Using CCTV to study visitors in the new art gallery, Walsall, UK

Abstract

The routine use of CCTV surveillance in new art galleries in the UK presents an opportunity for researchers to harness its potential as a powerful observational tool in visitor studies, and recent developments in video technology have created new possibilities for observational research. Recent studies using video observation methods in the UK, France and the US have demonstrated how powerful film data can be, but have also shown the difficulties in operationalising studies that use these techniques. The analysis of video data is in its infancy in the field of art gallery visitor studies, and this paper contributes to the theoretical, ethical and practical debate by discussing a recent observational visitor study using in-house CCTV cameras in the New Art Gallery, Walsall. The study demonstrates significant advances on previous observational visitor studies that have gathered ‘covert observational data’. It show how CCTV footage can be used to gather naturally occurring visitor activities in a highly structured way, without disrupting the gallery with extra cameras or microphones and yielding increasingly detailed, useful information. It opens up the prospect of a wider ideological debate about the use of CCTV in art galleries, and contributes to work in progress on a code of ethics for video observation in visitor studies.