In collaboration with Ludwig Museum and Spatial Affairs exhibition, 20 May 2021
In the context of Aalto University’s research involvement with the Beyond Matter – Cultural Heritage on the Verge of Virtual Reality project, we are delighted to announce that the first experimental PORe Workshop ‘Make and Share Stories’ was brought to the international audiences through collaborative efforts of Aalto University and Ludwig Museum in two sessions on Thursday 20 May, following the virtual opening of the Spatial Affairs exhibition.
The workshop took place in a shared immersive virtual reality space, created especially for this event using the free open-source Mozilla Hubs platform. Here participants, workshop facilitators and tour guides came together and interacted as avatars. The opening part of the workshop offered the participants an exciting opportunity to learn more about the Spatial Affairs exhibition and the number of selected artworks through a polyvocal immersive guided tour.
In the second part of the workshop the participants were encouraged to actively partake in the interactive tasks within the virtual environment. These creatively engaging activities, based on the PORe methodology and concentrating on two artworks from the guided tour, afforded the participants to reflect and share their own accounts of the exhibition within the group, to create their own narrative in the virtual space and to add their voices to the existing exhibition narratives.
The PORe Workshop pilot was conceived and produced by Lily Díaz-Kommonen and Cvijeta Miljak from Systems of Representation research group of Aalto University with indispensable contributions of the guided tour concept and production by Zsófia Somogyi-Rohonczy, Zita Varga and Zsófia Szabó from the Educational Department of Ludwig Museum and Selina Oakes and Pekko Vasantola, Aalto University MA students taking part in Beyond Matter MA Fellowship programme with Ludwig Museum.
The artworks from the Spatial Affairs exhibition selected for the virtual guided tour, in the order of appearance, in the ‘Make and Share Stories’ workshop, with the two bolded works discussed in the narrative creation part of the workshop:
Architecture Pill, Non-physical Environment and Non-physical Environmental Control Kit by Hans Hollein, 1967
Gegebenfalls die Wirklichkeit by Alicja Kwade, 2017
Dialectic Triangulation, A Visual Philosophy by Agnes Denes, 1970
Domesticated Ruin by Andreas Angelidakis, 2018
Manifesto of the First Pseudo Exhibition by Gyula, Pauer, 1970
Informational Relief by Hiroshi Kawano, 1969
Spiritual Reality by Lou Cantor, 2017
Black market: 6gb ending by Andrej Škucfa, 2019
Spatial Composition 8 by Katarzyna Kobro, 1932
The primary objective of Aalto University’s contribution to the Beyond Matter project is to develop a framework for novel engagement approaches that encourage co-creative participatory practices for community involvement and that promote the interpretative opportunities afforded by new media designs. The aim of the framework is to provide opportunities for museums to engage with their audiences and to gain valuable insights about the exhibition experience that would otherwise remain undisclosed.
The PORe (Performance-Oriented Research Methods for Audience Studies and Exhibition Evaluation) is a framework allowing for exploratory research, creativity and openness promoting participation, new experiences and co-creation of new content by the museum visitors.
Acknowledgements:
Performance-Oriented research (PORe) methodology concept and development: Lily Díaz-Kommonen PORe Workshop concept, production, implementation: Lily Díaz-Kommonen and Cvijeta Miljak Virtual space design and implementation to Mozilla Hubs: Cvijeta Miljak Guided tour concept and narratives: Zsófia Somogyi-Rohonczy, Zita Varga Guided tour narratives: Selina Oakes, Pekko Vasantola Guided tour videos: Zsófia Szabó, Cvijeta Miljak (final editing) Press Kit video: Cvijeta MIljak