Museums don’t hate tech, they just don’t want to keep fixing it.

Technology can be costly, and time consuming for museums of any size because it frequently breaks down and requires constant upkeep just to be functional. Traditionally, most museum exhibits–and especially history museums–use little to no technology because of the difficulties maintaining it. Museum professionals have consistently found success and longevity with just an artifact and a label. That, of course, is not to say that designing an exhibit without technology is easy. For example, Beverly Serrell has published four books just on writing exhibit labels. Her first, Making Exhibit Labels: A Step-by-Step Guide, published in 1983 and her second, Exhibit Labels: An Interpretive Approach, published in 1996. Serrell has since published two editions of Exhibit Labels, the second edition in 2015 and the third quite recently in January 2024. In short, nothing about exhibit design is easy or uncomplicated; however, not all exhibit design ignores technology. In fact, some technology has almost unnoticeably been around for quite some time.

Where does it all start?

Twenty-first century projectors trace back to the seventeenth century with Dutch scientist Christiaan Huygens invention of the Magic Lantern, a device that used mirrors and lenses to concentrate the light beams from oils lamps into images. The simultaneous evolutions of artificial light sources and mirrors and lenses in the 18^th and 19^th centuries the stacked upon each other to create new projection technologies. The projectors that closest resemble the modern devices, such as the Kinetoscope, Eidoloscope, Phantoscope, and Vitascope, came to be in the last decade of the 19^th century. Yet, despite its centuries old heritage, projection technology is still rapidly changing so much that even 30 years ago the projection technology we have in 2024 was only imaginary. More so, the concept of walking into a totally immersive environment created with only projectors is completely mind-blowing for the early projection inventors in the 1890s.

In the late 20^th century, non-uniform surfaces became more regular in projecting as seen in the Science Museum of Minnesota’s (SMM) Omnitheater. Hardly a coincidence then, that the Escape Velocity astronaut from the 2014 Coachella Festival was acquisitioned by the SMM. Obviously, as a science museum the SMM is certainly more inclined to acquire or produce technology-based exhibits, but that does not take away from the meaningful experiences produced by the technology. Arguably, it enhances them because it makes them more accessible to the general public because the demographic of Coachella’s attendance varies greatly from that of a science museum.

Making the video

Broadly speaking, the search to find examples of recent projection mapping exhibits was rather easy. The most difficult part was finding the right keywords and narrowing down my own scope of the project’s message. More difficult, was defining the technology behind projection mapping and understanding how it differs from “regular” projection. What I have learned is that there really is no decisive distinction. The history is complex because the invention of “projection mapping” comes from a century worth of incremental advances in projection and film. There is a solid amount of dedicated software and equipment on the market, making projection mapping projects much less “DIY.”

I found it difficult to order the examples of projection mapping in the video. Do I characterize them chronologically? Do I organize them by features? I chose to do both because in studying history we often discuss how history is not linear or progressive. I wanted to showcase these particular examples for their specific use of the technology, not just for them having done the projecting. The “Revolt” exhibit is ordered last in the examples simply because it is the most recent exhibit. However, I would argue that it is not the most complex use of projection mapping. I would argue that “Casting” or “Red Eyes” are much more complex uses of the technology despite having been produced prior to “Revolt.” And while I think that the full-room immersion of “Van Gogh” or “Story of the Forest” shows promise for future exhibition design, it primarily services art exhibits over history.

In regard to feedback on my video draft, I focused primarily on the music/audio and the captions. I was unsure at first how much text I wanted or needed in balance with the voiceover and media. I ultimately took the feedback to add more text and made a few additional descriptive captions to photos and videos to better ground the viewer in the subject. I mostly struggled with the audio settings. I am not personally inclined towards a silent background, but I also didn’t want the music to overpower the voiceover when it was just meant to fill in the blankness behind the speaking. I used the feedback to lower the overall volume of the music and add in some auto-ducking to balance music and speech.