The Future of Museums? It's Interactive

The opening of the Mori Digital Art Museum in Tokyo ushers in a New Era in Museum Curation, and Experiences.

Says Palpable Media Chief Experience Officer, Catherine Henry, "this is just the beginning..."

Next week marks a groundbreaking event in museum history with the opening of the Mori Digital Art Museum in Tokyo next week on June 21st. Designed by Team Lab, this dynamic exhibit merges traditional boundaries between art and exhibit spaces, and sometimes between artworks themselves. This magical interplay occurs on all surfaces, so the gaze is not directed but the viewer is immersed within the art. As artworks play into one another, viewers move through the space, even sliding through walls from one room to the next. Team Lab's fiercely inventive work will change forever the way we consider formal exhibition spaces in the era of new technology:

KLIMT CONQUERS PARIS

The latest rage of toute Paris, is a fully immersive exhibit at the Palais des Lumieres which features the wildly romantic geometric fantasies of Austrian artist Gustav Klimt's sumptuous paintings during the Art Nouveau period. The basis of these works have been deconstructed to fill the entire building, in which visitors wander from room to room, and floor to floor, with every surface a moving visual canvas. over 3000 moving pictures with the most famous elements of the Austrian painter’s paintings for a 30-minute light and sound show.

While this show is more referential and rooted in classical art historical and cultural foundations, and is large in scale rather than being truly "immersive" it does a fine job in demonstrating how more staid work can nevertheless be engaging and innovative.

Importantly, the exhibit has been a huge success. Opened in April 2018, the Klimt exhibit was sold out for the first two months, and has received viral press coverage for both the museum as well as incited interest in Austrian Tourism.

Why This Matters

These are the the first in what is expected to be a significant wave of innovation in museum management. Just as the Guggenheim led growth in the 1990's with its groundbreaking show of Motorcycles as design objects and then opened the first branch extension in Bilbao - we are now seeing the next iteration of what museum management should do to continue to stay relevant and draw audiences.

EXPERIENCE-DRIVEN SPACES

Museums as "white cubes" with rigid, directional displays are a thing of the past. Whether we like it or not, artists can and will begin to interject their own works and transform the museum experience.

This video captures the AR artist action by MoMAR, a collective artists group that "disrupted" a classic exhibition of paintings at New York's Museum of Modern Art.

Just a few months ago, the artists collective MoMAR staged an intervention in the Pollock room at the Museum of Modern art. They created an app which would allow viewers to see their Augmented Reality interpretations of several works by Jackson Pollock. Since the app is available to anyone with a mobile phone, the museum is helpless to change the display. Similarly, a group called Movers and Shakers in NY recently staged a happening at New York's Columbus Circle with Augmented Reality interpretations of Christopher Columbus and re-imagined history in a series of artworks displayed around the statue. By staging a "virtual museum" with its own works the group essentially redefines the concept of public space and public art.

These types of artistic movements are becoming more common and are feverishly exciting. Working in the tradition of Kaprow, Beuys and Kline, these collectives are asserting their own imprint on the art world, with a view of disrupting what we consider to be "museums" as well as the concept of collecting itself.

Let us turn now to some of the use cases for various technologies. First, let's look at Holograms. The varied forms of holograms can take on static, statuesque presence or more dynamic. They can even dance. As guides or as sculptures, the hologram can take on many forms. Lastly, as we see at the Mori museum, holograms can be very elegant ambient installations.

While we can't say for certain whether image above was a hologram, but easily could have been. And it could be a cloud as easily as it could have been a horny rhinoceros. Or Emperor Qin's terracotta army. The possibilities are limitless as the imagination - and the ever-evolving technology.

Virtual Reality can recreate the experience of time travel, erasing the walls of a museum and enabling us to travel in time and space to "see" what it would be like to live in ancient Rome and sit in an amphitheatre during an epic battle. No longer must we simply hear about dinosaurs: with VR, we can virtually walk among them. With "tiltbrush" we can all become artists, painting with light in a 3d space. Museums can now create interactive VR mini-theatres, treadmills, or simply headsets.

There are many new ways of creating interactive environments in a museum context for both temporary and permanent exhibits.

Augmented Reality can literally add new dimensions to work on paper and canvas. We can enable artists to create a dialogue with the work, This is an excellent opportunity to refresh the way art is presented and appreciated, drawing fresh attention to older works.

CONTENT IS STILL CRITICAL

Lest you think we are advocating museums as Disney world experiences, we could not disagree more strenuously. The point is that exhibitions today can be more relevant, by opening up to contemporary interactive artists and methodologies. These new technologies are exciting new ways to tell stories, share experiences. If museums serve as time capsules for collective memory, the opportunity to open a time capsule with virtual or augmented reality is an effective tool. However it cannot, on its own, replace curation, or the examination and exploration of important ideas about humanity, our social and cultural legacy or the world we inhabit.

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About the Author: Catherine D. Henry is a virtual reality filmmaker and expert in experiential marketing and interactive spaces. Working with some of the world's leading artists and production companies in the US, Europe and Asia she helps galleries re-invent their spaces and artwork using a variety of new technologies.

For more information please contact: [email protected]