ArtString is for people like you, who want to read MORE ;)
Museums have done a great deal in the last decades to open things up, such as talks, participatory programmes, comment walls, lively social media; but what's missing is something reliably there, every day, beside every object in the permanent collection.
The simplest way to put it is that ArtString is the label for the infinite digital space, not limited by space but still anchoring you to the real object. Your interpretation might be longer or shorter. Museum pieces can have layers and multiple interpretations. You can come back to it later, or follow it sideways into other objects that share something with this one.
The platform lets you build themed journeys through a collection, called strings, made by visitors, for visitors. A string might be for the weirdest hats, or propaganda back when it was called painting, or what the women in the background are actually doing, or objects with surprising provenance, or things my grandmother would have loved. It can be expert, silly, or deeply personal. All of them are welcome.
Making a string is more than tidying objects into a list. Choosing what belongs together, under a name, is itself a way of making meaning (as museums know very well). The same painting can sit in a string about light, a string about grief, and a string about the dogs people put in their portraits, all at once, with none more correct than the others. A string is like a mixtape: you don't own the songs, but the feeling is yours.
Alongside strings, each object carries visitors' comments. They're not ephemeral feelings that scroll away. The next person to look it up finds them still there, with the names of who wrote them and when. Over time an object gathers a small body of responses around it; a sentence here, something longer there, perhaps one contributor disagreeing with another. It works less like an internet comments section and more like the way a much-loved book gathers marginalia over many readers, each reader's notes there for the next.
The string you read on Sunday becomes the visit you plan for Wednesday; the painting you stood in front of becomes the comment you read on the train home. A comment might point out the small rabbit in the corner or explain the strange object in the sitter's hands. It might be purely personal: what the object recalled, what it made someone feel. It might be openly invented: a few lines in the voice of the sitter, or of the object's first owner. Fact, feeling and fiction all belong here.
The project takes inspiration from the parts of the internet that worked, such as labels to show who someone is and which hat they're wearing. A label might confirm that an account claiming to be an institution really is that institution, or mark a curator writing in a personal capacity apart from their museum's official account; and a separate kind of label sits on the contribution rather than the person, flagging a piece written in an invented voice (the imagined words of an object's former owner, say) as invented.
Profiles stay light: a name, a join date, the strings and comments you've made, an expertise tag only if you choose to add one, and a picture cropped from an object you've saved. The contribution speaks for itself, the person is named so you know whose reading you're reading, and nothing here turns that person into a brand. A comment is meant to be worth coming back to in six months, and the contributions worth making are the ones that took time to make.
Around nine in ten of ArtString's users will be readers, not writers. They arrive looking to know more: planning a visit, sitting in front of it, or just curious on the train home. Some walk into a museum and feel it isn't quite for them, as if there was knowledge they were meant to bring and a correct way of looking they were meant to know.
The other one in ten have something to say: they recognise an object, or want to make a string. A smaller group: art lovers, scholars, museum staff writing as themselves rather than for the institution, people whose family history touches an object, people who notice what others miss, people with a sense of humour, people full of feeling.
Because it's built around the permanent collection (instead of temporary exhibitions), the relationship is ongoing. When you read deeply about a collection over time (its histories, its gaps, the feelings it stirs), something happens: people who do this find each other and build a shared way of talking about it. ArtString is the place where meaning accumulates. Someone who works through ten strings about a collection over a year has learned from named, plural voices in a way a wall label never could. The community forms in the reading, not the posting.
The project works alongside museums; it's built on what they have already made public: catalogue records, locations, what's on display. It will offer a clear route to correct factual errors, misused images, and safeguarding concerns. Staying alongside rather than in partnership is also what keeps ArtString free to mean what it says: it's a place for all the emotions inside a museum.