnify artworks to the brushstroke. Users can build lists of favorite artworks and discover whether they are currently on view. Detailed descriptions, audio guides, and transcripts for hearing impaired users are also available for many artworks. Users can stream audio clips of the popular Sunday Concerts and other podcasts, watch videos of curators introducing special exhibitions, and go behind the scenes with artists as they create site-specific artworks for the Intersections series.
The Phillips Collection is known for its unconventional, non-chronological approach to displaying artwork in its intimate galleries and rotating those displays frequently. The App’s interactive floor plan allows users to navigate to the precise gallery in which each work of art hangs that day. In many ways, the App simplifies and distills the on-the-go visitor experience—users can consult the day’s event calendar, purchase exhibition tickets, and, when inspired, text $5 and $10 donations to the Phillips with a single click.
Phillips Director Dorothy Kosinski sees the App as a way to bring the “intimate museum combined with an experiment station” even closer to its 21st century audiences. “Our free app provides one more layer to visitor interpretation in the galleries, but it also extends the intimacy of that experience into the palms of audiences far and wide. We’re excited to meet art lovers where they are.”
Ottawa-based App developer Tristan Interactive worked closely with Phillips Chief Information Officer Darci Vanderhoff to produce the app and they will monitor and respond to user feedback and fine-tune the App in subsequent versions, including adaptations for the Android and Blackberry platforms.
