The past few years have seen a number of innovations emerge to better engage visitors with museums and galleries.

One of the more interesting was an approach taken by the Swedish gallery to auction art based on the emotions of the buyer.  The Auction Based On Emotions, captured the emotions of each bidder, and rather than selling to the highest bidder, they sold the art to the bidder who they believed most wanted the product.

Such an approach has also been used with a Dutch project to use emotions to grant the reader access to a book.

Suffice to say, these kind of projects are at the more extreme end of things.  Slightly more mainstream is a recent exhibition at the Guggenheim to get people more involved in the art.

Engaging with art

The exhibition, known as Åzone, aims to place visitors in the middle of the art itself, and in the process, help to form new technologies to better interact with art.

Visitors are first placed in a marketplace of possible future worlds.  These include things such as bloodless wars or weather we can manage.

Visitors are given 10,000 units of currency that they can then use to invest in the futures they like the most.  Currency can be earned by sharing various insights and articles related to each future.

The trading activity in each platform is then shown in a visual display that demonstrates market activity in real-time to allow visitors to see which of the futures appear to be gaining traction.

Suffice to say, prediction markets are not a new thing, but this is the first time such a device has been used in an art context.