Haven’t visited a museum for a while? You’re in for a shock

A volcano that erupts every 15 minutes, sending digital pumice and ash raining down on startled visitors … vast screens displaying ultra high-definition video accompanied by original soundtracks … the chance to “fly” over ancient Peruvian ruins using multi-sensory virtual reality technology …

Welcome to the booming, high-tech world of museum blockbusters. Driven by ever-quickening developments in digital technology, rising visitor expectations and intense competition for the entertainment dollar, museums are working harder than ever to provide high-impact experiences that go way beyond the old stereotype of objects in cases accompanied by dense labels.

Two major travelling shows have just opened in eastern Australia: Machu Picchu and the Gold Empires of Peru at the Australian Museum, Sydney, and Pompeii at Canberra’s National Museum. While dealing with wildly different subject matter, each show features a slick combination of digital technology and a collection of priceless artefacts from overseas.

Kim McKay with some of the gold artefacts in the museum’s latest exhibition.Credit: Nick Moir

Machu Picchu follows the Australian Museum’s hugely successful Ramses & the Gold of the Pharaohs, which closed in May after attracting more than half a million visitors, accounting for a third of the overall numbers for that financial year.

It’s all part of Australian Museum director Kim McKay’s masterplan. When she took the reins in 2014, one of her priorities was equipping the institution to bid for and host major shows.

“Our exhibition space for these big travelling international exhibitions was not big enough,” McKay says. “Its floor loading wasn’t strong enough, the ceiling wasn’t high enough and the floor space itself was not big enough. We lost out to Melbourne on quite a few exhibitions in those early days and that frustrated me no end.”

Visitors can take a virtual ‘flight’ over Machu Picchu. Credit: Nick Moir

The enforced shutdown over COVID provided the opportunity to bring in the builders and create a big enough space.

“With this big touring hall, we can take big, big shows that only a few institutions can host,” says McKay. “It opened up the opportunity for us to do more and get to explore elements like virtual reality because we’ve got space for that as well.”

Ramses was the first show to take full advantage of the museum’s new temporary exhibition space. And while McKay has been cautious about predicting similar numbers for Machu Picchu, it’s clear there is a hunger for shows that tap into our seemingly endless fascination with ancient civilisations, especially when augmented with high-tech trappings.

Troy Collins is executive vice-president of Neon Global, the Singapore-based design company behind both Ramses and Machu Picchu.

Pompeii curator Lily Withycombe at the National Museum.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

In Neon’s marketing spiel, they aspire to be “a portal where different communities from around the world can get closer to what inspires and ignites their imagination and connect with each other”.

In practice, that means partnering with Hollywood studios to create shows such as Harry Potter: Visions of Magic (currently in Belgium and Singapore) and Jurassic World: The Exhibition (Melbourne) as well as building travelling blockbusters for museums.

Collins calls the museum side of the business “authentic artefact-based experiences” and dates the shift away from the traditional, static “glass case and label” museum experience to about 15 years ago – but the process has been accelerated by COVID.

Inevitably, in a world where practically everyone has a smartphone in their pocket, expectations among museum-goers have been raised massively, just as attention spans have decreased.

“It is a product of today’s digital presence,” says Collins. “I remember in my live entertainment days, we were airing 60-second spots on broadcast television. Now we question whether 10 seconds on YouTube is too long. Technology, the internet, our smartphones have all reduced our attention spans, have all given us a lot of entertainment in our own homes.

“It is becoming much more challenging to convince mum and dad to get up off the couch, get in their cars, drive into the city, park, walk and really make an effort to go see something outside the home.”

A virtual Vesuvius erupts every 15 minutes in the Pompeii exhibition.

Then there is the not insignificant cost. A visit to Machu Picchu for a family of four, including the VR component, costs nearly $200 - and that’s before ice-creams, coffee, transport and the gift shop.

“If we’re going to pay that, we’re not going to be satisfied by a couple of text labels and some objects under some pretty lights,” says Chiara O’Reilly, director of Museum and Heritage Studies at Sydney University. “In these big shows, we’ve come to expect something that takes us into that story and takes us out of our daily life.”

But while O’Reilly, who co-authored a book with colleague Anna Lawrenson analysing the history and impact of blockbuster shows, says expectations have changed, she also argues the plethora of high-tech exhibitions are just the latest manifestation of a long tradition in museums.

“Over the past 20 years, exhibitions have become much more complex, staged experiences,” she says. “But exhibitions have always been about trying to wow us. They are spectacles and this is a natural extension of that.”

Neon Global’s Troy Collins aims to combine a learning experience with a fun day out.Credit: Nick Moir

O’Reilly points to a legendary 1972 British Museum show, The Treasures of Tutankhamun, as the first of the contemporary blockbusters. It pulled in 1.6 million visitors and remains the most popular in the history of the British Museum, still occupying a place in the imagination of those who visited the show as schoolchildren (this author among them).

Of course, we’re living in a vastly different world now, where museums are one of many players in the attention economy, competing for visitors’ time and money with other distractions, ranging from the latest movie release to Taylor Swift.

This reality is clearly reflected in both the Sydney and Canberra shows. While they take different approaches – Machu Picchu is a linear, walkthrough experience, while the style of Pompeii is more “choose your own adventure” – each experience is carefully curated so as not to overload the visitor. Information is presented in a range of multimedia formats and the text accompanying the artefacts is concise and accessible.

“How do you allow people to learn about a historical event or story and make it fun?” says Troy Collins. “If you look at science centres in particular, they draw in that family audience and they draw in the kids, and the way they get them to come is through that interactivity. Why can’t we employ the same kind of techniques and make it fun, make it entertaining, make it interesting? That way a family goes away saying ‘we really learned a lot today, but guess what? We had a great time too’.”

Both Machu Picchu and Pompeii promote themselves as “immersive”, a term that features heavily in contemporary museum-speak. If your show is not immersive these days, you’re not even in the game. However, immersion can take many different forms.

Alongside its “flying” VR experience, Machu Picchu features sophisticated lighting and sound that add to the impact of the extraordinary artefacts and the stories of Mayan culture.

The most obvious immersive aspect of Pompeii is the regular eruption of Vesuvius, which tries to give visitors some sense of the shock and terror the citizens experienced in AD79.

The National Museum’s Lily Withycombe, who curated the Pompeii exhibition, calls the eruption sequence “electrifying”.

‘You get a jolt and you forget yourself. I’ve seen it many times now and I’m still actually quite moved.’

Lily Withycombe

“It really does feel like you’re there,” she says. “You get a jolt and you forget yourself. I’ve seen it many times now and I’m still actually quite moved.

“That’s something I consider immersive but it’s also there in the sounds of antiquity that you can hear as you walk through the rooms or walk past the walls. The sounds are meant to convey ancient Pompeii as well as the sounds from the excavations.”

However, Withycombe, who specialises in archaeology, remains adamant the high-tech bells and whistles should only be in service of the story at the heart of the exhibition.

“I have this responsibility to the integrity of an exhibition, to the integrity of the original vision,” she says. “And to make sure it works in a way that is meaningful and has authenticity and integrity, which is all the more important when there’s so much multimedia around.”

There are some 90 artefacts in the Pompeii show, each selected by Withycombe and her team. These objects, she says, will always be the stars of the show.

“We were really determined our selection of objects did not compete with the multimedia,” she says. “Equally, it was very important to us that the multimedia didn’t compete with or dominate our objects as well.”

One of the more striking aspects of the Pompeii show is a vast curved screen playing a high-tech montage of the delicate and astonishingly well-preserved frescoes that were uncovered at the site. In the same room is a glass case with a selection of tiny, clay pots containing remains of the pigment the fresco painters were using at the time of the eruption.

This is Withycombe’s favourite part of the whole exhibition.

“They are the kind of objects you can only see in places like Pompeii,” she says. “They are extraordinary and give you this sense of life interrupted. You can even see the way the pot that holds the blue pigment has been made. There is a thumbprint that you want to reach out and touch. There is something so real and tactile about it.”

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