"Avatars and Poetry” – Learning from Experimental Immersive Participatory Dialogues on Cultural Heritage

The ongoing integration of emerging digital technologies within museum settings, including virtual and augmented reality, is reshaping the strategies museums employ to engage with their audiences allowing for exchanges that enable visitors to take a more active role in their experiences. These transformative approaches not only strive to make museums more accessible to broader audiences, but also hold the potential to form new communities and platforms for debate about topics of public concern. As part of the international interdisciplinary Creative Europe project 'Beyond Matter – Cultural Heritage on the Verge of Virtual Reality', we have focused on developing the Performance-Oriented Research Methods for Audience Studies and Exhibition Evaluation (PORe), implementing the research framework through a series of co-creative workshops for museum audiences.
This paper presents a participatory co-creative PORe workshop model “Avatars and Poetry”, a case study showcasing an experimental investigation into novel approaches to audience engagement which stimulates the interpretative and reflective processes of the participants by utilizing multimodal mechanisms that integrate dialogue, sensing, writing, making, and enacting. The workshop took place as an accompanying event to the travelling installation 'Matter, Non-Matter, Anti-Matter' (2022-2023) exhibiting interactive virtual reconstructions of two seminal historic exhibitions, Les Immatériaux (Centre Pompidou, 1985), and Iconoclash (ZKM, 2002). After experiencing the virtual reconstructions, the workshop participants are invited to engage in pairs with a selection of exhibition materials, negotiating its remediation through a series of co-creative tasks into avatar-performed live-animation video poems. These multimodal exhibition commentaries – visual, verbal and performative hybrids – are shared within the group to elicit a discussion on perspectives emerging from encounters with heritage and taking part in the participatory activities. Utilizing augmented reality and social media technologies in the workshop prompts a critical discussion on contemporary socio-technical dimensions.