PODCAST: The National Portrait Gallery chats with Vision Australia Radio

Listen to the interview via Vision Australia Radio. The interview begins 45 minutes and 47 seconds into the program.

Download the audio of the program. The interview begins at 45 minutes and 47 seconds.

Transcript

Vision Australia Radio (Adelaide)

Interviewer: Peter Greco

Interviewee: National Portrait Gallery (Carolyn Eccles and Robert Bunzli)

Date: 23 May 2020

Program: Leisure Link

[Interview begins]

Peter: A very sleek sounding event coming up this Wednesday May 22^nd. It’s free, so that’s a good start, and it’s going to be online which is also very important in this day and age. To tell us more about and we’ve got Robert Bunzli. Robert, welcome to you.

Robert: Thank you very much, Peter.

Peter: And Carolyn Eccles, thanks for your time.

Carolyn: Thank you for having us.

Peter: Robert, tell me a bit about this, it’s an audio described and a virtual tour of the National Portrait Gallery?

Robert: Yes, that’s right. This is the second in our series of virtual sessions where we are broadcasting from our various bedrooms around the country to bring some of the National Portrait Gallery’s collection to the general public and to make them as accessible as possible to a range of different audiences. And you’re right, this one will be live captioned and it will also be our first attempt at doing a form of audio description so that it won’t be a full audio description but we are going to make every attempt to describe what people are seeing on their screens.

Peter: I’ll give people a chance to grab something to take down the details as to how they can tune in. Carolyn, tell us about your involvement with this.

Carolyn: So I’m excited that I’m the one that you’ll see on the camera mostly on Wednesday and so I’m one of the learning facilitators here at the gallery and I’ll be taking you through, depending on the time, I’m thinking between five to seven of the works of arts. And we’ll be using those works to look at this theme of ‘home’ because I think we’d all agree we’re finding ourselves in a very exciting time now. We’re deciding whether or not we want to be out in the world or in our home, so we’ll be using the works to look deeper into these ideas.

Peter: Okay, how’d you go about choosing what you’re going to show?

Carolyn: Oh my gosh, it is the hardest job in the world! It feels like picking your favourite babies! [laughter] Hopefully what we’re going to be doing as well is adding links to show… so that you can follow up if you want to look at works. And also all of our works in the collection are online so I do have to make peace with myself that I am just whetting people’s appetites to further this discovery for themselves. We do also have other programs available that will be following this kind of template later on, so hopefully they’ll continue their journey with us.

Robert: Yeah, this is just one in a series.

Peter: Yeah I was going to say Robert you mentioned this is the second, so what I guess I was gonna ask you to say a bit about how this has all come about, but maybe that could be summed up with “COVID-19”.

Robert: [laughs] Yes well, that’s true… of course because of COVID-19 we are trialling some new models of getting our collection out virtually and digitally; however, the Portrait Gallery has been virtually broadcasting both educational sessions and tours through the gallery for quite a number of years so we’ve got a bit of experience in it. It’s just that we’re doing it from our spare bedrooms and lounge rooms rather than from our digital studio in the gallery, because the gallery is closed to public and the staff aren’t working in the building. So it has been a bit of a challenge. But we’ve been – I don’t know, Carolyn – we must have done about ten sessions over the last couple of weeks where we’ve been refining our techniques and we’ve been engaging with school classes where the classes the students are all dialling in, 50 or 80 students are dialling in from their homes, and we’re taking them through educational lessons. And we’ve been doing some sessions for community libraries and other groups. This particular session comes out of a partnership with Arts Access Australia, and they have worked with the gallery quite a bit over the past, and even before the closedown we did our first session in collaboration with them in March. And we had people from all over the country – I think almost every single state people dialled in through the zoom link, and we had someone in Sweden at 3 a.m. in the morning or something, and someone in California, and we took them through our exhibition The National Photographic Portrait Prize. And that was a really good success. It was live captioned, and so we’re just trying to build on our experience to address some of these access issues that a whole range of communities have.

Peter: So like a lot of things that happening today, it might be not necessarily the way we’ll be doing things in the future, but maybe including it in the way we do things in the future rather than say people physically getting to the National Portrait Gallery.

Robert: Yeah well, I think Carolyn’s exactly right. This this way of reaching people digitally is a way of whetting their appetite and you can only address so much with a with a remote audience over one-hour period. But you know what we hope is that that will then encourage people to visit our website where we’ve got 3,000 portraits from our collection up there and accessible with a whole range of support material like video interviews with the artists and the cities and that sort of thing. But also to encourage people to visit the gallery itself once we reopen.

Carolyn: It’s also I think a question if we have no idea what would be like in the next little while. So I know that we have an ongoing commitment to and providing online education and what that means we’ll just keep adapting as we go.

Peter: Terrific. Have you got to the details as to when and where? And is it sort of a one-off as in it’s on and that’s it all, or is there like you know getting it on demand as it were afterwards.

Robert: Yeah good question, Peter… I’m not sure that we will be posting this as a video for people to look afterwards – I suspect we won’t. However we are looking to repeat the session with a range of other accessibility issues addressed, so in slightly different formats. Perhaps for the Deaf community with some signing interpretation. We’re just working through those issues now we want to make sure we get everything right and we address the needs of our audience in the way that want them addressed. So there will maybe a repeat of this for another audience. There will be others in the series with Arts Access Australia – we’re looking to do this maybe monthly with different topics. In order to engage with this particular session which is next Wednesday the 27th of May at 2 p.m. Australian Eastern Standard Time – so if you’re in Queensland down to Tasmania on the east coast it’ll be at 2 p.m. and then at the staggered times in in other states – if people would like to join, what they need to do is send an email to the following address which is bookings@npg.gov.au and then once you have sent an email there expressing your interest, you’ll receive an email with the zoom link which you will then follow the to join the session at 2 p.m.

Peter: Something I think we’ve all become much more familiar with over the last 10 weeks or so! [laughter] Thank you for your time, Carolyn. Thanks also for yours. Good luck on Wednesday, I’m sure it’ll be great. So it’s 2 o’clock Eastern time which of course makes it 1:30 throughout the Central Australia and right on midday, a nice lunch break for those who are in West Australia. Thanks again to both for your time today.

Robert: Thanks, Peter.

Carolyn: Thanks for having us.

Peter: That was Carolyn Eccles and also Robert Bunzli who are from the National Portrait Gallery talking to us on Leisure Link today on Vision Australia Radio 1197 am.

[Interview ends]