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Aleksey Lebedev
Head of the Museum Design Laboratory
of the Russian Culturology Institution

The majority of our fellow-countrymen are sure that ancient people lived in museums. As for the art museums, they are the places where artists are still living and working. I myself for a long time have been a museum worker. And answering the usually asked at acquaintance question “Where do you work?” I proudly said “In the Tretyakov Gallery”. Very often my new acquaintance would nod knowingly and say “So, you are an artist!” I have no intention to sneer at such understanding of museum life, because it is based on the idea of a museum exhibit’s cohesiveness.       

Museum workers often go to the other extreme. They are very sensitive – sometimes almost painfully – to the authenticity of an exhibit. In the mind of a museum professional there is an impassable gulf between an authentic object, environmental material and a copy. Probably, this explains why modern means of information display are used in museums only as supplement tools that make easier the process of registration and storage (museum automatic information systems, AIS), comment on what is being exhibited (a kind of electronic labels and explications), and provide additional information (showing the objects which are not included in the exhibition). Alongside with traditional paper editions of museum materials we can find now CD-ROMs and web-sites. The root of the matter remains the same also when modern technical means are used as instruments of displaying the museum’s materials (demonstration of movie clips in a museum of cinema; showing video-art objects in a modern art museum, and the like).

We are interested in another method which is being more and more widely practiced in museums. We mean specially created audio-, video- and multimedia programmes which act as full fledged members of the exhibition ‘performance’ together with traditional museum artifacts.
     
Multimedia out of ‘production waste’

From inventory database to electronic exhibition

According to the accepted today terminology we shall call ‘electronic exhibition’ not any informational kiosk for visitors but only a system of terminals placed in the exhibition and broadcasting information from the register-and-storage database. (It would have been more precise to call it ‘an electronic explication’ or ‘label’ but the term has settled).

Of course, an electronic exhibition is not just an interface which provides a visitor with an access to the electronic catalogue. It has its own script. Moreover, a number of materials, as in any other electronic publication, are prepared especially for it: texts, images, audio- and video-clips, special multimedia programmes for visitors (including games), etc. But compared to a CD-ROM, a web-site or a local informational kiosk, an electronic exhibition has an obvious advantage: it can be synchronized. The main part of an electronic exhibition is comprised of the museum database materials and all changes and supplements introduced by a curator to the database are immediately visualized in the system.

Electronic exhibits correlate with the actual museum exhibitions in which they are placed in different ways. They can

• comment on the materials of the exhibition and help the visitors to find their way around it (interactive building layout in the electronic exhibition of the museum of Saint-Petersburg water treatment plant),
• supplement the main exhibition (‘People’ electronic exhibition in OAO Tatneft Museum, Almetevsk),
• introduce a game and entertainment element to the exhibition (educational games in the electronic exhibition of the State Museum of Nature and Man in Hanty-Mansiisk).
       
  3D-models

Computer 3D modeling was invented as an architectural tool, so the use of three-dimensional graphics programmes is most effective where the object of interpretation is an architectural structure or its part – in reserve museums and in museums housed in architectural monuments.

Let’s imagine a typical situation: an XVIII century building was reconstructed in the XIX century. For example, in a hall with two rows of windows a floor structure was made to make it two-storied. Besides, the new ceiling was covered with a fresco of big artistic value. To recreate the outlook of the building as it was in the XVIII century would mean to demolish the following century historic and cultural monument.

This is when computer graphics comes to the rescue of restorers, researchers and educators. A very successful experience of using it is demonstrated by the employees of the State Russian Museum (SRM), who reconstructed the original outlook of one of the palaces belonging to the museum – the Mikhailovsky (Engineering) Castle. While the reconstruction of the castle exterior is fully based on documents, some of the interiors are made ‘by analogy’ and reflect in big extent a free rendering approach (which was in every case honestly specified by the authors). The created 3D model is used during restoration work (for colour and pattern matching of finishes, etc.) and during exhibition work of the museum (virtual placement of furniture and pictures before doing it in real life). And, finally, the same model was used for creation of the visitors’ information system and for a number of  SRM’s electronic publications on CD-ROM.
     
Specially created multimedia programmes

The first and easiest variant is to use multimedia in art exhibitions when the programme is a part of the displayed artifact. For example, in 2003 the Museum of Ethnology in Leiden (the Netherlands) presented an exhibition of political caricature, where next to the caricature pictures you could find monitors showing TV interviews with the portrayed characters. This increased the effect produced by the graphic sheets considerably, but still a caricature exhibition can be perceived without any supplementary video-materials. However today we witness the development of a more radical approach. It is not uncommon now to see a piece of contemporary art and a monitor next to it with the author demonstrating his/her work and telling something about it. It will not be right to call such speech a commentary, because in the framework of postmodernist aesthetics it is an equal part of the work, not at least inferior to the object created with the artist’s hands. More than that, in this case the material and multimedia artifacts are inseparable and one cannot be presented to the viewer without the other.

The situation of equality and expositional inseparability of material and virtual objects is possible not only in art exhibitions. Here are several examples of such unity in museums of different types:

• A musical instrument and its sound (Museum of Music, Stockholm, The House of Music, Vienna)
• A stuffed bird and a recording of its singing (Darwin Museum, Moscow)
• Shaman clothes and a video with a ritual dance (Museum of Ethnology, Leiden)
• Uniform and equipment of a famous hockey-player and an episode of a match he played (Hockey Museum, Toronto)
• A stuffed animal and a video film showing this animal in its natural environment (‘Naturalis’ Museum, Leiden)
• Technical objects and demonstration of their operation on the monitor (Nemo Museum, Amsterdam; Science Museum, London; Technology Museum, Vienna)

We should note that in all mentioned above cases we see not just matched pairs of objects but ‘object – process’ pairs which means that they have equal expositional validity.

And finally the most interesting situation in the context of the chosen topic is the one when a material object cannot at all be displayed in the exhibition and multimedia is the only thing that is able to demonstrate it (blast furnace operation, molecular processes, volcano eruptions, geological structure of the Earth, etc.). Of course, all this can be shown with the help of traditional means (mock-up models, diagrams, etc.), but up-to-date means of presenting information appear to be in such cases much more spectacular and above all more authentic than any other. Multimedia is widely used in natural science and technical museums, but it can also be seen in art and history museums (Impressionism Museum in Auver, France; Kalashnikov Museum, Izhevsk).
     
Museum of M.T. Kalashnikov

Let’s look at the last one in more detail. Museum of M.T. Kalashnikov opened in 2004 in a specially constructed building. The important fact is that it is not a museum of the Kalashnikov machine-gun, nor of any weapon at all, it’s a museum of a man – the design engineer, inventor and our most famous fellow-countryman. Usually a museum devoted to one personality is a memorial museum. A situation when people create a museum of a live person is non-trivial and fraught with a number of difficulties. Additional problems in finding materials were caused by the man’s biography and character of his professional activity:

M.T. Kalashnikov was born in a peasant family which in late 1920s was repressed and exiled; his house was burnt down. Nothing is left of the material evidence referring to Kalashnikov’s childhood and youth.

The biggest part of M.T.Kalashnikov’s life he was security-guarded, many of his works are still classified as top secret.

Non-secret material has long been dispersed among museum collections (Military Historical Museum of Artillery, Engineering and Signal Corps, Saint Petersburg; Museum of the Izhevsk machinery works; Tula State Museum of Weapons, etc.), and the owners do not intend to give it away.

In connection with this, seventeen specially created video- and multimedia programmes became the main exhibits of this museum. They help to realize the conception of the ‘first-person’ museum, when the hero himself tells the visitor about his life. Extracts from Kalashnikov’s memoirs and videos with his stories interchange with newsreels showing Kalashnikov himself, his inventions at the background of historical events.

In this case video- and multimedia programmes happened to be practically the only authentic exhibits. All the rest (environmental material, dummy weapons, designer installations) rather create an environment, a background for the virtual artifacts. The only exception is the part of the exhibition displaying M.T. Kalashnikov’s own collection (mostly his awards and presents). But in this section multimedia also prevails, this time not because of the absence of authentic material objects, but because they are unentertaining and of low aesthetic quality.
     
Multimedia exhibition in the western pavilion – Corps de Garde of the Mikhailovsky Castle¹

Obviously, the next step should bring a new stage of unification of electronic and traditional means of display and acknowledgement of the multimedia space as appropriate for exhibitions. Mutual integration of a museum and new technologies is the main idea of the Museum Multimedia Centre created in the State Russian Museum.

Corps de Garde exhibition will not contain any authentic museum artifacts. It is created as a multifunctional centre of museum multimedia technologies which produce different visual effects. The important fact is that, while the pavilion facades have preserved their original visage, its interiors have been many times rebuilt. Inside the building only the extremely beautiful oval stairs are worthy of showing. As for the rooms, the authors of the exhibition can feel free. There is no eternal museum question here – how to avoid the visual conflict of the exhibits and equipment with the forms of a unique architectural monument?

As for the “plot” of the exhibition, it is rather simple:

Exhibits of every floor demonstrate different multimedia technologies and at the same time have their own subject matter.

• The underground floor – Informational introduction to the exhibition;
• 1st floor – “Saint Petersburg” (imperial Petersburg, Petersburg of museums);
• 2nd floor – “The Russian Museum” (public activity, work inside the museum);
• 3rd floor – “Corps de Gardes of the Mikhailovsky Castle”.

The exhibition is formed as a complex of relevantly autonomous spaces, which are connected with each other through a system of hyperlinks. It can be viewed during one tour or during several visits to different rooms.

The approach to the creation of the Centre exhibition was formed under the influence of the Corps de Garde building itself and the epoch when it was constructed – the time of Paul I’s reign: the period of projects and intentions, of fantastic reality and real fantasies, when one thing could be easily changed into another. This is the essence of that epoch.

The nature of all phenomena created by human imagination, whether it is architecture, painting or multimedia, is if not the same then closely related. The exhibition tries to unite these kindred arts; it is an attempt to show the peculiarities of the artistic world outlook starting from the intentions of the Emperor Paul I to the new time Russian painting and multimedia. Perhaps together they will be able to create museum’s own proper dimension with a specific sense of time.

This is why the prepared exhibition is somewhat mystical: it tries to introduce the past to the present. The style of the exhibition is the style of intentions and fantasies, of unexpected union of the imaginary and the real. Two lives of museum artifacts – antecedent and present – are united in the virtual space in a special way; so the Centre exhibition tells not only about the use of multimedia technologies, but also about their language, aesthetics, and means of expression. Despite of its ultramodern character, it addresses innermost meanings and tries to answer in its own way the eternal questions “What is a palace? What is a city? What is a museum? What is art?”

The exhibition gives a visitor an opportunity to enter the multimedia space which can appear as the space of the museum or the space of the palace, the space of the city or as confluence of these spaces. The effect of the constant traveling both in space and time is intensified due to historic reconstructions created by means of multimedia and lighting technique.

Visitors’ absorption in the multimedia space, which grows as they move from one room to another, finally turns into direct participation in the exhibition performance. The exhibition whirlpool engulfs the visitors and at the end they see a view over the Mikhailovsky Castle which crowns the exhibition ‘session’. The chain of births has been followed; the stories of the palaces and their inhabitants with their multimedia collections have been overlived. Here is the crossing of all ways – of the museum artifact, museum time, museum means (first of all multimedia ones) and of the owner of the Mikhailovsky Castle, Emperor Paul I, himself.

Corps de Garde is an attempt to create a “Museum tower of multimedia wonders’ where modern achievements, future possibilities and ‘museum backstage life’ are unveiled before the visitor. At the same time (since it is distant traveling in epochs and spaces, made possible only by means of screens and projections) the exhibition becomes a kind of a ‘mystic crystal’ which reflects the whole museum universe – from collections to every-day work.

The exhibition in the Corps de Garde is an absolutely new stage of museum-multimedia integration. It is being created at a turning point when media technologies stop acting as a supplementary mean and are actively included in the museum activity.
     
Exhibition at Ivan the Great Bell Tower²  

If Corps de Garde is an attempt to create an exhibition exclusively through media, Ivan the Great Bell Tower will be a step toward integration of real and electronic artifacts. The exhibition is devoted to the history of Moscow Kremlin architecture. Its topic can be formulated as “The Kremlin that doesn’t exist now and the Kremlin that has never existed” (Moscow Kremlin buildings that have not survived or have never been constructed). Unlike the Corps de Garde here there were limiting conditions. It was necessary to present real museum artifacts in the exhibition (fragments of the ruined Kremlin buildings). Besides, the bell tower itself is an unique monument of XVI century architecture; its interiors cannot be cluttered with show windows, screens or plasma panels. All multimedia visuals will be organized on the whitewashed walls. The engineering design provides for an opportunity to switch off all screen projection units and booster-lights around exhibits to help the visitors enjoy the architecture of the bell tower in its initial beauty.

The main method of exhibition structuring and material organization will be “architectural stratigraphy”³. This approach is revealed first of all in the thematic structure of the exhibition and arrangement of its sections in different rooms of the bell tower:

• 1st floor of the first tier – Early Kremlin (up to the mid-XV century);
• 2nd floor of the first tier – Kremlin of the second half of XV to the XVII centuries;
• the second tier – “the Kremlin that has never existed” (the projects that had not been realized during the XVIII century Kremlin reconstruction) and “the bird’s-eye view of the Kremlin” (panoramic sights of the XIX century Kremlin);
• ambulatory (viewing point) – the present-day Kremlin.

The designed exhibition can be viewed as a synthesis of objects, architecture and electronic exhibits. They are closely interrelated, involved in a constant dialogue, one opens a theme and then passes it on to another. Highlighted architectural details are transferred to the electronic exhibition as images. The bell tower interiors are also emphasized by lights and thanks to the play of lights and shadows look like a projection.

The electronic exhibition – projections of the Kremlin sights on the walls – is integrated into the interiors. Realistic effect of the electronic exhibition is enhanced due to its space orientation. Projections correlate with the views which one could have seen from the windows at different epochs. Reality of the projections doesn’t contradict their delusiveness. They are only visions that appear before the visitor for a short while. The Kremlin “that no longer exists” disappears with the end of the programme, but the bell tower architecture and the objects are still perceived through the created image.

Lighting system plays a very important role in the exhibition. The use of concentrated light and changed light intensity around separate objects is the main feature of the exhibition.

The light focuses the visitors’ attention and directs them throughout the exhibition. It turns on or off, moves, catches some artifacts and interior details. The visitors follow the light and stop at places marked by the light.

The light connects the electronic and object exhibits, providing ‘transportation’ of objects from the real space to the projections and vice versa. Light-and-shade brings out the volume and texture of the bell tower interiors.

Another peculiarity of the exhibition is the composition of the small space of the bell tower interiors with the gigantic outside space of the Kremlin. A person standing in a small room is looking at a big space. To solve this task is the major objective of the electronic exhibition. Thanks to the projection the walls move apart and then draw together again, windows open and then ‘slam’. At the end of every section the electronic exhibition ‘goes out’ and the visitor stays one-on-one with the architecture.

And finally, at the end, from the viewing point the visitor observes the panorama of the present-day Kremlin.    

Thus, Ivan the Great Bell Tower will present a comprehensive spectacle where electronic and real objects act as full fledged participants of the exhibition performance.

***

Multimedia and new information technologies have no real space of their own. It seems they don’t actually need it due to the virtual and private manner in which they are used. However, in the city environment, advertising multimedia with its gigantic panels and split screens advances very aggressively. Besides, there is video-art which also, though only at festivals by now, but wins its place in the big cities streets.

The museum has accepted and welcomed computer technology; however it exists in its rooms in considerable isolation, as if it was too shy to take place next to eternal art or as if it was afraid of its extreme attractiveness for the modern man. Examples described in this article are rather exceptions. But tomorrow is with them.

There are good reasons to believe that further development of museums will be connected with increasingly interactive exhibits and the wide use of state-of-the-art means of information display.