In the last days of summer, the first in Russia architectural on-line festival 360FEST took place, organized by three young architectural teams: Sa lab, ARCHSLON and SYNTHESIS MOSCOW.
A significant part of the festival was the workshop, the participants of which viewed the museum space as a bridge between the real and virtual worlds. Each group was offered one of five problem areas of museum institutions that can be solved using a virtual environment: the problem of storage facilities, scaling of museums, accessibility, customization of museums and content, teleport - the unification of different museum spaces in different parts of the world.
The participants worked with a game prototype of the virtual museum, consisting of five spherical volumes. Each team developed one volume, which later became part of a single virtual museum space.
Curators comment:
The digital environment offers unique opportunities for rethinking the problems of the familiar world. One of the main tasks is to prove that the virtual world is not an alternative to the physical environment, but its organic development and addition. Virtual space is the tool that allows you to solve the main problems of the real world. One of these problems lately has been geographic accessibility.
The results of the Festival amazed everyone - not only the workshop participants, but also the jury members, speakers, and the organizers themselves! 20 people met for the first time in the on-line space of the Festival and in four days created a whole universe! The most interesting thing is that the participants of the workshop got acquainted not only with each other and with the theme of exhibition spaces, but also with tools: those softwares in which they created a new world in a short time.
Not Available / Jury Choice
Elizaveta Grishina, Irina Kapunkina, Anastasia Sonina, Irina Talibova
Topic: now museums are physical spaces that have a whole fan of different kinds of restrictions - time, geographic, thematic, etc.
When we are transferred to the digital environment, some of the restrictions automatically disappear. After all, a visitor in a second can get into a virtual museum from anywhere in the world. Therefore, we decided to open the topic from the other side: through the concept of inaccessibility.
Despite the fact that the digital space offers a number of advantages, the effect of presence and immersion in the environment created by the artist is lost. In an effort to illustrate this effect, we created a cold and secluded planet - as a metaphor for emptiness, in which works of art become guiding stars.
To implement the idea, we chose the works of a modern artist
Tracy Helgeson, who strives for simplicity and clarity of expression: in color, in form, in the choice of subjects and in a laconic compositional solution. All these qualities catch the viewer's attention.
A visitor, getting to our virtual exhibition, passes the test: how true is his desire to contemplate art? This art is unusual for him: he sees not a picture on the wall or an exhibit in a window, but an imaginary oasis on the horizon. And strives for it. The painting becomes his main goal, he does not know what it is about, does not understand why he needs it, but at the same time he is carried away.
The elusive beauty of the works refers us to real life, in which we ourselves choose the vector of motion. Questions arise along the way. Will I get to my goal? What will happen next? Am I running in vain?
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Teleport / Viewers' Choice
Tatiana Nestrugina, Polina Stepanova, Tatiana Shirokova, Rada Belova
Theme: museums, exhibitions and key spaces are geographically separated and cannot be connected in the real world. The virtual world can expand geography, erase boundaries and allow one space to penetrate into others.
Outside of physical space, a teleport allows us not only to move ourselves between different spaces in a second, but also to move an object of art, which we cannot imagine in life in such a space. The perception of art outside of physical reality is completely different than live, so we suggest the viewer not to admire the art in our museum, but to reflect on the significance of the context and its relationship with the object. As an example, I chose the sculpture of Venus de Milo, a well-known work that has long become a symbol, even an icon.
The planet consists of six spaces with different atmospheres: dominant, amphitheater, cyberpunk, surrealism, replication and grotto. Each of the environments reveals to the viewer the image of Venus from a new side. The museum proposes to change the viewer's attitude to a well-known work and to think about controversial issues through the collision of sculpture and a more or less familiar context for it. Will our attitude towards Venus change dramatically outside the usual halls of the Louvre?
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Scaling
Oleg Chedia, Anna Sklezneva, Daria Mansurova
Topic: The proliferation of museums is an inevitable but extremely difficult process.
Scaling - expanding functions and expanding the museum into a virtual environment. One of the scalability options in this environment is adaptation. As an example of adaptation, it was decided to take the most abstract area of information for perception - sound. Based on the sound spectrum of the composition, its three-dimensional model is created. The viewer (listener) is given the opportunity to discover a new spatial layer of sound perception.
This type of exhibiting will work with museums whose main content is sound. The first exposition uses the work of the German industrial group Einstürzende Neubauten. Since the style of their performance evokes associations with performance and Dadaist motives, music becomes an interesting material for the materialization of the visual and emotional series. In some parts of the digital landscape, sounds are reproduced, and the landscape begins to deform based on the spectrum of these sounds.
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Customization
Elena Belkova, Andrey Kisin, Yulia Mikhailova, Elizaveta Kolesova
Topic: The content of the museum is usually set and focused on the average visitor, without adjusting to a specific viewer.
The crux of the problem lies in the fact that the visitor to the physical museum is limited in the choice of content. In the virtual space, the amount and kind of content may not be limited by the parameters of the real world. Our task is to show how a person can determine and adjust the information received by himself through personal choice in the study of the virtual space. Based on the idea of wandering multiple options, we have chosen a labyrinth as the spatial typology of our sphere. The structure invites the visitor to make a choice throughout the entire journey an unlimited number of times, each navigation experience becomes unique.
But any museum does not consist only of space; its main task is to exhibit and represent. As an example, we took as a basis the simplest thing in the world - an apple. And it turned out that this is a very influential symbol in all spheres of activity, from mythology to the latest technology. Thus, this theme meets our request for an unlimited amount of information, making it similar to the experience of navigating a museum with searching the Internet.
The entire sphere consists of a labyrinth, divided into four main blocks, smoothly flowing into each other. Each block contains one of four key themes of apple symbolism: culture and art, mythology, science, false facts or the whole “truth” about apples.
At the points of contact of the labyrinths, objects are placed that, according to their semantic meaning, are at the junction of topics. At these points, the visitor can change the direction, the color of the labyrinth and, accordingly, the topic of the study.
Choosing his path, the user determines for himself the genus and the amount of information that he will receive during the journey.
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Reserves
Ekaterina Borisenko, Ksenia Apalkova, Maria Pudan
Topic: The Secret Life of Museums. Most of the content of museums is hidden from us in storerooms.
80% of museum funds are hidden in storerooms and are not shown to visitors. We see the solution to the problem in the creation of a global virtual fund. In the very near future, all museums will have virtual scanned copies of objects and, thanks to Big Data, the exchange of data between museums will become possible, and the virtual environment will make it possible to more effectively interact with works of art in storerooms.
Virtual vaults will not only allow in the future to display works of art hidden in museum funds, but also preserve fragile, yet underestimated digital art.
As part of the workshop and post-pandemic reality, we decided to reveal this topic using the example of #COVIDART - a potential art that has social and aesthetic value, but which in the near future has the risk of disappearing into the global information flow of the Internet. We created the #COVIDART virtual vault to preserve the memory of one of the most difficult periods in modern history.
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