Hi Mike, I’m one of the ‘inventors’ of the technology used in Tate’s Carousel and I just bumped into your blog while surfing around for good/bad/indifferent comments to swell my ego or help me learn from my mistakes.
Anyway, as you’d expect, I don’t agree that the Carousel does nothing. It is actually doing behind-the-scenes profiling based on your interactions with it to skew the random presentation of fresh images towards those which share metadata with items you’ve added to your favourites, or sought more info on.
So if you use Carousel you should see that the ‘flavour’ or ‘atmosphere’ of the set of images drifts in one direction or another.
It is deliberate that this is behind the scenes – we don’t want viewers to know (or worry about) what the metadata is, or whether they’re in a ‘post 1945 sculptural’ mood today.
But maybe we’ve hidden its function too well, so people think it is just showing random images ad infinitum (which, actually, is what it will do if you don’t interact with it at all).
Anyway, if you have time try it again, twice, and pretend you have different likes / dislikes for those two sessions. You should see that the kinds of things displayed become noticeably different.
For example, try picking sculpture in one session and portraits in another.
It works for me…but then I would say that wouldn’t I?
Cheers, Richard