The National Gallery opens a digital commission, Bath secures museum funding and a touring exhibition puts audio engagement under scrutiny. Alongside new AV training, the useful questions concern delivery, evidence and the people running the experience.
Peter J. Knight
MCP | Creative Labs
A commission with a fixed budget, a museum moving towards construction and an audio tour travelling between cities bring different demands. Each needs a clear account of what is being delivered and how it will work for visitors. That is where this week’s developments become useful to producers, operators and suppliers.
The National Gallery has published enough technical detail to make its new opportunity worth reading closely. Bath’s funding decision changes the certainty around a major project. Guide-ID’s tour figures invite a more careful conversation about engagement, while AVIXA’s new course addresses the skills needed to keep increasingly connected systems running.
London: a digital commission in a working entrance
The National Gallery’s Connected Canvas open call offers a £15,000 commission for UK-based emerging creatives. Expressions of interest close at 23:59 on 17 November 2026. The selected work will take over three screens in the Sainsbury Wing entrance during six Friday evenings, from 30 April to 4 June 2027.
Applicants must be within their first five years of professional creative practice and outside full-time formal education. For a creative team, the eligibility conditions apply to every member. The commission fee covers creative fees and production costs, so the delivery plan needs to fit the whole budget.
The technical specification describes a Picturall media server supplying a landscape display and two portrait displays. The combined canvas is 16,320 by 3,240 pixels, spanning approximately 14 by 3 metres. Commissioned content temporarily replaces wayfinding and operational information, which returns between scheduled takeovers.
That makes the entrance itself part of the brief. People will be arriving, finding their bearings and moving past the work. Content has to remain legible and comfortable at that scale without requiring everyone to stop in the same place. The Gallery calls for accessibility and playback testing before public display, with particular attention to motion, flashing images, reading time and sound.
For producers, the useful starting point is the visitor journey and the return to normal operation. A convincing proposal should explain what happens across all three screens, how someone encounters it halfway through and how the entrance resumes its usual job. Those decisions belong in the creative plan from the outset.
Bath: funding approval moves the museum project forward
On 26 October, the West of England Mayoral Combined Authority confirmed approval of £7 million for Fashion Museum Bath and the wider Milsom Quarter. The project will put the museum in the Grade II listed Old Post Office. Construction is expected to begin in 2027, with opening planned for 2030.
The important change is the move from proposed support to approved investment. The money covers the museum and wider regeneration, including public realm. It should not be treated as a £7 million exhibition-technology budget or as evidence that a particular supply contract is available.
For an operator, the building, interpretation and arrival experience need to be developed together. The route through the surrounding streets, the entrance and the spaces inside will all affect the visit. Suppliers following the project should watch for defined procurement packages and design milestones before assuming where their equipment or services fit.
A long lead time also gives the project team room to plan ownership of content, access for maintenance and the resources needed to operate changing displays. Those questions are easier to resolve while the design is still developing than after an installation has been handed over.
Chicago: useful audio-tour figures, with questions attached
Guide-ID’s account of Anne Frank The Exhibition, discussed in sector coverage on 29 October, reports audio-tour completion above 95% in both New York and Chicago. The Chicago exhibition opened at the Griffin Museum of Science and Industry on 1 May 2026. The supplier says the move brought twice as many devices, additional audiovisual synchronisation and a Spanish-language option.
The comparison is worth examining because a touring exhibition encounters a different layout and operating team at each venue. A system that travels has to work with those differences, alongside changes in capacity and language provision.
The completion figures are supplier-reported. They do not establish that the device caused engagement or that the same result would follow at another attraction. Before using the percentage in a business case, I would want to know who is counted, what constitutes completion and how the different tour versions are compared.
There is still a practical lesson to explore. An audio guide should let people attend to the exhibition without spending the visit managing the device. Operators can assess that through observation, staff feedback and visitor responses, alongside the analytics. Completion is one measure; it needs to sit beside an understanding of what people actually experienced.
AV skills: following the whole signal path
AVIXA launched its online Broadcast AV: Glass-to-Glass course on 28 October. It follows the workflow from camera capture to display, connecting production, distribution and the people responsible for operating the system. A free preview is offered through the announcement.
This is relevant to live events and experience venues where capture, playback, networking and display increasingly meet in the same installation. A problem at the screen may originate much earlier in the chain. Teams need enough shared understanding to identify the right place to investigate and explain the fault to the next person.
The preview offers a sensible way to assess the course’s level before committing to the full programme. Training is most useful when it leads back to the actual installation: a current system diagram, clear responsibility for each stage and an agreed method of checking that the visitor is seeing and hearing what was intended.