The Spectacle of Augmented Reality
New Models of Participation in Museums
Daria Bojan
11310685
26.06.2017
Supervisor: Amanda Wasielewski
University of Amsterdam
New Media and Digital Culture
Under the constant pressure of opening their programs and exhibitions to a wider audience, contemporary museums face new challenges of developing into interactive and information-rich environments that allow visitors to be immersed in new types of experiences. Within this context, museums started using augmented reality (AR), a technology which offers new possibilities of embracing participatory practices and engaging the audience with exciting and creative means of displaying objects and information. As a technology that superimposes virtual objects over real life environments, augmented reality offers unique affordances, combining physical and virtual worlds.
Although AR gained popularity over the past decade, there are relatively few studies that actively explore how mobile, context-aware AR can enhance participation in a museum setting. Thus, this paper proposes an analysis of AR and its implications in terms of participation in the museum space. More specifically, the research question that guides this paper is what model of participation AR creates in a museum setting and how does it relate to the idea of the spectacle? In order to answer this question, this paper will provide an analysis of the theories and larger discourses surrounding participation and spectacle, as the main drivers that paved the way for augmented reality in museums. Within this context, augmented reality will be considered as spectacle that represents not only a form of entertainment, but one that involves deeper, political uses in museums. The various levels of participation enabled by this technology in museums will be determined on the basis of four different case studies that make use of augmented reality experiences in various ways: virtual reconstruction and the museum as an educational experience, outdoor guides and historical explorers, immersive art experiences and curatorial apps, and finally, guerrilla exhibits.
Keywords: augmented reality, museums, spectacle, participation, virtual reconstruction, outdoor guides, immersive art experiences, curatorial apps, guerrilla exhibits
Introduction 1
Augmented Reality. A Short Introduction 4 Introduction to the Case Studies 6 Chapter 1. The Spectacle of Participation 10
1.1. The Society of Spectacle 10
1.2. Participatory Culture 13
1.3. From Passive Spectator to Produser 16
1.4. The Participatory Museum 19
Chapter 2. Museums and New Media 21
2.1. New Media. A Short Introduction 21
2.2. Museums and the Digital 24
2.3. The Transmedia Museum 25
Chapter 3. The Discourse of Augmented Reality in Museums 29
Conclusion 45
Bibliography 47
Introduction
Contemporary museums have become more than just mere repositories of masterpieces; they are meeting platforms for people and ideas. Since digital technologies became an essential part of our lives, the main question is whether these institutions can keep up with the rapid pace of innovation in science and technology and adjust to the needs of public, with a growing interest in new media and applications. Under constant pressure to open their programs and exhibitions to a wider audience, museums face new challenges of developing into interactive and information-rich environments that allow visitors to be immersed in new types of experiences. Today, all over the world, we can visit museums and use mobile applications with audio tours, searchable databases of art and online collection information and even augmented reality applications.
More and more museums have become aware that their future depends on remaining an active player of the public realm, and therefore, all efforts were concentrated on finding the best means to engage with the public and keep up to date with technological advances. At the same time the visitors have changed their horizon of expectation, becoming more active: from being passive observers, with no possibility to interact with museum object to being users, engaging with the museum collection, and most notably, participants, involved in the meaning-making process of art and artefacts.
In the past decade, museums have looked towards industries such as gaming and military, which have effectively used technologies such as augmented reality, which offers new possibilities to embrace participatory practices and engage the audience with exciting and creative means of displaying objects and information. As a technology that superimposes virtual objects over real life environments, Augmented Reality offers unique affordances, combining physical and virtual worlds. By digitally adding or removing information from the physical world, AR creates a sense that real and virtual objects coexist, and can enhance people's interactions both with each other and with objects in the world. The use of AR technology in museum setting coincides with the rise of smartphones and people’s increasing familiarity with mobile apps, often AR applications. Many museums have begun to experiment with augmented reality experiences, using them as didactic tools, artworks on display, and as part of novel programs designed to connect museums with their communities and offer more participatory opportunities.
Although AR has begun to gain momentum over the past decade, there are relatively few studies that actively explore how mobile, context-aware AR can enhance participation in
a museum setting. This paper proposes an analysis of AR and its implications in term of participation in the museum space. More specifically, the research question that guides this paper is what model of participation does AR create in a museum setting and how does it relate to the idea of the spectacle? In this framework, the content of AR experiences in their technological context will remain peripheral, giving way, instead, to an analysis of the theories and larger discourses surrounding participation and spectacle, as the main drivers that paved the way for augmented reality in museums.
In a general sense, the spectacle refers to an event or scene that visually impacts the audience. However, within art history and criticism, the notion of spectacle evokes not only questions of visuality, but also political implications. While for Guy Debord, one of the key theorists in Situationist theory, the spectacle refers to the social relations under capitalism a definition of social relations under capitalism, which are increasingly mediated by images, for Jean Baudrillard, the spectacle replaces "real life" entirely with technology, therefore audiences become passive viewers. A solution to this fatalistic views on spectatorship, is participation according to Claire Bishop, as it offers a new conceptualisation of the audiences, in which everyone can be a producer.
Today, our culture’s desire for spectacle has gained in intensity, just as our ability to stage the spectacle has increased due to technical advancements. This means it is no longer only film and television which mediate the spectacle, but also computer graphics and more recently, augmented reality. Within this context, this paper will refer to augmented reality as a form of spectacle that represents not only a form of entertainment, but as it will be shown later on, it also involves deeper, political uses in museums. The various levels of participation enabled by this technology in museums will be determined on the basis of four different case studies that make use of augmented reality experiences in different ways: virtual reconstruction and the museum as an educational experience, outdoor guides and historical explorers, immersive art experiences and curatorial apps, and finally, artists and guerrilla exhibits.
In order to assess the implications of AR in the museum context, this paper will be organized in three chapters, each one assessing relevant theories surrounding the larger discourse between augmented reality, participation and the idea of the spectacle.
The first chapter of this paper will situate the notion of the spectacle within a historical framework related to participation and will look into significant issues raised theorists such as Jonathan Crary, Guy Debord, Jean Baudrillard, Nicolas Bourriaud and later on by Claire Bishop. Further on, the focus of the paper will move towards the concept of participation in a broader context, one focused on a media/digital perspective and the conceptualization of
audience. A phenomenon that explains the rapid changes that occurred with the implementation of new communication technologies and mobile applications is “participatory culture”, a term introduced by American theorist Henry Jenkins. Within this new framework, we witness the emergence of a more active user that not only consumes content, but also creates it and shares it. As the focus of this thesis is on the use of AR in museum, the last section of this chapter will introduce the concept of the “participatory museum” elaborated upon by Nina Simon. As it will become clear, by using participatory projects, which can include AR apps, visitors can actively engage with the museum and its exhibits, thus the institution can become more relevant to communities.
As an environment filled with participatory opportunities, a museum offers a place for individuals to connect and learn together, while at the same time deepening the relationship between the institution, object, artist and the public. These can be deemed as participatory opportunities, which can be enhanced by the possibilities enabled by new media. Thus, the second chapter of this thesis will focus on the implementation of new media in museums. As a concept, new media is rather difficult to define. While Martin Lister envisions new media as a historical marker, Sonia Livingstone and Leah Lievrouw see new media as being socially shaped in unique ways, and as having appropriate social consequences. In a museum setting, such consequences are immediately visible, as new media affected the ways in which museums deliver information to their audiences, as well as the storytelling techniques used in order to engage the public. Within this context, the paper will move its focus to “transmedia storytelling”, a term coined by Jenkins, referring to storylines which are told via various media and communication platforms. By using AR as a transmedia storytelling tool, museums can showcase their collection in a more inclusive ways and create more dynamic and meaningful content that encourages user engagement.
Lastly, the third chapter will offer an overall discourse of augmented reality in museums based on the concepts discussed in the previous two chapters. These concepts will be taken as a point of analysis regarding the four case studies, previously mentioned. Ultimately, this section will attempt to answer to the question that guides this thesis, in terms of what model of participation AR creates in a museum setting and its relation to the idea of the spectacle.
Augmented Reality. A Short Introduction
Before moving on to describing the specific AR applications used in museums, it is worth exploring the various definitions of this concept and outlining the ways in which it will be used throughout this paper.
Even though the beginnings of AR date back to the 1960s with the experiments of Ivan Sutherland, which used a see-through head-mounted display that present 3D graphics mixed with physical objects, the works that refer to AR as a research field only began in the 1990s. One of the first conceptualizations of the term ‘augmented reality’ was given by Paul Milgram in 1994. In his account, augmented reality is placed within the context of a “Reality-Virtuality continuum”. This means that rather than seeing virtual reality and augmented reality as completely opposed to each other, he suggests that both concepts should be seen as lying at the opposite end of a continuum (283) (fig 1). While the left side of the continuum defines an environment consisting of real objects, the right side defines those environments which are composed solely by virtual objects; for instance, computer graphic simulations. In between these two sides of the continuum, Milgram suggests that we have a “mixed reality environment”, one in which the real world and virtual world objects are shown together within a single display (283).
Fig. 1. Simplified explanation of the Reality-Virtuality (RV) Continuum
A few years later, in 1997, Ronald Azuma published a survey that defined the field, explaining augmented reality as a “variation of virtual environments”, making a distinction between augmented reality and virtual reality (355). In comparison to VR, which is a technology that completely immerses the user, with no possibility of seeing the real world through the use of a head-mounted display, AR technology allows the user to see the real world around him, but with virtual objects superimposed upon the real world. Furthermore, AR is not restricted to a particular kind of display technology, such as the head-mounted display, and it
is also not limited to the sense of sight, offering the possibility to be applied to all senses: smell, touch and hearing. Thus, in Azuma’s account, AR is a tool for supplementing reality, rather than completely replacing it. In his survey, he defines AR not only as a technology, but also as a system that contains three characteristics: combining the real and the virtual, offering interactivity in real time and being registered in three dimensions (356).
More recently, augmented reality has been theorized as a real-time view of an enhanced physical world, with an overlay of virtual computer-generated information (Carmigniani et al 342). The immediate aim of AR is to simplify the user’s tasks by not only bringing virtual information to his immediate surroundings, but also by providing an indirect view of the real-world environment, such as in a live-video stream for example. In this sense, AR enhances the experience and user perception in their interaction with the real world (342).
In terms of display, there three major types that are frequently used in augmented reality: head mount display (HDM), handheld displays and spatial displays. HDM is worn on the head and places images both of real and virtual environments as an overlay on the user’s view of the world. Handheld displays make use of small computing devices, such as smartphones and tablets, to show “video-see-through” techniques that superimpose graphics upon the physical environment and sensors, such as GPS units (Carmigniani et al 348). Lastly, the Spatial Augmented Reality (SAR) employs video-projectors, optical elements, holograms and other tracking technologies in order to showcase graphical information. This display technique is most commonly used in universities, labs, museums and in the art community, as it naturally scales up to groups of users, allowing a close cooperation between the user and the specific institution.
Within the last decade, AR experiences were transposed on smartphones and used in several applications. Considered as a breakthrough AR app that transformed the gaming experience, the wildly popular Pokemon Go uses the smartphone camera and GPS in order to enable a location based Augmented Reality environment. However, AR has not only found its place in gaming, but it has also become a novel medium that adds new layers of interpretation to museum collections.
Nevertheless, AR should not be seen as simply a technological issue, but rather as a concept that entitles a different experience of space. By combining the real with the virtual, the augmented reality process is what media theorist, Lev Manovich, sees as an “augmented space”, in which the physical space is overlaid with dynamically changing information (219). In his account, augmented space is not a strictly defined technology, but instead a new model of visuality, in which the real and the virtual are intertwined. Manovich states that it is essential
to see augmented reality as “a conceptual, rather than just a technological issue - and therefore as something that in part has already been an element of other architectural and artistic paradigms” (225). Thus, AR can be both an idea and a cultural and aesthetic practice and primarily, an everyday practice.
With these definitions in mind, this paper will make use of the term Augmented Reality both as a technological tool that enhances the museum space and its artefacts with an overlay of virtual computer-generated information, and also as a concept that challenges spatial perception and has various implications when applied in a museum setting.
Introduction to the Case Studies
In order to explore the research question that guides this paper, regarding the model of participation that AR creates and its relation to the idea of spectacle, it is useful to establish a set of categories for how augmented reality is used in museums. As a guideline for my own analysis, I will utilize the categories of AR in museums identified by Shelley Mannion, the Digital Learning Programmes Manager at the British Museum. These distinctions are relevant because they encompass the augmented reality projects currently developed and conducted by institutions and artists. These categories are “outdoor guides and explorers”, “interpretative mediation”, “new media art and sculpture” and “guerrilla interventions” (n. pag). These categories, as such, encompass the variations of AR applications in a museum setting and offer the means to explore the main concepts and debates which will be discussed in this thesis.
As the first category “outdoor guides and explorers” implies, these AR projects are meant to be utilized outside of the museum setting, by using GPS as a tool to place the digital version of a museum’s historic or artistic collection in several relevant areas around the city. For example, AR can be used to place a historical photograph or video in the spot in which it was taken in order to overlay the contemporary scene with one from the past by using the smartphone screen. Within this category, people depend on a smartphone, as a medium capable of relaying the experience and the interest for users to relate to museums and cities in this way. For instance, a recent example that fits within this category is the Chicago 00 project launched in October 2016 and developed by the Chicago History Museum and filmmaker Geoffrey Alan Rhodes: Chicago 00 Project. The project offers a series of multimedia experiences that display the museum’s film, photo and sound archive (Chicago 00). The first instalment of this project, “Chicago 00 The Eastland Disaster” offers an augmented reality experience, taking place along the Chicago Riverwalk between Clark and LaSalle Streets, the site of “one of the largest
nautical disasters in US history, the capsizing of the SS Eastland in 1915” (Chicago 00). The app provides the user with an augmented reality tour and a gallery of virtual reality images, revealing the story of the disaster in a complex way (fig 2).
Fig. 2. Chicago 00 The Eastland Disaster
In comparison to the outdoor guides, which offer a different spatial experience, AR as “interpretative mediation” allows a new type of interaction with museum objects, by superimposing digital images over the art object in the collection. This use of AR is applicable to those museums that contain artefacts which are either incomplete, were destroyed or as an educational tool for children. This category of AR use, unlike the first one, tends to be a marker designated for use within the museum galleries. In this paper, this category will be named “virtual reconstruction and the museum as an educational experience” and refers to those AR apps used in museum that encourage users to engage, learn, and thus, educate themselves in the museum space. A successful implementation of AR in this case was employed by the British Museum with their app “Gift for Athena” launched in 2013.
The game is designed for use at the Parthenon Gallery, in the Greek section of The British Museum. The challenges of the game involve finding sculptures, solving puzzles and playing mini-games. Each set of challenges examines a different part of the Parthenon. After completing challenges, users are shown how the sculptures they looked at in the gallery fit into the building as a whole.
The last two categories “new media art and sculpture” and “virtual exhibitions” overlap in Mannion’s analysis, as they both refer to innovation in new media art and exhibitions done by artists and guerrilla interventions in museum galleries. The term “guerrilla intervention” refers to the placement of digital artworks within the museum environment without the consent of the museum staff or the curators (n.pag). In these categories, unlike the two others elaborated on above, the projects use visitors’ own technology (smartphone with a specific app) and frequently take place within the museum space, thus gaining meaning though their presence in the particular environment. By installing their own artworks in a virtual place and telling the visitors where to find them, artists like Sander Veenhof, part of the Manifest AR collective, managed to exhibit his works in one of the most famous museums in the world, the MoMA New York, without an invitation. On October 9th 2010, artists Veenhof and Skwarek “invaded” the museum with virtual artworks, visible through an AR app (Mannion n.pag). The show itself was not visible to the regular visitors of the museum, but only to people using “Layar”, a free smartphone application, which allowed users to see the virtual art amongst the physical art, placed there by using a location-based augmented reality technique (Veenhof n.pag).
In this paper, I will introduce a new category: “immersive art experiences and curatorial apps”. With this category, I refer to those AR applications that allow visitors to not only interact with the artworks, but also to create new immersive art experiences. The app developed by the Cleveland Museum of Art, ArtLens 2.0, illustrates these features, as it uses image-recognition software in order to recognize a selection of two-dimensional artworks. Further on, it offers additional curatorial and interpretative content of the piece. The artwork can be scanned from fifty feet away, giving the visitors the opportunity to review the facts on the artwork and gather information before approaching the piece (Kites-Powell).
Fig. 4. Young audiences uncovering artworks in Studio Play
Moreover, the museum also created a gamified app “Studio Play”, in which visitors can not only connect with the artwork in the museum, but also take part in the creative process of making the art (fig 4). Due to the fact that it makes use of sensor technology and limits the touch screen interface, Studio Play offers an immersive experience for the visitor. Furthermore, users can create original artwork by using their own hands while manipulating clay in 3D space and throw virtual paint into a 4K digital canvas and create their own Jackson Pollock inspired paintings (Kites-Powell).
Thus, the categories elaborated on above, and each of the case studies assigned to them, will determine the various models of participation that augmented reality can create in a museum setting and how they relate to the idea of the spectacle. In chapter three of this paper, these categories will further be analysed on the basis of the theories and concepts central to this thesis.
Chapter 1. The Spectacle of Participation 1.1. The Society of Spectacle
The ways in which we listen to, look at and observe, namely participate with things, have a deeply historical character. Throughout history, the notion of spectacle, primarily a visual construction, indicated a shift into vision itself and its social function and significance. The multitude of images we are confronted with, from photography to cinema, television, computerization, and more recently augmented reality, have become more deeply intertwined into the very fabric of reality and human condition. Thus, in order to assess the contemporary implications of the spectacle and its relation to augmented reality, it is relevant to start with a historical overview on visuality and the observing subject in the 19th century.
In his book, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century, Jonathan Crary suggests that the 19th century society has undergone substantial shifts, which were characterized not only by a change in representational practices, but also a new conception of the observing object. Instead of detached observers, positioned in relation to an exterior world, observers were envisioned as physiologically and psychologically permeable, often unable to be distinguished from the incursion of the images that claimed their attention.
Developing his insights on attention, Crary’s follow-up book, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle and Modern Culture, is based on the premises that since the 19th century, individuals define and shape themselves in terms of the capacity of “paying attention”, disengaging from a broader field of attraction and isolating themselves. However, Crary is less concerned with attention, but rather with the concept of “attentiveness”, which comprises both attention and distraction. These two entities are interlinked in many ways and “cannot be thought outside of a continuum in which the two ceaselessly flow into one another, as part of a social field in which the same imperatives and forces incites one and the other” (51). This continuum is situated within modern culture and came with the emergence of new technological forms of spectacle, display, projection, attraction, and recording. Thus, the spectacular culture is closely interlinked with the issue of attentiveness, as it was founded on the strategies in which individuals are isolated, separated and disempowered (3). The spectacle as such is not simply a visual construction, but rather a construction of conditions that immobilize the subjects, in a world in which circulation and mobility are pervasive. In this context, he states that these new technological forms enabled in the spectacular society, are in fact methods for managing attention, “rendering bodies controllable and useful simultaneously,
even as they simulate the illusion of choices and interactivity” (75).
Moving towards the 20th century, during the paradigm shift of competitive capitalism, which was focused on production, to the later form of capitalism which revolves around consumption, media, information, and technology, new forms of domination and abstraction have appeared, corresponding to different interpretations of avant-garde attitudes. The Situationist International movement contributed to a critical reflection of this shift, highlighting the importance of social production and the new modes of consumerism in a media society, reinterpreting the Marxist theory to do so. While the initial theory focused on the means of production and class struggle, the Situationists focused on society and daily life, in an attempt for theorising a cultural revolution (Kellner n.pag). One of the founding members of this movement and a key theorist is the French philosopher Guy Debord, who attempted to renew the Marxist project by adjusting it to the condition of his time, and reinvigorating its revolutionary practice. He further developed Marx’s analysis of commodification, explaining that our world is becoming a commodity: "the becoming-world of the commodity and the becoming-commodity of the world" (66). For Debord, as well as the Situationists, the current stage of social organization represents only a deviation in capitalist society, and a transition from the paradigm of social control and domination of media and consumerism to a new stage, called "Society of the Spectacle." In this new phase of contemporary society, individuals consume a world constructed by others rather than creating one of their own. In other words, the classical paradigm of production is transformed into a paradigm of subjectivity influenced by hyper consumerism. This new paradigm is described by Debord as a "permanent opium war" meant to distract social subjects from real life and mislead them by spectacular representations: “Everything that was directly lived has moved away into representation” (1). Thus, the society of spectacle manifests itself through a dynamic of leisure, consumption and entertainment, ruled by a commercial media culture: "The spectacle is the moment when the commodity has attained the total occupation of social life" (42).
In his essay, The Precession of Simulacra, Baudrillard questions whether we still exist in a society of the spectacle:
We are witnessing the end of perspective and panoptic space… and hence the very abolition of the spectacular…. We are no longer in the society of the spectacle which the Situationists talked about, nor in the specific types of alienation and repression which this implied. The medium itself is no longer identifiable as such, and the merging of the medium and the message is the first formula of this new age (54).
Influenced by Debord and the Situationist movement, Baudrillard expanded Debord’s idea that electronic media were a “new stage of abstraction”, where social relations are increasingly dependent on technology (Kellner n. pag). Both Debord and Baudrillard have foreseen the new risks that emerged from media’s new “one-way modes of transmission”, namely the prospects of transforming active audiences into passive spectators (n.pag). Therefore, their concerns revolved around the need of authentic communication in opposition with the standardized modes of dissemination exerted by the rationalized and controlled society. Baudrillard considered that contemporary life moved beyond the society of the commodity and its pillars, asserting that the new era is characterized by new regimes of production: the production of simulacra that further evolved into a postmodern paradigm described as an “an abstract non-society devoid of cohesive relations, shared meaning, and political struggle” (Kellner n.pag). Baudrillard envisions the postmodern world as a world of simulacra, where signs are “without depth, origins, or referent”, and “electronic or digitized images, signs, or spectacles replace real life" and objects in the real world. The end-result of this process is the gradual replacement of the real with technology, and the audiences becoming passive viewers and consumers of a social system predicated on obedience and conformity.
Revisiting this idea within the specific framework of contemporary art, the British art historian Claire Bishop considers participatory art, as an important tool to change the idea of spectatorship, offering a new understanding of art without audiences, in which everyone is a producer. In her book Artificial Hells, she gives a complex introduction into the history of participatory art, highlighting the relevant debates around the radical potential of art and the intertwined relationships between the artist, critic and audience.
Bishop identifies three principles for the practice of participatory art: activation (empowerment and individual/collective agency), authorship (or the discontinuance of authorship for a more democratic artistic process) and community (by restoring the lost social bonds) (90). She explains that within this framework, artist becomes more of a “collaborator and producer of situations”, and his art is an “ongoing or long-term project with an unclear beginning or end”. Most importantly, the audience, previously seen as “spectator” or “passive viewer”, is now repositioned as a “co-producer and a participant” (90).
In more contemporary times, the spectacle is everywhere, usually integrated in novel spaces and sites. The Internet-based economy deploys this kind of spectacle as means of education, architecture visualization, promotion, reproduction, entertainment and last but not least, selling of commodities. Thus, Debord’s notion of the spectacle can be applied in our present-days, characterized by our extended use of technology and our reliance on it, which, in
a way, reduces our lives to a series of daily exchanges of commodities. Even though Debord had a deeply negative point of view on the spectacle, he did not believe that the emergence of new technologies was inherently a bad thing. However, he did object to the use of these technologies used as means of economic interest and profit. The spectacle, in this context, was replacing real life into a mere contemplation of it, rendering the subjects as passive spectators.
As the spectacle became more technologically sophisticated, it contributed to a better engagement of the audience through various media, generating more complex sites of information and entertainment, while increasing the spectacle-form of media culture (Kellner). Within the next section, this paper will explore the ways in which the media and cultural studies further developed the concept of the participatory, highlighting the rapid changes that occurred with the implementation of Web.2.0 and its applications.
1.2. Participatory Culture
The continuous advances of communication technology determined an ever-increased user interactivity and collaboration, resulting in more pervasive ways of connectivity and dissemination channels such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc. These channels are part of Web 2.0, a term popularized by Tim O'Reilly and Dale Dougherty. In short, this term makes a reference to a group of technologies, such as blogs, wikis, podcast and social media channels, which facilitate a more socially connected Web in which everyone is able to adjust and add content (Anderson 6). There are also certain features associated to these technologies, such as rich participatory user experiences; therefore the user can act as a contributor. In a similar way, augmented reality applications provide widely conveyable location based mobile AR experiences that can enhance creativity, collaboration, information sharing and rely on user generated content. For instance, with Pokemon Go, the user can move through the real world and see virtual overlays of information, showing up at locations of interest, and easily add their own content.
American media theorist Henry Jenkins has conceptualized this shift as part of a participatory culture that is currently influencing the way we experience information on the Internet. The notion of participatory culture as such, suggests not only a shift in the role of the web users, but also in the whole Internet environment. From a passive user, we observe the emergence of a more active and participatory user, that not only consumes content, but also creates it. Jenkins defines this concept as “a culture with relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement, strong support for creating and sharing one’s creations, and
some type of informal mentorship whereby what is known by the most experienced is passed along to novices” (Jenkins, Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st century 3). Therefore, a defining feature of participatory culture revolves around social involvement and interaction. By creating and sharing content, users can create social bonds and online communities can emerge.
In his analysis, Jenkins identifies four categories within participatory culture: affiliations, expressions, collaborative problem solving, and circulations (3). These categories are not separate, but mutually dependent, as they intertwine in order to form the foundation upon which participatory culture can flourish.
What Jenkins refers to as affiliations are the memberships created in online communities, such as Facebook, Myspace, in which members connect with one another through social networks. As such, social networking plays a central role in participatory culture and regarded as an essential skill or “cultural competency” (8). Thus, affiliations also represent a core part of the participatory culture as they provide a social component, crucial for effective participation. The second form of participatory culture as identified by Jenkins are expressions, which refer to the production of new creative forms, such as fan fiction, digital sampling, etc. (8). A prime example of a distribution channel in which these new creative forms can be dispersed is YouTube, as users can express their personal interests, exchange ideas and form bonds with those alike. Therefore, the expressions represent the social structure of participatory culture. The collaborative problem solving, according to Jenkins, occurs when individuals collaborate together in order to develop new knowledge. As elaborated on by Evens: “with enough participation, content arises from out of culture at large, reflecting our collective beliefs, opinions, and ideas. Each user gets to assent to those expressions that suit her” (n.pag.). An example of this type of collaboration is Wikipedia, where individuals compile, edit and omit pages of information in a collaborative way (Larabie 69). Finally, circulations refer to the way media and information flows through blogging, video blogging and podcasting (3).
From these four characteristics identified by Jenkins, it can be observed that the notion of agency and the ability to exercise authority is central in the discourse surrounding participatory culture. The debates around the topic of agency often occur in consideration to the challenges posed by traditional culture industries in relation to participatory culture (Larabie). For instance, Jarrett argues that “research on interactivity has long noted the capacity of a renewed agency in media production to disrupt the knowledge/power nexus and the basic power relations of mass broadcast media” (n.pag). Thus, even though Internet users are
empowered by the ability to create and distribute content, they are also often restricted by financial, political and legal limitations.
Despite the beneficial rhetoric, focused on the user, surrounding participatory culture, the degree to which the new mechanism of power permeate this environment continue to be under investigation. The features built in all social media applications and augmented reality applications, for example location awareness and user data, allow for power and control to operate in complex ways, and are also intertwined with the user’s willingness to divulge vast amounts of personal information. This, in turn, can allow third parties to maneuver this free information flow and capitalize on the participatory nature of the Internet. One of the core issues posed by the concept of participatory culture is that participation, in fact, is not always represented by equality: “the disclaimer on participatory media culture, Internet-enabled collective intelligence, and many-to-many as well as peer-to-peer dialogue is the fact, that access is not randomly distributed” (Dutton et al 30). The inequality, as such, is grounded in the fact that users are stimulated to believe, through discourses of democratization, that they have agency through participatory culture’s interactive nature and the discourse of freedom that accompanies it. Furthermore, participatory culture raises the issue of the incorporation of capital in participatory culture, which opens the gate for power, control and data manipulation (Terranova 39). For instance, when consuming AR content, the device retains the user’s current position and other context information that can be seen by service providers. Moreover, the smartphones and tablets that use augmented reality can capture what the users sees and are to record his actions and data about the user.
Along these lines, it has become clear that participatory culture, and digital culture as such, has been subjected to an extensive amount of criticism. However, it must be acknowledged that participatory culture has benefited Internet users in various ways, by encouraging users to share and create content on social platforms and engage with others in an environment that encourages creativity. Undoubtedly, participatory culture has broken down the traditional barriers of the media sphere, while at the same time having significant implications in economy and politics. However, the potential dangers, such as control, surveillance and privacy issues, associated with participatory culture cannot be disregarded. As this new environment encourages for data sharing, it allows third parties to use the data in order to shape the users’ tastes and interests, threatening the core principles of participatory culture.
In the next section, the topic of agency in participatory culture is discussed more broadly, with a focus on the new category of user that activates within this environment, the produser.
1.3. From Passive Spectator to Produser
In the emerging Web 2.0 environment in which AR applications activate, and in the context of participatory culture, the production of ideas occurs in a collaborative way. This breaks down the boundaries between producers and consumers, and enables the agency of the users, as producers of knowledge and information. One of the concepts that explains this shift is the “prosumer”, which according to Alvin Toffler is an individual who can both produce and consume goods at the same time. He argues that, as society moves towards the Post-Industrial Age, the number of consumers are also declining and will be replaced by prosumers. According to Toffler, the future would once again combine production with consumption and he foresaw a world where interconnected users would collaboratively ‘create’ products.
Toffler’s image of the prosumer continues to provide a relevant understanding of the user-generated, collaborative processes part of the Web 2.0 environment. However, by having a closer look at what the concept entitles, Bruns argues that Toffler’s model of prosumer is still strongly grounded in the mass media age, and does not include the developer of new content in projects ranging from open-source software to augmented reality applications. Thus, he proposes a new terminology in order to describe the users that take charge in the production of ideas in a Web 2.0 environment, which he names “produsers”. Instead of engaging in a traditional form of content production, these produsers are involved in “produsage”: “a collaborative effort in building and extending existing content in order to improve it” (1). What is essential in this new phenomenon is, according to Bruns, not only the spaces that have driven the rise of user led content creation approaches (social media, blogging, YouTube, augmented reality applications etc), but the emergence of a new generation of users, who contain the skills, abilities and interest to use them. The models of content creation and sharing used by this category of users contribute to the disintegration of traditional media and other industry models, as these actions take place in a Web 2.0 environment (1).
In order to better explain the process of content production that occurs in produsage undertaken by this new category of users, I will contrast the process of content production in traditional museum (public museum) settings with the collaborative processes in a postmuseum, a term coined by Eilean Hooper-Greenhill. The public museum is based on the
idea that during the French Revolution, the museum changed its function, becoming a public museum and opening up its once private collection collection to the public. Within this setting, the museum was shaped as an apparatus with two contradictory functions: “an elite temple of the arts” and an “utilitarian instrument for democratic education” (Hooper-Greenhill, Initiatives in Museum Education 63). Thus, the museum as such is the producer of knowledge and the visitors are passive consumers. This interplay can be best described as a one-way value chain from production through distribution to consumption (fig 5).
Fig 5. Traditional one-way value chain model
In this model, the control over knowledge and information is exclusively in the hands of the producers, the museum staff, who decide upon the nature of the content itself and upon its setting and the knowledge they want to distribute to the public. A downside to this process is the loss of immediacy, characterized by the impossibility to make immediate changes to the exhibited content and the fact that visitors cannot contribute with ideas. The introduction of the Internet and various communication channels, however, address these problems, transforming the museum into a “postmuseum”, in which knowledge is constructed through the account of multiple subjectivities and identities. Accordingly, the postmuseum attempts to involve the voice of its visitors and enrich its exhibition space with other communication means that fit with the interpretations of objects and visitors’ needs (Hooper-Greenhill, Museums and the Interpretation of Visual Culture). Within the context of the postmuseum, augmented reality can be used as a tool for activating the agency of the users within the museum sphere. Due to the fact that AR can offer an interrelation between virtual heritage and real space, it not only offers a new platform for experimenting on an artistic level, but also involves the visitor, who is now given the chance to handle and interact with artefacts and museum objects freely. Thus, as users gain more agency and a more direct role in the development process, the feedback loop gradually strengthens from consumers back to the produser, who in the process, undermines producers’ overall control of the production value chain (fig 6).
Fig. 6. Value chain with a feedback loop from consumers to producers
Even though the term “produser” certainly encompasses some of the characteristics of users in the Web 2.0 environment, and more specifically the ones that use augmented reality applications, critics, such as Jose van Dijck suggest that user agency is much more complex that this term suggests and identifies the need to account for the “multifarious roles of users in a media environment where the boundaries between commerce, content and information are currently being redrawn” (42). Van Dijck’s main point of critique revolves around the deceptive opposition between the passive recipients of earlier stages of media culture, and the active participant, “cast ideally as someone who is well-versed in the skills of new media” (43). She argues that there are relatively few active creators of content and, thus, there is a crucial need to distinguish the different levels of participation in order to get a more nuanced overview of what participation entails (44). In order to demonstrate this point, van Dijck makes use of a survey released by Forrester Research in 2008, as a tool to help businesses understand the ways in which different audiences engage with online content. The survey categorizes user behaviour according to six levels on the participation ladder. Out of all online users of UGC (user-generated content) sites, only 13 percent are “active creators”, who produce and continuously upload content on platforms such as web blogs, for example. The other 19 percent are “critics”, who provide ratings and evaluations, followed by 15 percent who are “collectors”, saving URLs and sharing these links with other users users (44). Furthermore, another 19 percent are considered “joiners”, who take part into social networking websites, but do not necessarily distribute content. However, the majority of users consist of “passive spectators” (33 percent), who performs activities such as reading blogs and watching videos, and finally the “inactives” (52 percent), who do not engage in any activities elaborated on above.
By looking at these numbers and categories, it becomes apparent that the term participation does not equal “active contribution” regarding user-generated content sites. However, van Dijck points out a more profound problem; not considering the role of the interface in shaping the users and communities (45). For instance, on YouTube, users are directed towards a particular video by means of “coded mechanism which heavily rely on
promotion and ranking tactics, such as measuring downloads and the promotion of popular favourites” (45). In short, the users indeed serve as providers and arbiters of content, but the rankings are made by algorithms, which are subject to manipulation, both by the site owners and the users. Similarly, when it comes to AR applications, the ways in which these interfaces are built and the type of user experiences offered can imply various levels of participation. As it will be explained in more detail in chapter three of this thesis, not all AR applications offer the same participatory opportunities, and the levels of agency differ: from more involved users or creators of content, to passive observers or receivers of information.
Accordingly, notions such as participatory culture and produsage tend to emphasize the emancipation of the engaged citizen, with the ability to express themselves in digital spaces. However, at this stage, David Croteau observes that we still do not know enough about the complex effect of user-generated content on the new media environment, and as a result, we need more theories that can help us understand the elaborate relationships between social and technological agents. The idea of participatory culture is challenging and is altering the ways in which industries do business, the engagement of citizens and the ways individuals engage in forms of creative expression, by becoming prosumers. It is impossible to know the long-term implications of this shift, but both the notion of participatory culture and produsage raise significant issues, especially when it comes to augmented reality.
As it was previously shown, this shift also affects the museum environment, which has undergone a shift towards a more collaborative practice. In this context, it is worth exploring more in depth the ways in which this participatory shift and the conceptualization of audiences affects our understanding and experience of the museum.
1.4. The Participatory Museum
Museum have the ability to educate, excite and create meaning for their audiences. In contemporary society, museums encounter the challenge of reconciling their institutional aims regarding education when faced with a younger generation with growing expectations and the ever-changing technologies. Thus, a priority for contemporary museums is to improve the visitor experience and aim to establish a stronger relationship with their visitors by developing engaging museum exhibits. Ideally, this would generate a more complex and memorable visitor experience, encouraging audiences to further promote the museum. The traditional model of the museum, as a conservative space with passive audiences, is actively shifting to a more active and collaborative engagement with their audiences.
In the field of cultural institutions and museums, participation is usually defined as “democratic, inclusive, visitor-centred, and based on the creation of learning or interpretative communities” (Elffers Sitzia 47). In this framework, the museum offers an environment filled with participatory opportunities, a place for individuals to connect and learn together, whilst building meaningful experiences, both for the museum and its audiences. These opportunities are meant to deepen the relationship between the institution, object, artist and the public. From this perspective, participatory projects aim to offer a tailored meaningful educational experience to its audiences, which can manifest both in individual or collective ways, with the aim to create communities.
In her book, The Participatory Museum, Nina Simon attempts to advocate participation as active engagement from the visitors, who create, share and connect. However, this does not mean that the institution can assure the constancy of visitor experiences. Instead, it offers the opportunities, either through interactive installations or multimedia experiences, such as AR, for a variety of visitor co-produced experiences. Furthermore, she argues that participatory projects can offer benefits not only for the museum, but also for the participants and non-participant visitors. According to Simon, the goal is to meet visitor's expectation for active engagement and to stay in line or strengthen the mission and core values of the institution. The main difference between traditional and participatory museums, according to Simon, is the way the information flows. While in a traditional setting, the museum provides content for visitors to consume, the participatory one supports multidirectional content experience; the museum serves as a “platform” that connects different users “who act as content creators, distributors, consumers, critics, and collaborators” (2). Simon believes that by pursuing such techniques that align with the institutional core values, the museum can become more relevant and important to communities, especially younger audiences, who are interested in social media and mobile applications and for “whom creative activities and social connection are preconditions for cultural engagement” (5).
However, it is relevant to mention that participation goes well beyond attendance (Elffers, Sitzia 48). Several museums struggle to really engage with their communities in genuinely participatory ways and often, although the museum may be committed to social change, due to fact that it has difficulty in changing itself, mainly because of issues related to budget or copyright. Those museums who have the possibility to invest in new ways of engaging with their audiences through multimedia experiences, often use augmented reality applications as participatory tools, in order to offer fun and engaging content for the younger visitors and interactive experiences. Furthermore, augmented reality creates opportunities
when it comes to storytelling. Museum objects can become part of an engaging experience and a story that the visitor can visitor can explore and unfold. These possibilities will be elaborated more on in chapter three, when analysing each case study.
The purpose of this chapter was to provide an overview on participation, both from a cultural and media perspective. The notion of spectacle is an essential one because it encapsulates not only questions of visuality, but also the degradation of human life in a capitalist setting. In more contemporary times, the spectacle remains an important construct as it relates to the ways in which we use technology today, in a time when social media and various smartphone applications are ever-present. The term participatory culture encompasses the new type of environment that activates within this technological framework, and the new category of users, produsers, who can create, collaborate and share content. In a museum, these shifts manifested in the use of more participatory techniques that can offer more interactive and engaging content for its audience. However, it is important to acknowledge the fact that this participatory shift and the new conceptualization of audiences did not occur by itself, but was part of the larger discourse surrounding new media. Thus, in the chapter that follows, this paper will shift its focus towards new media in relation to museum and the ways in which they affect the overall museum experience.
Chapter 2. Museums and New Media 2.1. New Media. A Short Introduction
As previously stated in the introduction, the goal of this research is to develop an understanding of the use of AR in museums and its implication in terms of participation and the idea of the spectacle. In order to get a better understanding of AR as a new medium, it is worthwhile to look into the discipline of Media Studies to guide the exploration of this medium. While AR is a unique technology that overlays virtual information on real life environments, a medium is never only the technology itself, but instead is part of a particular historical and cultural setting (MacIntyre et al 2). In this context, augmented reality is part of the developments brought by new media. Thus, in the following lines, this paper will focus on new media, an important notion in understanding the development of AR applications, that came along with a series of new digital media, the Internet, desktop multimedia and so on.
As a term, new media encompasses not only Internet developments, but also the interplay between technology, images and sound. New media makes use of textual experiences, which include computer games, special effects and hypertext and also new, different ways of
illustrating the world and the physical environment, through augmented reality applications or immersive virtual environments. Furthermore, it provides with new ways of interacting with media technologies, as users became producers of content (Lister 1).
In the study of media, the term “new media” poses several problems, mainly because of the difficulty of describing what is new. For instance, Lister states that the biggest issue in defining the “new” is that it “cannot stay new”, it is ever-changing (xiv). In his analysis, he views new media as a “historical marker”, emphasizing the importance of culture in relation to technology, media and history (xiv). Thus, he explains, the discourse of new media is more complex than the implied division between old and new media, as they are part of a large, global, historical change (10). The broader cultural and social changes that are associated with new media start from the 1960s onwards, according to Lister. To begin with, the shift from modernity to postmodernity is strongly associated with new media, as it caused profound changes in societies and economies in the 1960s and onwards. This was followed by the process of globalization; as national states and boundaries, customs, cultures and identities and beliefs were disintegrated; new media were seen as a contributory element to this process (11). Further on, the replacement of the industrial age with a post-industrial information age is another historical marker associated with new media, as there were various shifts that occurred in terms of employment, skill, and production of resources. Lastly, the disintegration of established and “centralized geopolitical order” brought about the decline of power and control from “Western colonial centres”, assisted by networks of new communication media (11). Thus, Lister envisions new media as part of these complex historical changes, both in cause and effect. In short, new media is an “epoch-making phenomena”, part of the larger discourse surrounding social, technological and cultural change, thus being part of a “technoculture” (11).
In an analysis focused more on the social, Livingstone and Lievrouw view new media as socially shaped in unique ways and as having appropriate social consequences. The authors define new media as the “information and communication technologies and their associated social contexts,” therefore emphasizing the importance of social shaping and consequences as an “ensemble” (2). Thus, by including both the technological and the social, new media are considered infrastructures with three components: the artefacts/devices that are used to communicate information, the practices in which individuals engage to communicate and share content and information, and the social and organizational forms that encompass these practices (Lievrouw, Livingstone 2). The two main characteristics of new media, shaped both by a technological and social background, are ubiquity and interactivity (6). Ubiquity refers to a sense of immediacy, as new media technologies affect, to a certain degree, everyone in the
societies in which they are employed. This characteristic is visible with the growing use of mobile technologies, which shifted the expectations of the user on mobility. While in mass media, technologies were physically fixed and typically shared, the mobile technologies today are customised as personal tools that provide access to various content and communication services, from any place. The second characteristic of new media, interactivity, is associated with the pervasiveness of new channels, by allowing users to craft their choices of information sources and interactions with others. As augmented reality began to be incorporated on smartphones, these characteristics are even more visible. As previously mentioned in the introduction, augmented reality offers interactivity in real time, as users can actively interact with their surroundings. By simply pointing their device towards an object, users can experience a virtual overlay added to the real environment. The sense of ubiquity, in this case, is given by the fact that AR can directly enhance the user’s perception of the wold around him at any location or on any object, at all times.
Even though AR represents a new medium, some of its characteristics are taken from earlier media forms, such as film and stage production (MacIntyre et al 3). These characteristics can be taken over into AR for showcasing narrative information. For instance, the techniques of characterization used in film can be adapted to AR in order to create virtual characters. In this context, visitors will have the expectation of how such characters should act based on their previous experiences of watching movies or stage plays. Furthermore, AR can adapt the process of making a film script when creating applications that follow a specific storyline. This process of adapting earlier media forms was described by Jenkins as convergence. This term implies that new media did not simply replace old media, but was integrated within it. The process of convergence suggests a circulation of content across multiple different media platforms. The circulation of media content is strongly related to the active participation of the consumers, as they are encouraged to find new information themselves and make sense of it (Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where old and new media collide 3). In this context, the users’ interactions allow for old and new media forms to interact in various complex ways.
Thus, convergence is strongly related to the idea of participatory culture. The circulation of media content across different platforms depends on the active participation of the consumers, who are encouraged to look for new types of information and construct meaning based on the various types of media content available.
Within the cultural heritage, the influence of new media and participatory culture has been profound. Contemporary museums rely on new media in order to manage their collections and present them in more interactive ways, and therefore creating a connection between new
technologies and the existing artefacts is vital. In the next section, this paper will change its focus towards the implementation of new media in museums.
2.2. Museums and the Digital
In 1987, Howard Besser predicted that the role of the museum will change from a “static repository of information” to a more dynamic, interactive information source (16). The advent of the Web made this change possible in 1990s. With the continuous advances in technology and mobile applications, museums have to find new ways to tell stories and engage with their public through the use of technology.
Ross Parry, a historian of museum media and technology, suggests that the shift towards the digital was not easy to employ in the museum sector. This is mainly because of an initial defensiveness to Internet technologies that appeared to encourage “an arms-length proxy contact with collections and that seemed to threaten even the primacy of the physical visit event itself” (Parry 1). Moreover, museums have shown a certain suspicion towards digital resources and had various problems in accommodating new media within an institution whose beliefs principally came from the presence of material objects (1). And yet, given these initial fears, two decades after the advent of the Web, the contemporary museum sector embraces digital culture and makes use of computer-based interpretative media, which allows exhibitions to support “experiences in more flexible, creative and empowering ways” (2). In addition to this, museums have adapted their modes of delivery and audience engagement in order to keep track and stay relevant in an evolving digital society and within a participatory culture. Thus, it is hard not to notice the profound ways in which computing and new media have affected not only how museums manage their collections, but also how they make them visible.
If we look back at the concept of convergence, briefly discussed in the chapter above, we notice that in the museum sector, as in others, new media was employed by looking at the trajectories of the past and previous endeavours. For instance, some museums started this process by using multimedia content such as video in their installations or audio guides and further on, they began employing more advanced forms of technology, such as augmented reality and virtual reality. Only by looking at technologies used in the past, Parry explains, we can understand the motivations of the audiences and offer them new media experiences(5).
In a brief history of museum computerization, David Williams tracks down the changes that affected the ways we experience museums today. He states that the initial changes occurred in the 1960s, when museums acknowledged that they, as institutions, cannot remain unaffected
to all the social and cultural changes that were affecting the entire structure of society. During this time, museums were pressured to increase the activities they offer and to fully use the resources they have at their disposal (16). One of the key catalysts for this change was caused by the advent of television, that created the expectation of a more “sharp, snappy, modern manner” display (16). In a response to this, museums were pressured to showcase their exhibition in a more interactive manner, appealing to audiences. Accompanying the new attention given by the audience to museums, came a new public observation of museum practices. While once, the museum was quiet, conservatory “sanctuary” reserved for scholars and researchers, museums were seen now seen as “public trusts with duties and responsibilities to their collections, to their communities, and to future generations” (16). In her introduction to Reinventing the Museum: The Evolving Conversation on the Paradigm Shift, Gail Anderson explains in detail the nature of this paradigm shift in museum theory, by contrasting the traditional museum with a “reinvented one”. While the traditional museum is indicative of a collection-centric, closed, conservatory and authoritative features, the reinvented museum suggests a more visitor-centric, open, flexible and community focused institution. As Anderson herself explains:
The centrality of the public, learning, and civic engagement embody some of the most significant shifts in institutional values for museums. Collections---historically viewed as the centre of museum activities---have moved to a supporting role that advances the educational impact of the museum. The collection holdings are no longer viewed as the sole measure of value for a museum; rather, the relevant and effective role of the museum in service to its public has become the central measure of value (5).
In the light of Anderson’s concept of reinvented museum - a similar term arises which offers an account of how museum narratives evolve in a world in which new media are becoming increasingly pervasive and ubiquitous- the transmedia museum.
2.3. The Transmedia Museum
The advent of the Internet and new media technologies have not only influenced society and the expectations of the individuals, but also the way we tell stories. Nowadays, media technologies allow us to tell stories in a new and potentially more engaging ways, not only in the form of entertainment, but also as a means of education and instruction. AR technology, in this context, can provide such storytelling experiences in museums in order to educate their public and familiarize them with the collection in more enjoyable way.
Within this section, I will explore the concept of “transmedia storytelling” in order to grasp these changes, and then relate them back to the museum. The concept of “transmedia storytelling” was first used by Jenkins to explain the ways in which one or more stories can be told by using a multitude of different technology platforms (Transmedia Storytelling: Moving Characters from Books to Films to Video Games Can Make Them Stronger and More Compelling). In short, transmedia narratives attempt to build interactive stories by combining a multitude of media and communication platforms, in order to create more dynamic and engaging content. This form of narrative is effective in the museum landscape, as they can use digital media in order to create and share stories about the artworks in the collection, and further on engage the visitor.
In a museum setting, Jennifer Kidd uses the notion of “transmedia storytelling” to refer to the extension of narratives across multiple platforms, and the implication of the user in “calling that narrative forth from a multitude of entry points-in diverse spaces and in varying stages of completion” (23). The narratives elaborated by museums through exhibitions, performances, workshops, social networks, online web portals and digital archives and games, create “webs of engagements and interactions”, in which meaning is decoded or created by the user (23). Thus, by using multiple media platforms at the same time -transmedia storytelling- allows various entry points for audiences and opens up the opportunities for play. These narratives involve the audience, “challenging them, acknowledging and problematizing their agency and making them work in order to piece together meaning” (26). However, as Kidd suggests, this shift occurred not purely because of the digital phenomenon, but rather, she emphasizes that in the twenty-first century museum, visitors have different expectations of the museum as a more interactive, participatory institution.
As it was previously described within the previous chapter, in a participatory culture and more specifically within a participatory museum, audiences are allowed to interact with the museum and its exhibits in new, exciting ways – the museum offering a platform for participatory opportunities and communication. I believe that by using transmedia storytelling, museums can incorporate AR experiences and educate their audiences about their collection in more engaging ways. Thus, it is relevant to explore the characteristics of this new type of storytelling and apply these characteristics to AR applications.
By drawing upon Jenkins’ concept of transmedia, Kidd identifies seven core concepts in transmedia storytelling: spreadability, continuity/multiplicity, immersion/extractability, worldbuilding, seriality, subjectivity and performance (27). To begin with, spreadability refers to the capacity for building content across platforms and allowing individuals to experience
