Minsarcheo: a Minsar experience at the National Museum of Archeology
In 2016, Minsar was selected by the French Ministry for Culture in the framework of the call for projects “Innovative Digital Services”. Since then, we have been working with three prestigious partners: the National Monument Centre, the Museum of Decorative Arts, and the National Museum of Archeology. For the National Days of Archeology in June 2019, we presented the results of the collaboration between Minsar and the National Museum of Archeology, which we called “Minsarcheo”. It was a big step in the history of Minsar: for the first time ever, a museum has used Minsar to create an experience from scratch, and then distribute it to their visitors. The entire process, from creation to distribution, was made by the museum team, especially Emily Chambers and Oceane Duboust who conceived the scenario and scenography.
The experience took place in the Room of Compared Archeology of the museum. The general idea was to choose a certain amount of objects in the display cases and place their digital selves within the physical room. The visitor, through a mobile device, could then scan a QR code which allowed them to open the experience on their device. Then they were encouraged to wander along in the room, to move around the digital objects, to observe them closely, before locating the real ones in the display cases.
In this article, I propose to analyze this experience to the particular light of my thesis problematics: the concept of playing and marveling in a museum, the creation of a new proximity and perspective of cultural objects, and at last the concept of contextualizing and decontextualizing cultural objects.
Offering a new perspective of the objects
One of the goals of this experience was to disrupt the perception visitors had of the objects. For instance, the scenographists decided to change the scale of some digital objects, in relation to the scale of the original object. That is how the tiny lekythos from classical Attica (5th Century BC), representing a baby, became an enormous vase in the corner of the room.
This process aimed at causing the visitor to observe the objects in detail through their digital selves. Moreover, by playing with the different scales, the scenographists wanted to create a sense of surprise amongst visitors, as well as make them want to search through the display cases. They wanted to actually renew the discovery of the real object compared to its digital self.
As a matter of fact, the same desires were present in designer Pietro Alberti’s approach for the Salon de Compagnie of Hotel de Lalande in Bordeaux. Indeed, from December 1st 2017 to January 31st 2018, the Museum of Decorative Arts and Design hosted, in that room, a peculiar virtual reality device. With a HTC Vive headset, visitors were invited to wander in the Salon, and to observe different effects of light, scale and perception on the objects and furniture. According to the artist, “this installation can be considered as a spatial experience. We play with the scenography of the salon in order to interact with each element. Playing with the perception of space and objects allows the visitor to discover the room from a new perspective, and to explore the smallest details of that room.” (WERTH, 2018)
Whereas Pietro Alberti’s goal was to create a contemplative experience which was assumed as completely artistic, Minsarcheo’s one was more modest. It was simply a question of breaking the traditional barrier of the display case and the unaccessible object, by giving access to the object (under its digital form) in the visitor’s physical space. However, Minsarcheo had something in common with Pietro Alberti’s experience, that is to say the desire to foster the observation of the details of the objects, and the will to confront the real object to its digital representation, or even simply promote a manner of rediscovering the real object in another way. It was also an occasion to question our relation to what we call “reality”, through the mixing of different levels of that reality. Indeed, it was sometimes surprising to lower the tablet on which we were scrutinizing the digital object and find out that it was not real after all. On the other hand, we found ourselves wondering several times whether some of the objects in the display cases were real or not. It is also very interesting to see that the creators of the experience as well as the visitors experienced that feeling of doubt about what was real and what was not.
Playing at the museum : between wonder and knowledge
As written earlier, the goal of this experience was to make visitors “play”, that is to say to make them examine the digital object before going and re-discovering the real one. Our will to change the objects scale was also attached to that “playing” perspective.
That notion of “playing at the museum” is something that has me particularly interested in my research. At first sight, museums are not a place for fun or playing, because playing is not “serious”. According to the French Ministry for Culture, when museums design mediation devices supposed to be more playful, these devices are in fact a disguise for pedagogy. They use their apparently fun promise to attract visitors, but in the end have still the same teaching goal. Moreover, it is quite commonly admitted in museums that fun and playing are only for children, not for adults. On the French Ministry for Culture’s museum, it is written that “playing is fundamental in the construction of the child: it is through playing that children understand, appropriate, re-act the world they are in”.
I believe that sentence is very true for adults too. Yet I also think this idea is far from being widely shared, starting with visitors themselves. Indeed, during the experience, we observed that a lot of visitors wished for more information about the objects. On the other hand, visitors who did play earnestly, who did try to find original objects in their display cases and play with the digital ones, were children. It shows how receptive children are of this kind of performance. That is something I had also observed at the Grand Palais exhibition about the Moon, in May 2019. In one of the rooms of the exhibition, there were decorative moons lying on the ground, illuminating the room. I observed a little girl who was fascinated by them, and it was beautiful to see how that wonder made her want to touch the moons, to actually interact with them. At that time, it made me think that children are not yet conditioned by the museum frame like the adult. That is to say that they are not yet accustomed by the traditional posture and attitude we are supposed to adopt in a museum, which are linked to learning and knowledge. It should be noted, though, that these two concepts are fundamental in the definition of a museum, at least for French museums labeled “Musees de France”).
Things might be changing though. In France, the “Musee en Herbe” has a page dedicated to adults. The core aim of this museum is to promote a playful, entertaining way to apprehend cultural heritage. I also found the same idea defended by Sarah Brin, who works for San Francisco MoMa. In her article “Games and Play at the Museum” in 2015, she writes that an increasing number of cultural institutions, throughout the world, understand the educational potential of playing, which allows for a greater engagement between the visitor and the museum’s collections. However, as seen earlier in this article, Sarah Brin explains that the devices designed by these museums in a perspective of play are often much more educational than really fun. Indeed, it is often difficult to efficiently mix the two worlds, partly because a certain amount of museums are confronted to limited design resources, or are pressed for integrating numerous educational goals within one single activity.
Besides, Sarah Brin notes that some games happen to distract the visitor from the actual collections. That is something I indeed observed during Minsarcheo as well as during other experimentations I attended for my research. However, it is not always the case. In Minsarcheo, on the contrary, people and especially children enjoyed trying to find the objects in the display cases. This way, we can consider that they have used their attention and sense of observation more than if they hadn’t experimented Minsarcheo. The experience also helped highlighting some objects that are usually difficult to see in the display cases. This offered the opportunity for a renewed confrontation with these objects, and it probably enabled them to be more efficiently engraved in the visitors’ memory. Indeed, I am convinced that digital tools applied to cultural heritage, in this case mixed reality, enable to anchor the experience not only in the visitor’s memory, but also in their physical body. That is what Francisco Varela called the “embodied cognition”, that is to say the idea that knowledge only exists in experience, and that experience goes through the entire body. (Rinaldi, 2017)
In this perspective, experience leads to knowledge. Yet, we could go even further and question the very necessity to draw knowledge from experiencing cultural heritage. Even though some visitors don’t really care about the historical, “cognitive” context of the object, is that a sin? Isn’t it possible to live a more sensory, emotional experience, which could eventually lead to a better knowledge of the object? I’m thinking, here, about the 360° movies made by Arte Trips. During a conference in Paris in 2019, Daniel Khamdamov, program officer in charge of these movies, said that these videos are “creations”. In this perspective, they are “subjective vehicles towards the works of art, and not audioguides, programs filled with comments and information.” Even though each project “implies an important expertise in art history, the artistic dimension is very important”. As a result, “these videos favour the sensory dimension rather than the informative aspect”. This is very well represented in L’Ile des Morts, directed by Benjamin Nuel, based on Böcklin’s painting. It is a true contemplative journey which gives absolutely no intellectual information about the painting, and yet makes us dive into its peculiar atmosphere, letting us even touch the shores of the netherworld. This kind of experience is memorable in every sense of the word. Anchored in the living experience, it engraves the image and universe of Böcklin’s painting in spectators’ memory. Some will decide they need no more, others will certainly be led to seek more information about it.
In the end, it is mainly a question of determining the goals of a mediation device, whether it relies on immersive technologies or not. Must it lead visitors to acquire knowledge about the object? What kind of knowledge? Must the device enable the visitor to dive into a contemplative and subjective reinterpretation of a painting, as Arte Trips does so well? These questions will then lead the methodologies, scenarios and editorialization of the experience.
Decontextualisation and recontextualisation of cultural heritage
At first sight, Minsarcheo consists in a complete decontextualisation of objects. Indeed, the idea was to get the digital copy of certain objects in the display cases, and to place these copies absolutely anywhere in the room. Each digital object is to be experienced for itself, without any apparent information. This can be frustrating: a lot of people told us that they had felt the desire to touch the object and trigger some kind of information panel. Apart from the fact that triggers are soon to be implemented in Minsar, this was an assumed choice as we have seen earlier.
Indeed, the idea was to lead, through this decontextualization, to recontextualizing the digital objects by making the visitor seek the originals in the display cases. This is the first level of recontextualization. The second one was ensured by audio commentaries dispatched through the room. These commentaries explained the role of the Room of Compared Archeology, the goal of the experience, and the compared archeology methodology, very purpose of its room.
The Museum of National Archeology’s website explains that the “Room of Compared Archeology was designed at the beginning of the 20th century, by Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss. They want to illustrate the ethnographic history of Europe and humanity, based on the total social reality from human’s origin to early Middle-Ages. Indeed, according to Henri Hubert, the “living” societies apprehended through ethnology can contribute to a global vision of humanity just as the “dead” societies apprehended through archeology. He considered that only this global vision in time and space could lead to an accurate comprehension of societies. This approach, called compared archeology, was very successful between the 19th and 20th century. Although it has been criticized on some points, it remains crucial in every archeological methodology, under certain conditions.
The Room of Compared Archeology of the Museum of National Archeology is, in this perspective, organized according to a flow of time going from Paleolithic to early Middle-Ages. That flow is represented by a series of technical inventions like stone cutting, ceramic and metallurgy, so that the different societies are compared from a chronological as well as technical point of view. That comparison allows for highlighting the differences or similarities in the evolution of the different cultures from different areas of the world. A certain amount of common themes can be noted, like matter, daily life or representation (Emily Chambers and Oceane Duboust).
This is how Minsarcheo targeted a second level of contextualization, by somehow taking the compared archeology methodology further. The goal was to go beyond the display cases and the global organization of the room by completely mixing objects, continents and eras. At last, a large map of the world was virtually hanging on top of the room, again in order to remind the role of the room. This experience is, as a result, at the crossroads between two approaches: one the one hand, objects are decontextualised in order to be recontextualised by seeking the original and its information in the display cases. On the other hand, the objects are decontextualised in order for the experience to be more generally anchored in the compared archeology methodology.
A real and rich step in Minsar’s history
Minsarcheo represents a very important step in the history of Opuscope and Minsar. Indeed, it is the first time the complete process of creation and distribution of a mixed reality experience was carried out in a cultural, official context. Besides, it triggered a large amount of reflexions I tried to expose in this article. First, it made me contemplate the question of renewing the perception of cultural heritage, through the reception as well as the creation of the experience. Then, it made me question the role of playing at the museum, and it allowed for a mediation about a more sensory and emotional approach of cultural heritage. At last, it allowed for a reflexion about cultural heritage recontextualisation and recontextualisation mechanisms, and how, through this experience, both approaches complete each other.
To go further
- ABOUDRAR, Bruno Nassim, MAIRESSE, François, La médiation culturelle, 2018
- BRIN, Sarah., “Games and Play at the Museum”, 2015
- CHAUMIER, Serge, MAIRESSE, François, La médiation culturelle, 2013
- EDWARDS, Michael, L’émerveillement, 2008
- JUSSEAUX, Maëlys, Patrimoine historique et survivance artistique, Master Thesis, Paris 8 University, 2018
- MERLEAU-PONTY, Claire, La transmission culturelle, nouveaux modes de médiation, 2010.
- LEGERET, Katia(dir.), Créons ensemble au musée, 2019
- SERAIN, Clément. La conservation-restauration du patrimoine au regard des humanités numériques : enjeux techniques, sociocognitifs et politiques. PhD thesis, Paris 8 University, to be presented in 2019.
- VARELA, Francesco and al., L’inscription corporelle de l’esprit, 1993
