Lou Downe

We can identify objects which might be intelligent and which ones probably aren’t based on whether or not they can talk. A screen is a mouth, it can say anything in a way that a button cant.

In a world of where anything might be connected, this infinite possibility to communicate equates to potentially infinite intelligence, because not only can an object talk but it can listen.

How do we indicate the level of intelligence of objects we aren’t used to listening? Like bathroom air fresheners, cars or shoes? What are the implications for privacy if we don’t?

What do you do when you have a collection of over 60,000 objects, a gallery space that’s open 7 days a week and a new exhibition to plan?

This is Tate’s new ‘dummy’ gallery space, completed earlier this year at their Elephant and Castle storage facility in London. More frequently used to house works not on display, the vast industrial hanger off the Old Kent road now plays host to a recreation of one of Tate Modern’s exhibition spaces.

“It makes it easier for curators to plan the flow of a room, get the lighting right and position any complicated floor mounted works. Its often hard to predict how works will sit together from photographs”, one art handler told me.

Exhibitions can be planned anything from 3-10 years in advance at Tate (depending on how much research and jostling for loaned works is needed) and cardboard models are often used early on in the process to plan the overall structure of an exhibition.

This new test room allows curators to plan the human factors of an exhibition well in advance, things like lighting, height and the distance of works from one another that can be impossible to predict from a model.

The space was designed and built by exhibition specialists, [MC Designs](http://www.mcdesigners.co.uk/photo/index.htm?ipg=12012).

Built to with withstand temperatures down to -40 degrees, these boxes are used to store and transport works on loan from Tate’s collection to hundreds of galleries around the world.

Each box is made to measure by Tate’s art technicians, and is so airtight that the work inside can take up to 4 days to reach the ambient temperature and humidity of the outside air. The boxes are even lined with a sound resistant foam to protect the work inside from the rumble of a long transatlantic cargo journey.

As it is, they’re almost perfectly equipped for a long voyage, but these boxes have one more trick to withstand mistreatment, they’re bright yellow.

“We started painting them this colour so we could see them in the cargo depot”, one Art Handler told me “then the warehouse staff started noticing the boxes, and would take special care of them because they looked so nice”

If an artwork is fragile, a Conservation Scientist from Tate will travel with it on a chartered cargo plane, but artworks often fly solo and can spend several hours in a baking hot or unheated warehouse whilst they await collection. These boxes might be tough enough to rough it out, but they also go beyond looking after themselves, they demand be looked after by others.

Its easy to think of packaging as a disguise, or protection for its contents, whether thats a packing crate or a mobile wallet, but revealing the vulnerabilities of an object, service or product can make clear that care is needed to look after it.