Museum thrives in new Covid normal

Creative streaming and digital programs helped keep Victorians up to date with cultural institutions during a harsh lockdown.

ACMI is home to a selection of Australian films. Picture: Field Carr

While the doors to Victoria’s cultural institutions were closed under the state’s harsh lockdown, creative streaming and digital programs helped keep the link to audiences open.

The Australian Centre for the Moving Image opened Cinema 3, a virtual cinema where audiences could rent selected films to watch at home, and access additional curated content.

ACMI director Katrina Sedgwick said the centre had talked about providing a similar service for years.

“We realise there’s an audience out there who want to have that museum experience with their streaming,” she said.

She said Cinema 3 wouldn’t replace the experience of going to the cinema but there was a “hungry and eager” audience interested in films who also wanted access to a “beautiful, connected constellation of content”.

There’s a section of Australian films, and works from other filmmakers in the region, as well as works from small film festivals that can’t afford to access software on their own, including the Czech and Slovak festival which is currently available.

“It’s a great way to support those really diverse festivals,” Sedgwick said.

“[They’re] small but with really keen audiences.”

Sedgwick said algorithms were currently directing people’s choice of content, often for commercial reasons, and Cinema 3 was an unusual juxtaposition of films chosen by humans for humans.

Sedgwick said Cinema 3 was not about volume or undermining the importance and “magic” of attending a cinema.

ACMI director Katrina Sedgwick.

“I think audiences have recognised that we need to be active and rigorous about what we consume at home … I think we have changed and our needs have changed,” she said. “It’s just been such a fascinating experience, what a time to live through … Amongst its terribleness it’s been eye-opening, The way these changes will remain with us, I think is so extraordinary.”

National Gallery of Victoria director Tony Ellwood said the gallery went into lockdown “full steam ahead” with a commitment to enhance and add to all of its digital interfaces, including the new hashtag #NGVEveryDay which recorded more than 26 million hits.

The gallery also hosted real-time drawing classes, virtual tours of exhibitions, school programs which were picked up in the Middle East, and gained international press coverage when galleries around the world were laying off staff and facing closures.

The strongest connection to the NGV’s audience however was through a weekly email which contained different art forms centred around different themes — colour, emotion, millinery, Asian culture.

Ellwood said the email now reaches more than 160,000 people who feel an “ownership” to the collection and look forward to the long-form email which features between eight to 12 works from the collection.

“[We] ended up being completely swamped with feedback,” he said.

“I said to my colleagues I have never felt more in touch with the audience.”