Beyond the Frame: How Digital Engagement is Rewriting the Gallery Experience

When you walk into the Art Gallery of Hamilton, you’re surrounded by more than 11,000 works of art. For Ty Tekatch, lead of Media Production, that number isn’t just a catalog. It’s a provocation.

“That’s 11,000 potential sites for digital engagement,” Tekatch told me. “11,000 opportunities to tell stories.”

The question, of course, is how to do that. How do you create digital experiences that enhance rather than distract? That deepen, rather than dilute, a visitor’s connection to the work?

In Hamilton, the answer has become a program called Beyond the Frame, launched in 2023 with support from the incite  Foundation for the Arts. It’s an umbrella for everything from artist interviews to augmented reality, united by a simple principle: use digital tools not as add-ons, but as extensions of the art itself.

The Philosophy: Digital as Creative Opportunity

Before Beyond the Frame, the gallery had used screens, tours, and even AR — but always in isolation. This was the first time they built a strategy around digital engagement. Tekatch’s guiding principle?

“The digital should not only be a way to access background information, archives, and commentary,” he said. “It should also be considered a creative opportunity. It should facilitate and present artistic production itself.”

That philosophy shaped three broad categories of content:

1. Artist voices – interviews, commentary, and oblique perspectives that put creators at the center.
2. Artistic reinterpretation – collaborations with local artists who respond directly to works in the collection.
3. Augmented reality – not as a gimmick, but as a way to make the invisible visible.

The Artist’s Voice

Tekatch approaches each interview with what he calls an ear for “head tilt moments.” Those unexpected details that make you stop and look at a work differently.

When artist Christina Sealey  described using a bag of flour to simulate the weight of a head in her 2001 painting, it was exactly that. “This note about her process is precisely the kind of little detail we looked for,” Tekatch explained. “Something that would pique curiosity or reveal something completely unexpected.”

These interviews, edited down to tight two- or three-minute clips, now live both inside Beyond the Frame and the gallery’s archive — assets for today’s visitors and tomorrow’s researchers.

Reinterpreting Icons

Not all voices come from the artists themselves. Sometimes they come from collaborators.

Consider William Kurelek’s haunting painting This is the Nemesis. For local musician Jeremy Greenspan, the work raised one question: What does nuclear apocalypse sound like?

The answer became a 40-minute album, composed with saxophonist Colin Fisher, available only inside the gallery through a geo-fenced app. Since its launch, thousands have listened. Some visitors now come to AGH for the album first, the painting second.

“The uniqueness of the digital engagement and the fact that it could only be listened to in the gallery drew in new audiences,” Tekatch said. The project even garnered national press.

Augmented Reality with Meaning

If music gave one work a new dimension, AR gave others new layers.

The gallery’s most requested painting, Alex Colville’s Horse and Train, now reveals its evolution through preliminary sketches animated into being. Visitors can also scan canvases by William Blair Bruce to uncover the sketches beneath the paint.

But Tekatch is clear: “The AR experience must always draw the visitor’s attention back to the real artefact with newfound understanding. If the digital content is more interesting than the physical object, it has failed.”

The program also invited Hamilton-based painter Stephen Altena to create a digital “trellis” around Helen McNicoll’s The Apple Gatherer. Altena’s collaged patterns, scanned and reassembled in 3D, offered visitors a gateway into McNicoll’s impressionist world — not as distraction, but as invitation.

Lessons for Museums

For Tekatch, the work isn’t just about what AGH has done. It’s about what other institutions might do.

He points to five key considerations:

• Purpose first: “The technology should always serve the art and curatorial vision, not overshadow it.”
• Accessibility: Visual descriptions, transcripts, and multilingual options ensure digital tools are inclusive, not exclusive.
• Practical realities: Dead zones in Wi-Fi? Swap video for audio. Build flexibility into content.
• Future proofing: Invest in assets (audio, video, 3D) that can migrate as platforms evolve.
• Staff support: Visitors may need help. Train your front-line staff. Provide devices and guides.

In other words, digital success isn’t about gadgets. It’s about weaving technology into the fabric of curatorial practice, accessibility, and visitor experience.

“Ultimately, a compelling AR experience in a museum is one that creates a moment of wonder and discovery,” Tekatch said. “It should forge a stronger, more personal, and more insightful memory of an object than a visitor would have had otherwise

Beyond the Frame — and Beyond

For now, Beyond the Frame is still growing, with new activations and new experiments. But its impact is already clear. Digital engagement, when done thoughtfully, can be more than just a bridge to art. It can become art itself.

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Ty Tekatch from Art Gallery of Hamilton spoke at the Digital Collections Summit 2025.