VIRTUAL: Prague Heritages

Abstract

Museums are the subject of increasing attention and debate regarding their role, means, and methods of performing them. Among other issues, this debate revolves around their relationship with the public, and in particular, their educational mission. Changes are rapid, challenges are numerous and constant. Institutions renew themselves, adapt, innovate, and seek to respond and meet multiplying demands. How can a museum optimize and make the most of its role with the public? How can a museum simultaneously streamline its relationship with different audiences – children, adults, families, researchers, and educators? How can a museum configure and streamline effective and proactive communication tools, given the diversity of audiences, artifacts, topics, or areas of knowledge? Seeking to meet a set of concerns and challenges in the field of democratized access to the museum, interactive participation, sensory experience, and knowledge production, we propose, describe, and discuss a versatile, multipurpose, and proactive interface. Adaptable to diverse museographic contexts and different circumstances – collection management, temporary exhibitions, itinerant projects – the interface we propose facilitates new exercises around musealized artifacts. A multidisciplinary exhibition totem offers three faces with the following strengths: face a) exhibition of an artifact in physical presence, isolated from any additional information; face b) a set of interactive monitors that allows access to a textual and visual database on the artifact from questions posed by the museum and questions introduced by the visiting public; face c) sensory experience synthesized from the artifact and apprehended through the five senses – sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell. Gathered in an interface based on analog and digital resources, the devices explore the artifacts in a multidisciplinary way to establish a dialogue with the adult, juvenile, and child audience in the domain of sensory.