Experience Impressionism – An Audio Guide and App for the State Gallery Stuttgart

In their first collaboration, the State Gallery Stuttgart has joined forces with tonwelt to create an audio tour that evokes the essence of Impressionism in a uniquely sensual way. Thanks to tonwelt’s new supraCMS, the guide is available as both a traditional audio tour and as an App.

The moment the visitor enters this special exhibition of Impressionist masterpieces, it becomes clear that the State Gallery Stuttgart has succeeded in creating something very unusual. Enigmatically entitled “Mit Allen Sinnen” (With All Senses), over half of the show’s 60 works stem from anonymous private collections. Yet this exhibition isn’t just about highlighting a particular period in art history. Nor is it merely concerned with tracing the development, influences and references of that young circle of painters surrounding Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro and August Renoir who attempted to break with traditional subjects and techniques from the 1860s onwards. No, this exhibition focuses instead upon those specific motifs where the “painting and the eye of the beholder” seem to dissolve into each other. Those moments when the viewer’s senses are challenged – when seeing becomes a sensory event!
Through this unique concept, the State Gallery Stuttgart has given its visitors a chance to grasp the fundamental aim of Impressionism: “to make seemingly everyday scenes and supposedly unimportant landscapes come to life before the viewer’s eyes”.

The audio tour was inspired by the curatorial concept

The challenge for tonwelt was to reflect the exhibition’s unique, immersive concept in an audio tour. To achieve that, tonwelt and the State Gallery Stuttgart worked hand in hand to develop an audio experience that pays particular attention to the most sensual aspects of the exhibition. By integrating carefully selected music and visual motifs into the acoustic journey, the audio tour succeeds in taking visitors on an immersive adventure into a world of associated images and feelings.

The perfect medium for each visitor group: Making the tour available via audio guides and Apps

Like the Kunstmuseum Bonn, the State Gallery Stuttgart has used tonwelt’s new multiplatform architecture for its exhibition. This enables visitors to experience the audio tour on either supraGuide ECO devices or their own smartphones. tonwelt’s new supraCMS content management system serves as a central media and tour management tool. It now enables tours to be created in one single system before being played back through a variety of platforms: in this case via classic audio guide devices and a Progressive Web App (PWA). Along with the purchase of their ticket, visitors are given a QR code which they scan into their own smartphone. The various audio tracks are then displayed on a website and streamed live.
The big advantage with the new supraCMS system is that all changes or additions can be made centrally, rather than having to be entered separately on different platforms. In other words, tonwelt’s multiplatform architecture now enables museums to offer specific visitor tours to their target groups in a highly efficient and flexible way.