Making and Sharing Stories – Immersive Experiments in Sharing Knowledge for Cultural Heritage

Recently, during ongoing global pandemic restrictions, we have found virtuality imposed upon many of our everyday activities, experiences and interactions. Remote, mediated collaboration presented itself as nearly only way of working within the international Creative Europe research project ‘Beyond Matter – Cultural Heritage on the Verge of Virtual Reality’ which gathers diverse actors committed to arts, culture and heritage. At Aalto University, our work centres on further developing a research framework using co-creative embodied practices and artistic and humanities-oriented methodologies. We seek to learn more about deeper meanings that often come about as a result of culture and heritage experiences. How, when and why do exhibitions touch their visitors in meaningful ways?
In this paper we discuss the design process leading to the first pilot in a series of experimental participatory PORE workshops (Performance-Oriented Research Methods for Audience Studies and Exhibition Evaluation). The workshop was created as an online experience for the open-source Mozilla Hubs platform, where participants interacted as avatars. Parting ways with fascination for (hyper)realism we are relying on sensibilities of artistic praxis to experiment with aesthetics of the medium while posing ethical questions about what sustainability could mean in the context of interdisciplinary collaboration, participatory engagement and communication.