First published in Artlink 38:4, December 2018
In The Time Machine (1895) by H.G. Wells, a scientist projects himself forward from Victorian London to the year 802,701, where he discovers a civilisation of futuristic, childlike adults preyed upon by a repressed, animalistic underclass. One night, under threat from the latter, he seeks refuge in a great green porcelain museum reminiscent of London’s Crystal Palace, which becomes a temporary lens through which he views this dystopian future.
Inside, the time-traveller finds some things intact and others looted or destroyed. There are no books in the library or texts in the museum. He is left to form knowledge about the world from the frame of his own experience. The building is a shell that has preserved objects but not memories, and the fact of its survival has not meant the same for its cultural narratives.1 Nevertheless, in the year 802,701, the dynamics of the museum are the same for interstellar travellers as they were for Victorian flaneurs; it provides space and time for exploration, remembering and sometimes forgetting.
Museums have always been based on intricately constructed virtual realities animated by arcane codes of behavioural logic governing how they create and preserve knowledge. As a theorist of archive and memory Jens Brockmaier argues, they operate by cultivating collective memories through the preservation of individual ones in the form of artefacts, organising countless fragments of these data into schemata that can be read holistically.2 The traveller was left with questions about the future because he was unable to collectivise his memory of the past in the present. How these spaces of memory might be bridged concerns us now.
In fact, Wells had the mechanics of time travel backwards, for the museum itself has always been the vehicle for projection across spacetime. When the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations was presented at the real Crystal Palace in 1851 it ushered in the era of the universal exposition, where visitors could imaginatively traverse the globe through themed, national pavilions. There they sampled works of art and industry and, in this case, consumed a narrative of Britain’s superior vision for a technologically-enabled future world. A similar vision was on show in the Sydney International Exhibition of 1879, held in a Garden Palace modelled on its London forebear. It also burnt down, in 1882, but in 2016 its colonial memory was resurrected in the Kaldor Art Project by Jonathan Jones, barrangal dyara (skin and bones)(2016), in which he traced the footprint of the palace with thousands of bleached white shields, memorialising the loss of Indigenous cultural memories in the blaze.
This repositioning of museum narratives over time echoes a trend in contemporary practice away from museums being conceived of as shrines to nationalist virtue—as Andrea Witcomb puts it, “places where one learns the stories of a nation’s progress, triumph and exceptionalism” —towards more fluid models in which historical understanding is created through interaction and exchange between artists, visitors, curators, collections and archives.3 In this context, interactive and immersive virtual reality installations can enable critical reflection of institutional memories. This is because of their potential to create embodied, sensorial spaces that support engagement with cultural artefacts outside the primary curatorial directives of a collection.4
Virtual reality methodologies have yet to be widely adopted in museum research, preservation and display practices. Currently, cultural heritage interpretation largely stumbles on the technological novelty of virtual interfaces and their predilection for the carnivalesque. Experiments in augmented and virtual reality museology in the public sphere have often simply replicated the functions of exhibition documentation, such as in the case of the Royal Academy’s Ai Weiwei 360, which allows users to teleport between rooms to view 360-degree photos of the exhibition from fixed vantage points, or provided cinematic experiences such as the popular Bombing of Darwin Harbour, exhibited at the Royal Flying Doctors Service Darwin Tourist Facility.5 Both modes offer immersive modes of viewing to users on and offsite, but reinforce the top-down authorial model of the museum by limiting the user to the role of a consumer of predetermined narratives. Compare this user relationship to successful models of bottom-up knowledge creation using crowd-authored digital platforms in terms of negotiated content generation. In the field of counter-cartography and deep mapping, for example, Linda Quiquivix’s study of a project to record, using Google Maps, former Palestinian settlements in what is now Israeli territory, demonstrates the potential of user-generated content to add criticality and alternative viewpoints to public histories.6
Nevertheless, GLAM sector capability to create and exhibit immersive and interactive digital content has expanded in the last decade. The visualisation laboratories at the University of NSW, where my practice is based and whose works are discussed in detail below, engineer immersive environments for touring museum exhibitions. UNSW’s DomeLab, the world’s highest resolution portable digital geodesic dome, featured in the National Museum of Australia’s award-winning 2017 exhibition Songlines: Tracking the Seven Sisters. The Advanced Visualisation and Interactive Environment (AVIE), a 360-degree 3D mixed-reality theatre engineered at UNSW’s iCinema Centre for Interactive Cinema Research, tours internationally and Melbourne Museum possesses an AVIE system. More broadly, forward-thinking institutions are establishing research centres. The State Library of NSW created the DX Lab, an innovation hub for the development of experimental visualisations and digital interactive interfaces to explore its collections and cultural data. In 2018 The University of South Australia opened MOD, a museum dedicated to art/science collaborations whose modus operandi is to exhibit immersive, interactive art projects. This rapidly-developing capability is further enhanced by the enabling of multi-platform functionality through software engines that ensure interactive data is easily transferable across institutions, as well as by the establishment of grant programs to foster the development of immersive content, such as ACMI’s Mordant Family VR Commission, and Create NSW’s 2017 virtual reality art grant.
I argue that virtual reality is better understood not by reference to its technological interfaces alone, but as a range of potential embodied and interactive modalities that employ immersive environments in user-led and affective ways. In this conception, the sympathies between traditional forms of museum interpretation and exhibition, and modern concerns about spatial and sensory exploration, become clearer. For example, my virtual reality installation Henry VR(2018), exhibited at the Art Gallery of NSW, employed a form of substitutional reality where the Euclidean space of the virtual world—a simulation of a Tudor London painter’s studio and reconstruction of a portrait of Henry VIII in the Gallery’s collection utilising particle accelerator visualisation and analysis—mapped the volume of the physical gallery in which it was exhibited. This was done to enhance users’ sensory immersion, but it also created conceptual parallels between the institution as a locus of living histories and the user as an actor within them. In this case, the virtual reality world served as a museological bridge that allowed the restored painting to be reconnected to the Gallery’s collection narrative. With no contextualising content in the Gallery’s collection of English art, it had been a collection orphan of sorts, unexhibited and unrestored since a brief public appearance in 1962, shortly after its acquisition. The virtual reality visualisation of the painting and its scientific data was a core process of new research into the painting’s material history and cultural significance that produced a new spatial context for its encounter.
As Henry VR suggests, when the relationships between museums, their artefacts and audiences are visualised in immersive forms, the character of their collecting histories becomes open to enhanced interaction because these forms are new ways of seeing that allow audiences to critically assess how the meanings of works of art change with time and context.7 Such is the case of The Australian War Memorial’s immersive online exhibition Art of Nation, led by senior curator Anthea Gunn, which engages with the politics of display and archival interrogation. Art of Nationvirtually reconstructs the proposed architectural vision for the Memorial by official WWI historian C.E.W. Bean, as well as his plans for its first collection hang, and allows users to navigate through the never-realised design in first-person perspective 3D.8
Where this project differs from other virtual projects that simulate museum visitation is in the critical historical awareness it affords. Bean’s original vision reveals its dramatic irony by comparison to the present: the war to end all wars did not; the building evolved to accommodate this failure; and what was intended as a memorial to a national trauma also functions as a spiritual prophylactic for future sorrow. Even the artefacts come into question. Entering the building the user must pass over the Shellal Mosaic, a sixth-century Byzantine floor uncovered by Australian troops during the second battle of Gaza in 1917 and transported to the antipodes after the war. It is the same mosaic off which Tom Nicholson based his critique of institutional colonialism and contemporary political territorialism in his Comparative monument (Shellal) (2014–17).
These unexpected threads unravel histories of colonialism and conflict that complicate nationalist histories. They are often hard-won moments because, as Witcomb notes, opportunities for historical and institutional criticality decrease with time. And yet, exhibition strategies that encourage the viewer to experience difficult emotions can be useful tools in entreating critical and empathetic thinking. In their respective fields, Kit Messham-Muir and Jill Bennett have developed lexicons to theorise how emotions can be ethically and authentically transmitted through objects and works of art about unwitnessed events. Messham-Muir describes the ability of a WWII-era German Kar 98 rifle to provoke intense emotional responses in 21st-century university students, who form associations with the latent violence of the object.9 Bennett delineates “sense memory” from “ordinary memory” to trace one person’s empathic response to another’s loss outside the interpretive frame of a narrative event.10
Clearly, I am thinking of the power of immersive realities to tell marginalised stories that call the canon into question, and indeed there is an emerging body of literature that attests to the efficacy of user-led virtual reality interactive cinema.11 But in galleries and museums where cognitive learning remains the expected outcome, the role of affective experiences in creating meaning over time is not well understood.12 There is an understandable tendency for virtual reality experiences to focus on personal histories of trauma, but as Mick Broderick, Stuart Marshall Bender and Tony McHugh argue, how these memories are mediated through intelligent, interactive avatars remains a core challenge in facilitating genuinely empathic encounters and avoiding disaster tourism.13 This is complicated by studies in the field of human computer interaction that suggest that the generation of empathy within virtual reality environments is reliant on individuals’ expectations of and familiarity with the medium.14
How then might we create a new syntax of spaces through virtual realities to explore archives of memory in the expanded field of museums and cultural institutions, through which meanings and difficult histories are negotiated rather than simply received? This has been done sympathetically and poetically by Jill Bennet, Bonney Djuric, Lily Hibberd and Volker Kuchelmeister in Parragirls Past, Present (2017). Parragirlsis a multi-platform project utilising several interactive modalities to explore the traumatic personal experiences of former residents of the Parramatta Girls Home in Sydney, which until the 1980s was a state facility for the care of “at risk’” girls. Physical and emotional abuses at the facility were made public through the course of the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, ordered in 2012 by then Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard.
Through the narrations of former residents reflecting on their experiences 40 years prior, Parragirlsrevisits traumatic memories within a sympathetic contemporary political context, increasing the potential for viewers to extract meaningful individual responses to others’ memories. The most visually spectacular iteration of the project is a 360-degree immersive environment exhibited in the world’s highest-resolution cylindrical visualisation system at the Expanded Perception & Interaction Centre at the University of NSW (UNSW), as part of the 2017 Big Anxiety Festival. This environment visualised the buildings and gardens around the Parramatta Female Factory where the home was located. It took the form of a dense, vividly-coloured point cloud, reconstituted photogrammetrically from hundreds of photographs of the site taken by Kuchelmeister as he navigated it by bicycle. This methodology resulted in spatially-incomplete 3D artefacts that suggest the composition of the environment while offering their incompleteness as an allegory for the partial reconstruction of memories. It is also significant in that it was the product of Kuchelmeister’s own physical exploration and imagining of the history of the site. This immersive environment was partnered with a self-directed audio guide experience narrating residents’ memories, available for visitors to the physical site in Parramatta. Together, they form a kind of mixed reality psychogeography, where the boundaries between time and real and virtual sites are dissolved, and through which an explorer’s derivé is guided by fragments of data.
Parragirls demonstrates the potential for immersive realities to offer critical means of apprehending the world via sense-based and affective processes, what Bennett has described as “aesthesis”.15 This is also a concern addressed by my own work Metascape: Villers Bretonneux (2018), an experiment in reconfiguring the aesthetics of war art by applying affective, interactive methodologies to the analysis of wartime memories archived in collecting institutions. In particular, I am interested in the ways in which war art might serve as a focal point for emotional resonances, what Laura Brandon describes as a “site of emotion”.16 Brandon offers a challenge to the genre, questioning whether viewers of war art works respond emotionally to their aesthetics, or through a blended interpretation made using contextual information. She posits that war art may be a locus for the collectivisation of emotional knowledge, through which viewers contribute to the understanding of others.
Metascapeattempts such a locus. It is a 1:1 scale immersive, interactive environment experienced in first-person perspective, that simulates 72 hours in real time of the 1918 Second Battle of Villers Bretonneux in which almost 4,000 Australian soldiers staged a daring night raid to recapture the strategically-significant French town. The battle has been canonised as both the nation’s greatest military victory and as a formative nationalist moment in the validation of the body politic. Like Parragirls, this memorial investigation occurs at a time of historical significance—to coincide with the centenary of the battle in April 2018, the Australian Government-funded Sir John Monash Centre was opened at Villers Bretonneux to serve as the chief museum and memorial for Australia’s engagement on the Western Front.
Metascape was developed for the Advanced Visualisation and Interaction Environment (AVIE) at the iCinema Centre for Interactive Cinema Research UNSW, a 10-metre diameter, 360-degree, immersive interactive theatre for research and museum display in which viewers become actors and agents simultaneously within real and virtual spaces. The work relies on multiple forms of spatial reconstruction. Sixty-four square kilometres of the battlefield, including Villers Bretonneux and its surrounding features such as villages, roads, forests and trenches were reconstructed in 3D from photographs and placed onto a scale landscape adapted from GIS and aerial data. But the difference here is that Metascape’s focus is psycho-spatial; it primarily maps the emotional resonances of the battle’s participants as they are preserved today in archival records. In so doing, it offers a counter-cartography of the battle that eschews traditional military methods of mapping battles by unit movements, casualties, engagements and national lines, allowing new knowledge to be introduced to the canon through aesthetic and affective enquiry.
Key historical texts were sourced from institutional collections including the Australian War Memorial, State Library of New South Wales, State Library of Queensland, Trove and the Bibliothèque nationale de France. These were anonymised and subjected to sentiment analysis to identify twenty different emotional states associated with first-hand experiences—ranging from love and hope to anger, horror and fear. The location and time of each incidence was recorded to produce a dataset of memories in spacetime, which form the core of a bespoke animation system. This system assigns a geometric displacement algorithm with different transformative characteristics to each emotion—developed with some reference to the historical record of war art aesthetics—which is activated to indicate the spatio-temporal presence of emotional memory by transforming the form of the 3D world in unexpected and semi-abstract ways.
Metascapeis a virtual psychogeography that allows users to explore not only of the landscape of war, but the rhizome of archival records. Within the theatre, five users at a time, whose movements are tracked using infra-red detection, must collaborate to navigate the environment. When a quorum of users move in a particular direction, their location in the world moves with them, allowing them to explore the environment based on their interest in certain visual forms. Returning to a central point in physical space allows the users to teleport forward four hours in spacetime, to sample the emotional geography from a different point.
Importantly, within Metascapeusers are not simply narrative consumers, but co-authors of meaning. Through a graphical, tablet interface they are able to diarise their collective responses to the visualisation as they happen. An artificial intelligence engine logs these new data, and can assign a displacement algorithm to describe it at that point in the simulation. This results in the visual co-mingling of historical and contemporary emotional records over time, the two datasets interacting visually in unpredictable ways. The result is not only a new visual paradigm for describing experiences of war, but a data log of time-based emotional responses to the paradigm itself. Given enough use, it will be possible to analyse the variance in affective response to these visual forms between groups of users generations apart to provide data for investigation into social or cultural differences in perception.
As Marcello Carrozzino and Massimo Bergamasco argue, virtual reality allows museums to modulate their “cultural proposal”, adapting content for new audiences and contexts.17 I am interested in going one step further, by exploring the potential for virtual reality installations to create spaces in which users modulate the cultural proposal of institutions and archives through the co-authoring of narratives. Virtual reality installations can provide a degree of agency to visitors through which the relationship between collections, audiences and the way in which memory and meaning are constituted between the two, are reconfigured. Their natively alternative geographies can chart new cartographies of the expanded museum by drawing in subjects and intangible cultural heritages that would normally be outside the purview of physical museum collections. They can also allow existing territory to be re-mapped by new viewers whose cultural knowledge differs from institutional narratives. They can empower audiences.
Virtual realities are not unreal. They rely on social and emotional interactions that are given valency by their users. In fact, as I have argued, they can often give expression to otherwise invisible meta-realities—the very ways in which memories, meanings and narratives are created and consumed. What I am proposing is a new model for interaction with cultural heritage materials through immersive environments that moves beyond concepts of edutainment to consider simulative and investigative processes as part of the core foundations of museology, curatorship and object-based research.18 Doing so embraces the sensory turn by privileging affective engagements with the past. Virtual worlds are spaces in which meaning is created by their inhabitants, that can allow critical engagement with historiographies of culture. They are active, generative spaces where time cannot stand still.
Footnotes
1See Dolly Jorgensen, “Remembering the Past for the Future: The Function of Museums in Science Fiction Time Travel Narratives,” in Joan Ormrod and Matthew Jones (eds.), Time Travel in Popular Media: Essays on Film, Television, Literature and Video Games, Jefferson N.C.: McFarland & Company, 2015, 118–31__2Jens Brockmeier, Beyond the Archive: Memory, Narrative and the Autobiographical Process, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015__3Andrea Witcomb, “Understanding the role of affect in producing a critical pedagogy for history museums,” Museum Management and Curatorship, 28:3, 2013, p. 255__4This is an argument I adapt from Kali Tzorti’s spatial analysis of sensorial built environments in museums. See Kali Tzortzi, “Museum architectures for embodied experience,” Museum Management and Curatorship, 32:5, 2017, 491–508__5Andrew Yip, “Impossible Encounters: Virtual reality and the museology of consciousness,” Artlink, 36:4, December 2016, pp. 42–47__6Linda Quiquivix, “Art of war, art of resistance: Palestinian counter-cartography on Google Earth,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 104:3, 2014, 444–59__7Andrew Yip, “Metadata and the Rhizome of Museum Practice,” Artlink, 37:1, March 2017, pp. 34–39__8Anthea Gunn, “What could have Bean: Using digital art history to revisit Australia’s First World War official art,” Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art, 17:2, 2017, 162–81__9Kit Messham-Muir, “Dark visitations: The possibilities and problems of experience and memory in Holocaust museums,” Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art, 5:1, 2004, 97–111__10Jill Bennett, “Art, affect, and the ‘Bad death’: Strategies for communicating the sense memory of loss,” Signs, 28:1, 2002, 333–51__11 Kath Dooley, “Storytelling with virtual reality in 360-degrees: A new screen grammar,” Studies in Australasian Cinema, 11:3, 2017, 161–71; and Joan Llobera, Kristopher J. Blom, and Mel Slater, “Telling stories within immersive virtual environments,” Leonardo, 46:5, 2013, 471–76__12Brenda M. Trofanenko, “On difficult history displayed: The pedagogical challenges of interminable learning’, Museum Management and Curatorship, 26:5, 481–95__13Mick Broderick, Stuart Marshall Bender, Tony McHugh, “Virtual trauma: prospects for automediality,” M/C Journal, 21:2, 2018__14Shin, Donghee, “Empathy and embodied experience in virtual environment: To what extent can virtual reality stimulate empathy and embodied experience?’, Computers in Human Behaviour, 76:1, 2018, 64–73__15Jill Bennett, Practical Aesthetics: Events, Affects and Art after 9/11, London: I.B. Taurus & Co Ltd, 2015__16Laura Brandon, ‘Cause and affect: War art and emotion’, Canadian Military History, 21:1, 2015__17Marcello Carrozzino and Massimo Bergamasco, “Beyond virtual museums: Experiencing immersive virtual reality in real museums,” Journal of Cultural Heritage, 11, 2010, 452–58__18Andrew Yip, “The Ekphrasis engine: Towards a new industry architecture for digital art historical practice in the age of the virtual’, Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art, 17:2, 2017, 135–46.