[ISEA2016] Panel Statement: Sarah Kenderdine – Towards an Embodied Museography

Panel Statement 

Panel: Gigantic: Mediation Beyond Surface

We are in the midst of a transformation, from a world of screens and devices to a world of immersive experience _Brian Krzanich

This panel contribution will examine new paradigms for transforming digital cultural archives into these immersive experiences through research in data creation, virtual environment design, interactivity, and information visualization — transforming public engagement with intangible and tangible heritage.

Cultural heritage is under increasing threat from destruction forces spanning iconoclasm to climate change to mass tourism. Within this context, digital documentation technologies play a vital role in the sustainability of both tangible and intangible heritage (from laser scanning and photogrammetry to motion capture and motion-over-time analytics). The creation of repositories of high fidelity digital data derived from heritage – open-up opportunities for re-staing and reimagining the object of study. As post-processural archaeologist Michael Shanks described, new digital archives demand “prosthetic architectures for the production and sharing of these archival resources — an animated archive emphasising personal affective engagement with cultural memory”. The research presented in this panel explores strategies for creating and translating the new abundance of digital records in the cultural archives into narratives of engagement by which museum visitors virtually re-embody and ‘perform’ the archive. This embodied museography is defined by attributes of immersion, interaction and participation and necessarily asks us to re-examine our notions of aura, authenticity and authorship. At the core of these experiences is a series of bespoke large-scale omnidirectional, omnispatial, panoptic and hemispheric interactive visualisation systems which promote human to human as well as human to machine interactions.

  • Sarah Kenderdine (AU), Expanded Perception and Interaction Centre, University of New South Wales, AU sarahkenderdine.info

Full text [PDF] p. 382-383