Performance-Oriented Research Promoting Community Engagement Museum Activities

Researchers working in anthropology, archaeology, art, computer science, and the humanities, among other fields, have been proposing and making use of immersive media as a way to augment knowledge-building processes for half a century now. This is not surprising given the deep penetration of digital infrastructures into our epistemic practices.

Interaction with digital devices occupies a fair amount of our attention span during
customary human activities. In the case of specialists working in museums and other
heritage institutions (such as galleries, libraries, and archives), digital artefacts are now liberally used components in the exhibition repertoire. Noted once for their potential for expressive multimodality and audience engagement, the digital models that come into being through the process of immersive media design and production are now also being explored as an intrinsic element of knowledge preservation.

This is the case with our current project, Beyond Matter: Cultural Heritage on the Verge of Virtual Reality, funded by the European Union Creative Europe program. During my presentation, I would like to consider how the multidimensional aspects of human presence impact digital evolution through immersive media. Drawing from work samples ranging from the artistic to the scientific, I would like to challenge notions of human adaptation to new modes of existenceamong digitally born artefacts and question how the digital comes to the human, and how the human is brought into the digital. I will also use the opportunity to introduce aspects of our performance-oriented research methods deployed as part of the project’s audience and community engagement initiatives. These methods, which combine autoethnographic and duoethnographic narratives with artefactual analysis of material culture, will be used in our project to gauge audience responses to our reconstructions of the exhibitions Les Immateriaux (Centre Pompidou, 1985) and Iconoclash (ZKM, 2002).