LeithLate Virtual Tours: An Alternative Digital Gallery Showcasing Local Art
During Summer 2020, the Culture and Community Mapping Project designed a virtual tour of murals and artist studios in collaboration with the arts organisation LeithLate.
The LeithLate Virtual Tours displays Leith neighbourhood street art through beautiful hi-res images and audio guides by the artist and narrator Cameron Foster. The studio tour includes videos featuring artists who describe the inspiration and installation of the artwork. Visitors can learn about multiple art studios in Edinburgh and see what it’s like to create in the studios through self-guided tours of the artists in residence. Each video includes subtitles made by Matchbox Cineclub for accessibility.
The online map, which uses Mapbox and GitHub software, has generated open source code that other organisations could replicate to design their own virtual tours. While Google has a monopoly on digital galleries worldwide, the open source LeithLate virtual tours offer an alternative for showcasing local art in its community.