‘‘We don’t really know how it’s going to work’’: The front-end and back-end processes of action-led research at Tate

Abstract

The paper considers the front-end and back-end processes of art production as a methodological format and a metaphor for conducting research in museums and other cultural institutions in the age of computation and rapid technological innovation. Beyond their use in software architecture, those two terms can be ways of embedding research inside an institution. Informed by research projects embedded in museums as well as through my observations from the specific case study of BMW Tate Live: Performance Room the paper explores how cultural agents assimilate the technological present and how cultural value is produced in this context. Examining this experimental project of performance art staged live online on Tate’s YouTube channel and the conceptualisations of the digital audiences that emerged throughout the programme’s development highlighted how the institutional authority upon the production of art knowledge translates into online interfaces. The museum’s ambivalence to extend its art programming in a digital, distributed, ecosystem poses wider questions about the ways that contemporary art institutions can comprehend the technological moment and whether they can be up to speed with a computational present and future.