On Thursday June 27, the IESA meetings were held at 11 Conti – Monnaie de Paris. Created 2 years ago in collaboration with {CORRESPONDANCES DIGITALES]IESA, these meetings bring together a host of professionals (agencies, cultural institutions, academics) to discuss a range of issues relating to digital technology and innovation in the cultural sector.
This year, 4 themes are covered:
- Exhibitions / immersive mediation: what does digital technology change?
- What’s the point of open data / content?
- How can digital technology help preserve our heritage?
- Innovations and cultural venues: from experimentation to sustainability.
This article summarizes the discussions at the first meeting on the rise of immersive exhibitions and mediation in recent years.
1. Introduction: some background information and presentation of the issues at stake at this meeting.
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Introductory presentation by IESA students.
The meeting begins with a definition of immersion. It also reminds us of the extent to which this process takes place over a long period of time and covers a variety of forms (sensitive, material, human, and of course, digital).
Digital immersive techniques allow us to renew the way we exhibit, both in terms of :
- Design an exhibition,
- To implement a mediation program for the public at a venue,
- Or working to promote an exhibition.
The aim of this first meeting was to set up a dialogue between various participants to discuss the issues raised by these new forms of mediation, encouraged by the technological boom of recent years. The floor was thus given to :
To listen to the podcast, click here:
Listen to the podcast of the meeting
2. L’atelier des Lumières: a public success story.
0:06: Where Michael Couzigou presents the Atelier des Lumières
At the start of this talk, we take a look back at how theAtelier des Lumières came to be based in a former foundry in the 11th arrondissement. After presenting the venue’s programming, Michael reports on the public success of this initiative.
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Presentation of the Atelier des Lumières.
5:58: Where Michaël Couzigou announces the launch of a digital art festival in the continuity of collaborations undertaken to date.
Given the success of the Atelier des Lumières, Culturespaces has created a digital arts festival(Immersive Art Festival) to identify and showcase emerging artists and support them in promoting their creations.
When it comes to designing immersive exhibitions, the development of artistic and creative collaborations is increasingly essential, over and above the technical aspects of a digital project. This is one of the challenges facing the creations of Atelier Athem.
3. The Athem workshop: a technical innovation to focus on artistic creativity.
12:47: Where Philippe Ligot talks about the genesis of the Athem workshop and a technical innovation that makes it easier to put “art on the street”.
The creation of the Jamion truck has enabled Athem to free itself from a number of technical and regulatory constraints. As a result, budgets for this part of the process are lower, making it more accessible to heritage sites, brands and local authorities wishing to use this type of process, and enabling them to concentrate on the creative side.
21:57: Where Philippe Ligot presents a variety of projects realized by Atelier Athem.
Athem carries out a variety of digital projection projects, both indoors and outdoors. These collaborations involve motion designers as well as artists and filmmakers. This was the case, for example, with Wim Wenders’ recent project for the Grand Palais.
Presentation of Atelier Athem’s project with Wim Wenders at the Grand Palais
These projects are deployed with a wide variety of customers, ranging in size from small villages to major international brands, and in type (brands, heritage sites, local authorities) or stakes (marketing, communication or mediation).
The nomadic nature of Athem’s offering, and the contribution of these devices to mediation projects, are reminiscent of the Micro-folies project run by the Etablissement public de la Grande halle de la Villette.
4. Micro-folies: using digital technology to promote outreach activities.
29:04: Where Rebecca Bouillou highlights the vocation of the micro-folie project to reach out to audiences geographically distant from national cultural venues to enhance their collections.
The fruit of a series of partnerships with a variety of cultural institutions, Rebecca Bouillou presents the exponential deployment of the Micro-Foliesproject in different cities (200 cities deployed in 1 year, and 1,000 in the near future).
Presentation of the micro-folie digital museum.
These different micro-folies are deployed, notably in a network logic.
39:59: Thomas Lafont demonstrates how digital technology can be integrated into a networked mediation offering with strong local roots.
The Micro-Folies digital offering is part of a multi-faceted mediation system (human, sensitive, material and digital) that fosters links between the various Micro-Folies, the audiences they welcome and local cultural institutions.
5. Art of Corner: 3D modeling to reconstitute a place and change your relationship with it.
50:05: Frédéric Purgal presents the uses and technical underpinnings of 3D digital project design.
The photogrammetric process is at the heart of Art of Corner’s 3D reconstructions of artists’ studios, enabling their history to be told in an immersive way. Examples include Maurice Utrillo’s studio at the Musée Montmartre and Bourdelle’s at his eponymous museum.
Some of Art of Corner’s creations
1:00:00: Where Frédéric Purgal discusses the uses of immersive reality and 3D in other cultural and creative sectors.
The various narrative and realistic processes put in place to encourage the immersion and appropriation of audiences in the reconstitution of the Bourdelle studio are of course also of interest to the audiovisual, video game and photo sectors (Art of Corner has recently been incubated by Fisheye’s incubator, L’Agrandisseur). In the luxury goods sector, various brands are increasingly interested in this type of experience as a means of communication or internal training.
Like other speakers at this event, such as Athem and Skyboy, we can envisage collaborations with brands beyond the heritage sector.
6. Skyboy: enriching reality through storytelling.
1:06:00: Where Francois-Xavier Goemaere discusses Skyboy’s positioning.
Skyboy was born out of the meeting between a specialist in storytelling, Vincent Georgelin, and an urban planner, François-Xavier Goemaere, who was keenly aware of the need to take the environment into account to ensure the success of any project. At the crossroads of these two convictions, they created Skyboy, an augmented reality device accessible via smartphone to promote access to content narrated in a way adapted to their environment.
Introducing Skyboy and its Overlap Reality (R) process
1:15:00: Where François-Xavier announces the “off-the-shelf” availability of their solutions so that the public and professionals can generate their own experiences.
To encourage the development of new immersive experiences, Skyboy has announced that its technology will be made available on subscription to professionals and the general public, enabling them to develop their own superimposed reality films via their smartphones.
7. In conclusion
Rich in exchange, this first meeting evokes a plurality of collaborations in the design of immersive exhibitions and mediation. The technical aspect essential to the creation of these projects is tending to fade away in favor of more creative projects contributing to mediation logics thought out in a more integrated way with a set of accompanying modalities (material, human, sensitive). The systems mentioned above illustrate the many possibilities for providing the public with this type of experience: video protection, tablets, headsets, etc. The public are also faced with a variety of experiences: artistic evocations, reconstructions of places or educational proposals. The success of this type of device, recent technological advances and the positioning of a number of players at the crossroads of the brand world and the heritage sector are all factors contributing to the redefinition of mediation and cultural policies at work in French cultural establishments.
