Despite having lived in Liverpool for the past … years, this was one of the first visits that I had made to the museum. This got me thinking about who visits museums and how do they visit? My own circumstances are that visiting museums and galleries were not an activity that my family took part in, instead that that type of activity was a school type event, linked with education beyond my home. My background is Sri-Lankan, at home there are few links to art other than direct objects that are of cultural significance to people's own culture. Therefore I had to examine whether the museum was to become part of my culture, or I was to become part of its audience. Therefore exploring this new environment through the media of my specialism, with consideration of using artificial and virtual technology, gave me the connection to this new environment. Our introductory sessions involved focusing on the museums priorities to increase their online, aAR and VR presence. This project planning was an exciting time, as we came together to share ideas and to highlight the issues around representations of objects in museums. I became aware that the museum's collection is mostly in store, and that many hidden treasures exist, hidden away in boxes and in stores. Therefore, our work was an opportunity to show pieces to the public that may be to fragile, to precious or unsuitable for display in a museum glass case. Looking around the museum gave me the impression of an old fashioned display of labelled objects, some of them were weird or clustered into a strange representation of a culture. The inflated seal skin, the Canadian totem pole, the Mayan Codex were all extraordinary objects, however, they didn't come to life for me or communicate their cultural significance or context. Having worked out what was missing was the cultural context and the meaning of objects, that some life needed to be given back to the museums objects in order to make the relevant to the viewer, this is where the idea of animation came from. We were in groups of 6 - 9 students, one from the same class as myself and two from the same subject. This meant that we were able to discuss our ideas more freely as we had things in common.
(This video shows the interior of the culture gallery that we are working on)
(This image shows the briefing session we had with the project tutors. )
(We had sticky notes to keep us on track, identifying what section and which things needed to be worked on)
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