#6: Portals - Museum Innovation Deep Dive 2
The second in a two-part special edition looking at the state of play in the digitalisation of global museums
Portals 2 // Museum Digital Innovation Deep Dive
Last week we started to unpick what’s going on in museum digital innovation, looking at NFT projects, at new kinds of distributed institution and at museums’ digital twins.
This week we’re going to jump in on the state of play with immersive, and at the flatlining of social media innovation.
But first, I realised I never explained why I called this look at museums “Portals”. I should have - it describes a key trend in itself. So that’s where we’ll start.
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Trend #3 // Portals between physical and virtual
I called this edition of “Creative R&D” Portals because of designers and architects Space Popular.
Friends, I ❤️❤️❤️ them.
Explorers of the boundary between the real and the virtual, they design impossible buildings made entirely out of wood, propose new construction systems and write manifestos for virtual architecture or the metaverse. Like a cyberpunk OMA, they are seriously cool. They describe what they do as:
“developing projects that speculate on the future of immersive media and its effects on everything from domestic environments to public spaces”
And alongside this, they design absolutely brilliant exhibitions.
The Portal Galleries, which I saw last year at the Sir John Soanes Museum in London and is shortly landing at the Museum of Applied Arts in Vienna, grew from a database of a thousand portals in fiction and popular culture over the last 150 years.
It explored what hopes and dreams we might have at the new magical thresholds which will arise in virtual environments in the century ahead. It was beautiful, historically rich, and a first glimpse of the future all at once.
Space Popular are a sign of a critical trend: at the absolute top of the museum sector there is a wave of exhibition making operating seamlessly between the real and the virtual - masterly storytelling, dovetailing advanced immersive technologies and digital media seamlessly with object interpretation and architectural re-presentation of space and place.
I mentioned Jake Barton in issue 1 as he was demoing a new immersive experience around climate change. His Local Projects remain exemplars of this and the just opened Jewish Heritage Museum experience, telling a story of the Holocaust for young audiences, looks another masterpiece.
What they do so well is totally submerging advanced technology within storytelling - as it should be of course, but so hard to do. Holographs, projection mapping and more - it’s all there, but utterly at the service of experience.
And from far away in New Zealand, but landing soon in Quesnoy, northern France, is the New Zealand Liberation Museum, designed by Wētā Workshop the special effects pioneers behind the Lord of the Rings.
A multi-sensory experience about a French town liberated by Kiwi soldiers, it will provide further evidence that the greatest creative innovations are driven by work of the highest qualities.
A word about our sponsors // Preview Tools
In a week where we’re talking about museums’ digital twins, having Preview Tools as the sponsor of “Creative R&D” makes brilliant sense. If you’re a gallery, museum or immersive experience, Preview Tools lets you make videos inside a digital twin of your environments. CHECK IT OUT.
Trend #4 // Immersive acceleration
More good news.
The last couple of months have seen a visible acceleration - or at least a pretty serious rash - of immersive storytelling and technologies across a whole range of major museums. And the range and quality of interesting projects out there right now is 🔥🔥🔥.
To the Hague first, where old friends Moyosa Media have created the VR for “Loot” the Mauritshuis’ exhibition about stolen art. Brilliant idea, and like the work of Space Popular, the intersections between real and virtual are richly explored. Great story about it in the New York Times.*
Then to London, where Rebel: 30 Years of London Fashion, the Design Museum’s history of street style gets an augmented reality try-on room powered by Snapchat. The tech’s not new, but this is a seamless integration that makes a world of sense. I’m heading down to see it in a couple of weeks.
Then over to the Musee D’Orsay, where the same Van Gogh exhibition we talked about last week with its NFT digital souvenirs has also got installations where you can talk to an AI-powered Van Gogh about his mental health struggles.
This mini-breakout of immersive goodness happens as a major new research project, Museums in the Metaverse, was announced last week. Funded by Innovate UK, this £5.6million project will look towards the next wave of virtual museum experiences.
The focus of public investment into this space is welcome - the commercial model for immersive technologies in museum experiences is still highly uncertain. Note about the Van Gogh, “Loot” and Rebel that they’re all inside paid exhibitions. This virtuous circle, from early stage, publicly funded experimental R&D and innovation through to commercially productised use is critical if we’re going to truly deepen the adoption of current and next-gen digital storytelling in the sector.
Let’s be clear though: in a changing market with weak demand, embracing immersive isn’t an option, it’s a competitive necessity.
In London, Outernet Global is already the most popular art gallery in the country. Not the National Gallery, not the Tate, but a new-built centre showcasing digital art - mostly by artists with no real public visibility - across large-format screens. Refik Anadol’s show at Sphere has had a LOT more eyeballs than his show at MOMA.
The choice to do digital and immersive storytelling is not a could do. In a rapidly changing environment, it is a must do.
(* NB, was George Osborne riffing on Loot this week when he said the stolen objects at the British Museum would make a great exhibition? Call him up Joel!)
Trend #4 // The social dilemma
There’s a warning note in that last piece.
We’re going to end by sounding that warning a lot louder.
Social media has been a good news story for museums over the last decade. But I think it’s now hitting a brick wall, an activity that’s got nowhere new to go.
When I first joined the British Museum in 2014, unlocking their potential in social media was not just low hanging fruit, but a real tangible way of pursuing the BM’s mission of being “of and for the world”. The YouTube channel we built there remains one of my favourite ever projects, still today an incredible resource of story, alive with the personality and passion of curators talking about things they love.
The success we had in YouTube and Facebook was driven by the first of a series of transitions which Museum’s benefited from as they grew their social audiences in the last decade.
The first transition was the rise of video as the primary media of the web, something that happened in late 2014. Making video became a critical priority - and one I think we and many others took very well.
The second transition happened a few years later as Instagram exploded.
Insta is great for museums partly because Insta’s visual nature suited the core assets (collection imagery) which museums have access to, and partly because at the beginning its immature advertising model meant there was no throttling of account follower growth. Museums could grow an audience to a million followers or more without spending a cent.
A third transition then happened in the Covid period, a digital-only period unlocking a wild range of creativity in museum teams. At the same time, TikTok erupted, and their very open embrace of culture as a content category helped another wave of innovation, creativity and a land grab of significant audiences.
But since then, what?
With Facebook and Twitter/X audiences long-topped out; Instagram now governed by the same rigid algorithm incentivising ad spend museums just don’t have, and TikTok’s thresholds already reached by the museums who went hard and early, a structural change in the social media market we’ve seen in the last few years has made social innovation HARD.
And at this point, no museum is really embracing the transitions in the social market which have followed.
Whilst the success of the last decade has been about taking museum storytelling to as many people as possible through Facebook, Insta, Twitter and YouTube, the new wave of social is smaller and harder to see.
They’re by no means new, but social’s real current innovation is now held in Whatsapp groups, on Telegram and on Discord channels. It’s more fragmented, more relentless - and less evidently a place for storytelling.
And museums aren’t there.
Go look for museums with WhatsApp or Discord channels and you’ll find nothing. Indeed, the art world altogether seems silent on WhatsApp. Elsewhere Discord channels were critical drivers of the NFT bubble. Artists nurture their own multi-channel communities.
I worry about the risk of disintermediation - another place where audiences are being distracted from museums offering by smarter, quicker, more relevant digital cultures.
It’s tough but necessary, but the best museums will need to re-evaluate soon what their investments in social are for.
Looking into the complex world of dark social will have to follow for the never-ending task of building audience to flourish.
Next week on Creative R&D // Digital Performance
Next week we’re going to look at the state of play in digital dance, theatre and opera, and ask why this could be Winter 2023’s most exciting production:
See you next week. ❤️