The Hybrid Museum (Session 2 of 2)

Unknown Speaker 14:27
You can start with him. Okay. Yeah, welcome everybody to this session here at the MCS 2021 My name is Torill Haugen, and I work for Solomon's Kunstmuseum in the city of Christian salmon south of Norway. And with me today I have some brilliant people, I've been working with and getting to know lately so I think let's let's just start if you have we can go to the next slide, and then we can just introduce ourselves. You can start.

Unknown Speaker 15:04
Thanks. Today, I'm Giles Pooley, I, the former head of digital and experience design for Antenor International and now run a collective called lucid lab, we are strategic creatives and we deliver digital transformation and immersive experiences of all kinds. For the cultural and social sectors. I'm 45 years of age, even though I think I'm 18, I hope it was middle that mixed race with a grain of salt and pepper beard. I'm calling him from Barcelona and behind me is a screengrab of one of our virtual exhibits, which is a Live me online museum with rotating exhibitions. That's me.

Unknown Speaker 15:54
Great, you have better manners than the drives to introduce yourself properly. I will just do that quick recap, and just a tutorial I'm middle middle age that's what you call me now I'm in my 50s That's tough. And behind me you can see a picture of exhibition microworld Christian Sam with genetic mood that we will kind of link to a little bit later in this conversation. So let me move on to Philip, yeah. If you would like to introduce yourself.

Unknown Speaker 16:24
Hi, everyone. Thank you for coming. And so, My name is Filipe Pais, I come from Portugal. 38, years old, long hairs, sometimes looking like Jesus Christ or something like that. So, yeah, what can I say about me, so I'm a curator, independent curator also researcher at the collective the valley, and from time to time I teach in in London at UCL and RCA and also go to Norway at Norwich University. I'm very interested by digital and online exhibitions at the moment so that's why I'm here. Yeah,

Unknown Speaker 17:10
thank you, thank you. Nicola, can we hear from you.

Unknown Speaker 17:14
Hello, my name is Nicola, and I'm one half of the digital art group genetic move. I had the privilege or Tim and I had the privilege of having an exhibition micro Kristiansand in the solum Kunstmuseum which total historic team. Director show for us, and we work with Luminarc projects and Jack is here with us for that. And I am sitting in my virtual room because we created virtual Shmoop for the museum, as a partner project with our exhibition. So it's a red room, I have my little avatar by the side of me. And I'm white, and have blonde hair and wearing black and I'm middle aged, thank you.

Unknown Speaker 17:57
Nicola, and last but not least, Jackie.

Unknown Speaker 18:01
Jack Addis, the director of Luna projects in the lumen prize. I'm 32 years old I wear glasses I have a beard and short hair, and I'm calling speaking to you today from a small village near the city of bath in the UK leaving our projects in Italy looming prize celebrate the very best art created with technology. We have a network of over 400 artists around the world genetic moving, being one of those. We work with various organizations and partners to produce exhibitions and new conditions, and also provide advisory services such as knowledge seminars and workshops.

Unknown Speaker 18:41
Yeah, thank you. So just as part of this project that we did, we also had somebody who couldn't translate Biomek collective so I just want to mention them as well. And just to say after this session we will we will visit this virtual escape mu.edu And it would be nice people if you want to join us there, so feel free. So next slide deck. Just like dimension, you know, Here's a picture of our museum where we are at the moment we will move into an art silo shortly, within the next two years. So this project that we did together it was supported by something called free with the free words that should encourage kind of conversation and debates, and also Khrushchev our local foundation for arts here in hearing their Christian sound. Yes. Next slide please. So, um, the reason you know why we wanted to explore this virtual space or what you can say digital twin for museum or hybrid. Yeah, was that, you know, the COVID situation happened for everybody. We just opened up, or now we plant this exhibition with them, with the genetic law here at the museum, and other things but suddenly we have to close, and, and there's a center here in Norway called the Center for Creative industry Sunday, after some time during COVID they released a report to say that kind of 50% of the audience's in the museum's kind of miss, miss, that sense of being together in this space because a lot of new seamen. And we as well we started you know producing videos and you know things kind of a little bit one way communication to our audiences but it's quite early that people realize, missing this sense of being together. So that's why I reached out to Jack Addis, and we were started quite early on talking about how can we create the space for for our audience to be together. Deck, do you remember part of that early stage, can you share a bit about how things came along.

Unknown Speaker 20:57
So totally and I had already been working on the genetic move microworld exhibition and we also worked on a previous exhibition in the museum as well. Remembering with Ricky kind of Dolan so when Trump. Around this time, the pandemic, obviously, was in full swing and lumen always likes to do an exhibition to show our winning artists each year. Within a physical exhibition, and obviously in 2020 We weren't able to do that so we've partnered with the general Leonardo and the online virtual platform Nubart city, to produce a kind of exploration of all the winning works for the other one the Lehman price on this brief quite difficult to do because it looming we have, we cover all different types of category of work so that's ranging from still images through the video work, interactive installations and works, you know, based around augmented or virtual reality. So finding ways to represent these vastly different practices in a virtual setting proved really interesting to us, and I'd obviously share this, this project with Torill and working online, and showing work online, it's kind of an interest I'd always had, and something that Torill And I kind of, we're kind of skirting around, you know, how do we involve the audience again in microworld. But not only providing a kind of video or images but drawing the deeper end and giving them a chance to interact, I suppose, with the themes or ideas that genetic we work to in that in that practice. Yeah.

Unknown Speaker 22:41
So I'm looking at this next slide. So, I you know I remember us going through a lot of different platforms and New York City was one of them and we looked into modular hubs, and the central lab and some of these spaces that were developed but Phillip you actually mentioned this to us. And it seemed like the, the feedback was that actually people enjoyed meeting in this, or people actually, you know, enter them relate to each other in this kind of space. Can you tell us a little bit about this platform.

Unknown Speaker 23:13
So, so this is what we see in those images is referring to the platform like like on this was you Oh mama, so it was supposed to be the tiniest MMO RPG, in the world, built by one of the industry. They are a very interesting collective of gamers and and game developers from Italy. So I was really fascinated by this experiences I had. When they opened in the in the past year, and the first thing that was really striking was how people were interacting, just, you know, very spontaneously of by chatting with each other, that the dialogue system is extremely simple and is really at the forefront of the interaction. So it was, it was really interesting to how suddenly we're engaging with someone else who might be in the other side of the world, and steal the word talking about just random things like the waiter or where are you coming from or also just like, you know, the, the aesthetics of that space or the the aesthetics of a certain work, which was exhibited in the, in that digital space so I was really, really seduced by that and that's that's why we came up to to work with lifelike, I decided to to bring this to the attention of 14 and, and Jack, who I was working with, by that time, and we immediately went inside that space. And we obviously through experience, we arise, we realize that, that would be something we would like to explore a little bit further. Yeah,

Unknown Speaker 25:11
Yeah, and we had a long discussion about platform because kind of really thinking about our audiences what how they would be managed to move around in those spaces, especially more our traditional audience that's not so used to this kind of platforms. And we also had a long discussion about what to show in this kind of on this kind of platform, what should we kind of try to bring our collection into it, how is that related to rights and things like that but then we had the brilliant idea, at the end of that, because we were just, you know, setting up this preparing for the microworld. I mean being shipped to Norway not having the artists there like we normally would have, but like I remember talking to you about this, you know, why don't we invite Nicola Antin from genetic mood to explore this space, you know, you know, and I think that kind of idea landed well with you as well.

Unknown Speaker 26:07
Yeah, it was thinking. Not maybe creating an exhibition version, but more of a residency. And I think for me that's what makes takes us predict to kind of a different place than than where we've been talking about before, it was having the artist in residence in the virtual space, which again led us to a lot of different conversations about how that would happen, which platform, what software we would use, what artists, you know can can manage to do this work and what infrastructure, do we need to put around them to enable them to make the most of the opportunity that we're offering as well as give the audience something interesting and meaningful to look at a split was describing. So we kind of came around and through kind of a hard process of elimination, but it's right we chose the, This, this, like like platform, and we invited genetic moon, to have a look at it and see how it worked, and through maybe coincidence but perhaps not the aesthetic really work very well with genetic mood to McNicholas current practice. And I think, how the work was developed over time, and how we built out the environment that the visitor would go in, there's a lot to kind of unpack there to make sure that, you know, everyone felt comfortable and knew how to access to space and how it would be how you can run events in this space for instance how, by having an artist residency, how does that work but actually the visitor is able to drop in at any time alone. Also through events, run by the museum so how does that work for the artist as well and how do you structure and plan a virtual residency in a space where things can can be changed. Very very easily and very quickly as well, and how do you manage your audience through marketing and to draw that interest I think there's there's a lot to kind of go into that, and I, I'm not sure how far to go at this point with any one of those points so I think I can back to eat or.

Unknown Speaker 28:22
Yeah, that's a, that's a lot of good questions there and I think what you know one here that can answer that is Nicola who had that kind of, you had that question, you know, you and Tim together. Would you be willing to kind of explore this idea some of these possibilities together with us, so maybe you can share a little bit, nickel about how that process went was for you.

Unknown Speaker 28:42
Sure, I will initially so it was when we entered it and when any of you entered the likelike space is incredibly charming, it's working at a very low resolution 128 pixels by 100. And I mean, we might not work with super high def but I mean that is quite a challenge in the first place. And yes, so one of the first things that we did with Finn contacted Paolo Peda cine because there was thoughts about us, collaborating with them, perhaps with Him, because He created his of Molleindustria to create our space, and he recommended the biome collective which is how they came on board, this was really important this residency wasn't just about us, creating an interesting space as a sort of partner project to the exhibition. It was about learning new skills and really to take it to the level we wanted to, we wanted to we need to to work with people who had experienced of it as well and they had worked with Molleindustria on the MoMA project, and it was incredibly exciting it was to work virtually, we, the pandemic bought all sorts of complications to us as interactive artists to lose contact with our audiences quite significant. And so to suddenly be in a situation where we will creating work for an audience, although for virtual interaction was really exciting to have collaboration with groups of people across the world was also really exciting so a very positive one, and one that has benefited us for the future as well because I suppose really from that experience and from what we did. It enabled us to win a commission to work on a project which will be opening in January and Leicester which is in the gallery, and also online.

Unknown Speaker 30:39
Oh, that's interesting. That's nice to hear. Yeah, so just should be looked through some of the images from the project.

Unknown Speaker 30:49
So, yeah,

Unknown Speaker 30:52
yeah, yeah, so I'll just say something about this. So, as I say we're interactive artists and we work on large scale interactions behind tutorial you can see, she's surrounded by this immersive space large gallery space. So I emphasized this the scale difference if we go to the next photograph. Next slide, Jack. Next one. Yeah. Oh, sorry, it's not the one I thought it was. Yeah. So with that, yes, let's go into this one so this is schmo said this is outside the real museum and the entrance to the virtual space really up to encourage engagement you want to give as little information or direction to people that you want it to be intuitive for that for them to feel comfortable with it and to get straight into it and this is what the lifelike interface is like. So yes, if you can go on. This was designed by the by and collected by the way the entrance areas to the museum. The next slide. So, the first in the top left corner you can see the lobby in the museum and this is where people can come together and there are, there's a chat box, chat bot in there who says hello to you, gives you a bit of information, we decided to do it in Norwegian and English. And then you have some of the rooms within our micro world. And it's the story of the of the starfish and. And there's a walkway into the rooms, and the rooms themselves in the bottom left you have this all inspired by the way by interior of the starfish, so this is one of the stomachs in the starfish, and the whole site the entrances to channels or legs in the top right you can see what the interior of the leg is like. And, and then little activities are inspired by the exhibits and micro Kristiansand itself so anyone who has actually been to the exhibition will recognize these, if they haven't been, it's an indication of what is in the exhibition, and they're playful, and, and this was so the biome collected guided us in terms of working on this scale and in this type of environment, what we brought it was then, our coding skills to develop interactives but have a relation to the interactives that are in the Microsoft space have similar experiences. Next slide. Yeah, so this is just to give you an idea of the scale so this is a sort of high def imagery we're working with in our exhibitions, and you see in the top right corner. This tiny little image, and behind me as I says is an blown up image of the space itself. And it's remarkable to work at that scale in fact how sharp the edges of the pixels really are. And perhaps one of you can take over from there I feel I said plenty.

Unknown Speaker 34:11
Yeah because, I mean, Philip you came to the opening on this as an avatar, how was it.

Unknown Speaker 34:18
It was great, actually. It felt really strange at the beginning like okay I'm going to an opening, but I'm actually just staying at home, and, and once you arrived there you see lots of people gathering and entering the museum doors, then going through the lobby and actually going into the cinema room. I think this, this is how we call it. And actually, you get to see this live presentation where Torial is speaking and presenting the project with the Buddha, or who we see also there the SDN director, and you see lots of people who are actually able not just to talk between each other and common on what they are actually watching, but also they can play if you have, they can use certain codes for example, slash dance we see there. So the avatar starts dancing, or if you if you if you were you were typing another one, which I don't remember quite well what was the coop where you could transform yourself into a pint of beer so it's called exactly it's called it's like Sunday for, for no regions or cheers. And to a certain extent, to it a certain time everyone became just a pint of beer, so there were lots of points of view assemble that was quite fascinating to see all this kind of spontaneous social behavior and social interaction, which was really going beyond words, just sometimes we've movement, people just approaching each other then getting out of the room, but still that, I mean they had the possibility to to explore the rooms, and the space is quite big, as you as you will be able to see if you go into, into the space. But still, people were concentrating and would prefer to see together gathering and watching the presentation and playing with each other and that really shows, you know, our suspicion. The strong affordance for social interaction and social play and spontaneous play, and that really happened there so it was a great opening it was really a, I was really happy to see that, that that happening in front of me so it was, it was a big success for me.

Unknown Speaker 36:51
Thank you. I had people commenting on because we tried to build a similar to our museum, and you know, some of my youngest nephew he said, I've been there when he saw this with a with a exhibition online, and also people were commenting on the opening that okay they have this sense of being together and they exploring things and and you know we streamed into this cinema room that we have. So maybe we should try. Let's see how much time we have, we have a little bit time left so. So, this kind of question is to all of you, what do you think are the major challenges, challenges in curating online and what is the potential of this kind of. Yeah, what is the potential of this online collections and building kind of in a way a digital twin of your museum or a hybrid, as we say today.

Unknown Speaker 37:46
You're the first consideration is to not try and wholly imitate what the gallery space does physically and virtually I think that's quite obvious to everyone, and I think it's to tread carefully to make sure that you, traditional visitors who museum can feel comfortable in a virtual space that you've made. So having that as your opening focus. I think is really important to make people almost forget the technology, and I think that's a key, a key thing with any virtual exhibition is that, you know, you provide as you mentioned Torill This, this space where people say they recognize what's going on. And then you provide as Philip was discussing is almost like a stage, I mean this is a great slide demonstrate that it's almost a stage where people are together, and they interact, and then they can find through someone else doing one of these interactions that we had coded into the, the virtual SKU, there's a number of interactions that weren't. Obviously, we knew some of them, but I think only Nicola knew all of them. So you see someone do an interaction like the dance will turn themselves into a beagle I think we've kind of gone across the space, a bit like a Mexican way. So I think providing those, those kind of moments of where visitors can forget that they're in a virtual space and focus solely on interacting together, I think is a key thing to enable it not to feel empty all that you're perhaps experiencing the exhibition on.

Unknown Speaker 39:24
I think that's a really good point, Jack, I mean, so Tim and I are in any of our exhibitions are really mindful of how people feel in the space, you know, in terms of, you know, we want them to enjoy it and participate. And so we want to make it simple for them to engage so no, no specialist specialist knowledge required. And, I mean we, I think it's fair to say that during these last 18 months, people's skill set in terms of digital has really come on its head to. Nevertheless, people still feel nervous with technology. And so to use a platform that people have an inkling of what is, you know, they can make sense of what's going on because they see a community coming together, you can, people can type their words, obviously you can read the words, you can see things happening, it just, and there's something so joyful as well about being a little avatar in this very very simple shape. So, it's compelling, it's incredibly compelling. But I think for anyone wanting to do an exhibition online or to use technology with the public, you really do have to think about helping people, not making it so complicated not needing loads and loads of instructions as to how to do it using tools that people are, you know, recognize,

Unknown Speaker 40:50
I think to pick up on that, you know, there's, there's a feeling that you can either as curators or producers or however we turn ourselves as the team in this project, we didn't have as much control over the exhibition spaces as we would in a physical exhibition, because we can't control really how people are viewing this on what equipment they're viewing it on, and how their connectivity is so you have kind of have to release that and work in a way that enables the, you know, it with that in mind. So, very simply, it was, this is this is a much smaller, as we pointed out before, image than being a high definition on virtual space, you don't need a very fast internet connection to join it. It's actually square, it's not 16 by nine so again that enables it to be viewed on a range of screens in a range of orientations, without feeling too confusing. I just like to pick up on one point but before we move on I think we missed over here is we had a long conversation about whether this should be a first person view or a third person review, and how that dictated on the platform and what was easier for the audience to understand and I think if I'm correct, we came to the conclusion that clearly third person was was easier to understand because you're able to orientate your avatar within the space and see how you relate to everything around you. So I think every kind of step of how you interact needs to seem very, very consciously

Unknown Speaker 42:24
on just to have small bits on that. You pretty much covered what I had to say but um, but I think really the digital literacies definitely one of the concerns are curators, but also mediators and museums, need to have. Obviously there is this potential for global reach, so you can you can you can reach remote places on Earth, and, and therefore thinking about, about a more horizontal and democratic approach, and, you know, and this is quite good because this, this all started, somehow in the 90s we've met our movements like exploring this affordances for, you know, to invite everyone basically to, to experience art, and not just going into museums and pay for tickets, etc. So this is, this is extremely interesting, but obviously you need to be careful about the kind of language, how you address people how you invite people in your experience, and obviously the big challenge as well, is, you know, there is a tendency to just remediate or imitate the offline world, you know, even as we were confronted and we this image clearly shows, we were confronted with that we needed to have some kind of recipe reference paces, so people are not continually lost, and there is an interesting clash because, as you can see we have the structure of the museum, the lobby space, the cinema room, and more traditional galleries gallery spaces, But at the end, at the end of the day we ended up showing the interior of strange organisms, and you know this Tomic Center of Dominance and and strange things that otherwise would be very difficult to just build in a traditional hardening Art Museum, obviously. I think that this is the big, big struggle is to avoid you know just imitating or find worlds Do we still need, you know, windows and walls and doors in this digital spaces, Can countries think otherwise, you know, if, if this museums, if this digital exhibitions are supposed to be extensions of museums extension of galleries, why do we need to still use the same metaphors and the same interactive metaphors right. Another thing is the exhibition space. Of course, in digital in non digital spaces offline spaces, we have limited space, we have to deal with the material technicalities here we have almost infinite in this space. So this is a, we need to be very careful with that. Also, another important one is the attention span, right, and how to maintain and keep the visitors interested, we need to be. We need to realize we are competing with other onstream very absorbent digital spaces, emails, notifications and stuff like that. So how do we prepare for that, how do we compete with this highly absorbent digital spaces. So yeah, that's, those are quite big challenges I think we need to think about them.

Unknown Speaker 45:52
Absolutely, thank you, Philip. Yeah, I guess we have some takes. We have some, you know, maybe, Nicola, you mentioned that you, you have a new possibility now to do a new combination of office space, and the virtual. So do you have any advice from you seems are more eager to kind of explore or, well,

Unknown Speaker 46:15
yes, I think, certainly I mean, one of the things I mentioned to Torill the other day and I don't know if people are familiar with this but, so in this country, there has been money given to museums and institutions to help with the, you know, let's say digital reach to the for the public, and quite a few places have struggled with this because perhaps partly because of a misinterpretation about what it was used for so thinking in terms of improving their websites or their social media activity. And I would say that, you know, okay, that can be useful but that's not the most interesting thing to do with it so perhaps for institutions, and maybe I'm talking to a very converted public but I think it's to, to trust that there is, you don't have to know everything about it about what's possible and to trust that if you invite artists to respond to doing something online that they may have ideas, well beyond anything you imagined. And that, yes, open up a conversation and see what's possible and explore things but I think it's to be to experiment. And I think, to also give the space to the artists to, you know, we had a very wonderful experience I have to say, Torill and Jack with this experience but I think it's also because we were given a tremendous amount of freedom to experiment and to try things out and then to discuss it and see what happened and then to run little events in it. And I think so. It my advice is, you know, you'll have very happy artists if you give them that degree of freedom as well to explore there obviously has to be a delivery day and what have you. Find out finances obviously important and I'm sure you know tomorrow you have more to say about that. I think that I agree that it, you know, a helping hand, in terms of, in our case having that entrance that looks like the museum so it's inviting the audience in is a very good thing. It makes people feel comfortable they recognize things, etc. And you're also talking to a community that perhaps are loyal to your space anyway. But then taking them off on a little journey, you know, like Alice in Wonderland of something, it's very exciting, and, and perhaps you're going to reach an audience that you never reached before, I mean there's no two ways about it, you've probably recognized that this, you know the gaming community is massive, and that the teenage audience perhaps a lot of museums struggle to reach out to them and these sorts of things, you know, this is what they're interested in people will love to explore them to play games people invent things if the thing is open enough if whatever is created is open enough it's a bit like a sandbox game, people will explore it and do their own things and create communities around. Yeah.

Unknown Speaker 49:18
So, we have 10 minutes left, which we, I mean, I think we really love to hear from the audience if you have some comments if you have some questions, feel free to put it into the chat and we will like to connect with you.

Unknown Speaker 49:33
Yes, please do. I've been asking for questions, of which we haven't had any yet but we've had some who've asked how they could visit the site themselves so put the URL. Yeah, and I've also put URLs for, like, like the platform and a bit and the one for biome selection in case anyone wants to see one, any of their work, but I think you were thinking about having a mini get together after the chat as well within the space so if anyone wants to come in and see, meet some of us there, say hello. We will be actually on the platform.

Unknown Speaker 50:05
Yeah I think Tim is going to be in there as well and I'm in fact going to go in there myself.

Unknown Speaker 50:11
Yeah, I think it'd be great if we could go in there as a group, because you can't, it's very easy to see the images you don't ever get, you can't really experience the works that are in there through these, these still images, they're all interactive exciting places to be and they really do take you on a on a on a journey really and I think we haven't actually, before we go discussed how the residency played out and what events took place. And we mentioned the starfish the journey of the starfish. Nicola, could you mentioned very briefly how wet, why is it the starfish, you know, what was the missing stuff.

Unknown Speaker 50:50
Yes, okay. So, when we set up the exhibition, the, the real exhibition micro Kristiansand, one of the pieces called Hexter and the sun stars, and we have set up remotely because in fact we were, we live in Margate, we couldn't go to Norway. And so, we accessed artworks online and set them up. And one day, Tim was aware that one of the starfish, one of the three star fishes had disappeared. And we thought well that's a bit odd, and so we explored it a bit and then thought we knew what it was doing and etc, etc. And then about a week later the same thing happened and this coincided with us doing the residency and we thought, well, it might be really nice to have a narrative to, to encourage people into the space so you have this, you know, communications aspect to it, you have this playfulness aspect to it but perhaps to have a story associated with it could be very good as well. So the idea is that you enter this exhibition, you understand from signage that it's the story of the missing Sunstar, and then you go on this journey and within it, there are the possibilities to collect some some stars. And if you're really clever transform yourself into a starfish that there is a sort of you know, the gratification aspect to it, playing it as well. Does that answer your question, Jack or is there something else in particular,

Unknown Speaker 52:23
just really good, because this isn't redrum this isn't a virtual exhibition, This this virtual residency is tied to a physical exhibition that was not available at the time of creation. So it wasn't just, you know, there was a kind of meaning and narrative here that we wanted to get across.

Unknown Speaker 52:45
Yeah, and I just say, there are a few people who are already in the foyer, a follow the arrow because you'll meet Tim, Tim standing next door, he's got an eye above his head. Okay, we can see there's some cows already.

Unknown Speaker 52:57
Great. Just before we go, there's two things I took a question from Murray in the chat which I'll ask in just a second and then also the lovely Eric has got his hand raised. So we'll come to him in a second as well. So the question for Murray, have you had feedback from some of your onsite audiences about the virtual space.

Unknown Speaker 53:18
Yeah, we had a bunch of four young kids, being in the exhibition and afterwards entering the space, you talk to them a little bit Nicola Did you get any.

Unknown Speaker 53:28
Yeah, no, they loved it. Um, I think, especially, it's not surprising that with children that you know they will respond to it very quickly. But it's, it's also, I realize that someone's asking about the exhibition audience and making that connection with it, they can see that some of the artworks, or all of the artworks relate to the real world ones, but we've also had people who haven't been in Norway or haven't been to micro with Kristiansand, entering the exhibition and recognizing the artworks in there. And, and, you know, exploring it and interacting with it because I think if, if you, when you're in there you go into the first stone which is the multiple on one of our very popular pieces is an artwork that uses connect sensor that repeats you in multiple patterns around the space. And in this very simple way Tim's very cleverly achieve the same effect with the avatar. So it's a really nice way of instead of introducing our artworks in this, in a virtual world. So, as I understand it, virtual Shmoo is going to stay online, and, and it means that we can actually promote our exhibition through this virtual world, which is lovely. And you anyone who's in there already knows that we've got our avatars, I look much younger than I am in real

Unknown Speaker 54:52
the avatars to take over. And so, I just want to come quickly to Eric. Hello lovely Eric. We've got some time for you.

Unknown Speaker 55:04
Yeah, I just put in the chat. Are you familiar with me

Unknown Speaker 55:10
in the US. Yes, I am I'm very familiar with them I love their pieces,

Unknown Speaker 55:16
yeah I've never I've never I've never been in person but I mean they, they started around this concept. I think I can't remember where, but they're, they've been extremely successful with it and having, you know, a, an economic model around it, where they, they have made a fortune around it, and so I'm also interested and I think you all approach it from kind of a very creative and design perspective, which of course is you need that. But I wonder, you know, how museums will integrate that in into either art exhibition or interactive, and you know what is their business model behind it, I know is that, you know it's not to be. We don't need to. And to answer your question here but I'm very intrigued with those new kinds of.

Unknown Speaker 56:14
Can I see my take that, guys, I know I'm not talking specifically about this, but just in a couple having worked in the sort of immersive experience space, Mia will do something similar but very different they create worlds in which you walk into and you experience art and the whole event is a very physical one. But a magical one, I think there are a number of very successful, what they call themselves theatre companies rather than immersive experience companies you do the same thing sort of punch drunk NUMMI bum bum train very interesting name, and a bunch of do that sort of thing is one of, I've taken that idea and sort of brought it across the Atlantic. But there are increasingly and I know, speaking from Barcelona, there are a couple of spaces that are opened up here which will look a bit like the wonderful space behind Tourelles head, which of these beautiful white boxes in which you walk into and you have audio visual experiences and and they are ticketed events, you know, and they are not cheap ticketed events either so it depends on which way you want to do it but yeah there are various different business models, turning up

Unknown Speaker 57:27
up sorry, we have a question from Allah I thought we should just honor the, yes. Yeah, hello.

Unknown Speaker 57:37
I didn't want to interrupt a Gill, who was saying, No, I come from the university. We are researching this kind of experiences we are brothers also we work with augmented reality as well. But my, my approach is that normally in technology now is so advanced that these avatars look like a real person and maybe now we have these virtual persons that look like real, but from, from our research and from our experience those virtual avatars are problematic because they, you can stay looking to one person. Digital like that speaking to you for more than two minutes. So, in this game that you are presenting this pixel art. I really find it really attractive in that way that you did, don't stress for that, because you can you look at that, so you can stay like more than 15 minutes, moving around and not struggle with this. So, so getting with what deals we're seeing now, sometimes this very high quality technology from video games industry is not on the same level of quality or not quality that consumers need, and sometimes we need an equilibrium and this kind of expensive experiences that can be like paid by an Indian Museum, but also when we want to approach Harry that we, we need to do another approach,

Unknown Speaker 59:22
I think, yeah, I think it's brilliant, to hear what you're saying I mean Tim and I have been in our history of making which is since 2008 We've been very keen to use readily available technology. That's good, very good for museums and institutions because it means that it's, it's cost effective, but it's also because we're interested in inspiring people to make art as well but you don't need to have high. Let's say cutting edge technology to do it, but I totally agree with you, but you've got the research I happen that there is the staying power with these little avatars. People take time to choose what they're wearing, have you know which dance, they're going to have, you know there's a real care with it and there's a real really quite strong engagement and connection with it, that is, you know I think completely amazing so I'm really interested to hear what you've got.

Unknown Speaker 1:00:20
Yeah, let's meet in the virtual space. Yeah, sorry, sorry, it's really nice to have this conversation and if we have more time we can continue but it's already past our time. So thank you all for coming. Thank you all for joining, and see you in the virtual space maybe

Unknown Speaker 1:00:37
thanks door and thanks everyone. Thank you everyone. Thank you. Enjoy.