IN-PERSON: Prague – Section B

Abstract

For decades, multiple cultural institutions around the world have incorporated different media and technologies to build experiences for visitors. This approach is shaped both by technological and cultural transformations. As new technologies are developed and made available, they can be used for exhibition and experience design. These designed experiences may be used to preserve, teach, inform, and delight visitors, and are especially useful when deployed to create experiences about intangible cultural heritages. While some tangible cultural heritage manifestations, such as objects, may easily be on display, intangible cultural heritage presents more challenges. The National Center for Civil and Human Rights, in Atlanta, Georgia, U.S.A., is a social justice museum and Site of Conscience. The institution preserves, communicates, and teaches about different types of cultural heritage using a large range of methods in its exhibitions. Rolls Down Like Water, the exhibition about the American Civil Rights Movement, promotes one of the most important political movements in the U.S. in the 20th century as a manifestation of national cultural and social heritage and preserves its memory through an engaging exhibition that contains multiple interactive experiences. This paper analyzes Rolls Down Like Water as a case study of how an exhibition that preserves and communicates an immaterial element of cultural heritage may be constructed. The paper focuses on the mediated visiting experience, and particularly on the interactive experiences on offer, and how they contribute to teach, communicate, and preserve the memory of an intangible element of cultural heritage, the American Civil Rights Movement.