Digital ArtBo

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The Client

ArtBo | Bogotá International Art Fair is one of the creative industry platforms of the Bogotá Chamber of Commerce (CCB). Since its inception in 2004, it has offered a showcase for the plastic arts in Colombia and has become a key player in commercial relations, seeking to promote art and culture in Latin America.

Through this space, every year a national and international call is made in which galleries, curators, artists and collectors participate. Through a careful selection of works and activities, the project favors cultural exchange and the promotion of the artistic scene.

The Challenge

ArtBo took on the challenge of digitally transforming one of the most important platforms for cultural exchange in Latin America by offering an interactive digital experience and ensuring version 16 of the fair.

With the physical spaces closed due to the COVID-19 health emergency, Artbo decided to move its stages to a digital environment to show the artistic offerings of 30 galleries, 189 artists, and over 280 works.

“The challenge was presenting the tours, galleries, artists, and works through the web, so people could access them from their mobile devices and enjoy the ArtBo experience from home,” says Luis Alejandro Pava, Web Chief of Corporate Affairs at CCB.

The project included:

  • Architecture and web design.

  • Form engine optimization.

  • Multilanguage platform.

  • Collaborative platform.

The Solution

  • Development of independent platforms for ArtBo Season and ArtBo Weekend in two months.

  • Mobile-responsive design (responsive – mobile first).

  • Image download optimization via CDN (content delivery network) to enrich the user experience. Every work has a detailed view that loads in 600 milliseconds. This includes the possibility of appreciating the physical size of each work through a “view to scale” functionality.

  • Creation of various search categories: price, technique, gallery, artist, and keyword.

  • Displaying information about galleries, artists, and selected works thanks to the integration with the information collection engine used for calls, which was created as a separate project by Aplyca.

  • Incorporation of audio guides in the galleries’ profiles, with detailed information about the artists and their works.

  • Creation of the fair’s digital memory, maintaining a repository of the different versions of ArtBo.

Technologies Used

  • Ibexa DxP - Digital Experience Platform

  • VueJS for the works search engine and detail view

  • Form.io platform, managed through Node.js

  • Imgix for image optimization

The Results

As a provider of digital technology solutions for CCB since 2014, at Aplyca we were contacted to support the ArtBo digital project and make the 16th edition of this fair viable in the context of the health crisis.

We managed to provide an effective solution to the challenge of creating a digital platform for ArtBo 2020 in the agreed times, despite the pandemic and the restrictions imposed by the national government.

Between July 14 and December 9, 2020, the ArtBo portals reported:

  • + 79,100 users

  • + 122,400 visits

  • +252,700 page views

  • 00:02:30 average duration of each session                                               

Today ArtBo has an online platform for galleries to share their content and extend the reach of their audiences. According to Luis Alejandro Pava, the web version of ArtBo is capable of supporting the promotion of these cultural spaces, artists and collections, through a digital medium that further boosts the art industry.