Virtual Museum and City Tours Improving in 2021
Stating the obvious: a long and disappointing year, not just for museums
It’s been well over a year now since the pandemic forced museums (among others) to physically close and turn their attention to the virtual. After all this time, have virtual museum offerings improved?
My own answer is a resounding “partially.” Some institutions have really raised the bar of what is possible and desirable for the digital museum, while others remain plagued by inertia or bad choices (my personal pet peeve: falsely advertised “virtual tours” that are really just 360° photographs in which the objects and texts are unreachable and unreadable). Many museums did little or nothing to boost their online presence during the pandemic, probably focusing instead (although their lack of communication with their public leaves this uncertain) on renovations, research, and other projects too long on the to-do list. This is certainly a logical course of action, but it is emphatically NOT mutually exclusive to a public-facing digital program. To the contrary: we museumgoers LOVE seeing the renovations and research projects behind the museum facade! Thematizing these into an online offering of one sort or another is not complex. In my opinion, surprise surprise, it just takes a museums-lover host/editor and a cameraman. Yet many museums could not rally enough to do it.
Some museums step up to the virtual challenge
But!
Some truly inspiring, life-affirming, intriguing new formats have indeed come out. Here are some of my recently-discovered favorites, spanning quite a large spectrum of formats. From animated game to city tour, there is something for everyone. Leave a comment below with your own favorite!
Exhibition as animated game
The Humboldt Forum in the new city palace in Berlin has been riddled with critique for its entire life. Often I am inclined to agree, but this new digital experience of their exhibition-in-progress is a real gem. Krickelkrackel takes the form of a very simple game occupying just one room and three side niches of the exhibition space. The drawing style is simple, flat, and brightly colored.
You play Krickelkrackel, a scribble with eyeballs. You have to pick up the strewn exhibition objects, watch a 30- to 40-second video about each one, and decide which empty glass case it belongs to. When you’ve put all the objects into the cases, three info points are made accessible that show more views (again in short videos) and info about the exhibition room.
I really admire the simple concept and design of this game. The videos are extremely short live videos of Krickelkrackel as a delightful sock puppet surrounded by a cloud of knotty wire (embodied and voiced by the fantastic Julia Korp). In the videos, Krickelkrackel stands/floats next to the actual object in the exhibition and delivers a sentence of information about the object and several entertaining commentaries on it. I fell in love with this husky-voiced sock puppet!! See if you do too when you play!
Sped-up exhibition run-through
The exhibition “Maria and the Paragraph,” about the history of abortion laws in Germany (based on the legal code paragraph 218), takes a very different tack. Originally planned and indeed executed as a physical exhibition, the creators were stuck with the question of how to make the show available online. They came up with a very simple but effective solution: a video of a sped-up walk-through of the show, accompanied by a German cabaret song about the political and social pressures of having children. Yes! Sounds incredible, but there it is. Of course, the details and texts of the exhibition are not visible in this format – but it is surprisingly good at giving you a spatial sense of the whole thing, as well as the scope of the objects, media, and wall design. The soundtrack adds a layer of fascinating history as well as energy. Surprisingly effective on a very low budget – check it out and see if you agree.
Live virtual city tours
Although these tours are not inside museums, they are such an exciting new format, potentially applicable to museums, that I have to share it here. The website Let’s Go Virtually offers tours with real live people who take you around great exotic locations across the world – over Zoom. You pay just a few dollars (5-10 USD) for a tour of 3/4 to 1 hour. Indonesia, the Australian outback, Moscow’s Red Square, and my first choice, Laguna Beach, California – they’re all here! I’m absolutely thrilled to travel to California by Zoom tomorrow evening and see the city and art installations, as promised in the tour description. I’ll let you know how it goes!
What online museum offerings do you think are top? Share in the comments below!
