In recent months, spurred on by the health crisis and restrictions on cultural sites, a number of remote mediation proposals have emerged in the heritage sector. Museums and monuments have long been involved in developing their online presence, and since March have been launching new projects on the Web and social networks, where direct, interactive human mediation is at the heart of these new offerings: webvisits, e-classes, online conferences or workshops…
What are their characteristics? How do they fit in with other proposals recently launched by other players? Who are the target audiences? Are they likely to be sustainable? These are just some of the questions this article seeks to answer.
For your information, in January we piloted a study with GECE on the online cultural practices of the French, in order to gauge their sustainability. A Webinar will be held on March 2 at 9:30 a.m. to share the main results (to register, click HERE).
1. Some pioneering initiatives at the root of remote mediation.
The French enthusiasm for virtual visits, which was evident during the first confinement period (March-April), quickly fizzled out, with only 7% of French people claiming to have visited an exhibition or museum virtually (see December’s figure). On the other hand, this unprecedented situation has put the spotlight on and perpetuated what had previously been the exception: live sharing between the public and museum professionals. Of course, since 2014, a few highlights have punctuated the year and encouraged such online encounters. These include one-off events such as MuseumWeek on Twitter orAsk a curator. In their first editions, these two initiatives met with unfailing commitment from professionals in the heritage sector. Unfortunately, this enthusiasm has faded over time…
2014 also saw the launch of a particularly pioneering new mediation offering: Webvisites at Musée de la Grande Guerre (Meaux). We had the opportunity to discuss the genesis and characteristics of such an offer with Aurélie Perreten, the museum’s director last December during the Webinar we organized with the DPMA on the monetization of digital activities.
In 2020-2021, following in the footsteps of Musée de la Grande Guerre, many museums and monuments are now launching new and innovative remote mediation offerings in the face of a closure situation that seems to go on indefinitely.
2.distance mediation: a simple transposition of activities and know-how?
Although highly diversified, all these mediation offerings are linked by a number of common features. They all transpose to the Web and social networks activities that were previously offered on site: conferences, workshops, guided tours… As a result, they naturally mobilize the solid mediation expertise of museum professionals. What’s more, they help make up for the lack of physical offerings to create or renew links between the public and museums, and create conditions conducive to exchange.
In response to these challenges, heritage institutions have quite easily gone online by producing video recordings of their guided tours. For example, since November, the Château de Versailles has been offering remote guided tours on Tik Tok (see France Culture’s article on the subject, with a particularly relevant contribution by Elisabeth Gravil), an opportunity for the institution to forge fertile links with new audiences.
Others have taken advantage of videoconferencing solutions to offer “streaming” courses. This is the case of Paris Musées, which has deployed its online art history courses, previously offered in the auditorium of the Petit Palais. Like other streaming platforms, these art history enthusiasts are offered access by the unit (€8 full price, €6 reduced price) or by annual subscription (€130 full price, €80 reduced price for 26 sessions).
As for Fondation Louis Vuitton, it took its inspiration from the micro-visits, one-off mediation actions previously offered in its exhibitions, and transposed them to the Web. To reconnect with its visitors, the Foundation gave priority to those who had already purchased tickets for the Cindy Sherman physical exhibition, enabling them to discover this exhibition despite the circumstances. Such an offer is not, however, a second-best solution: for a modest price of 2 (reduced rate) to 4 euros (full rate), the exhibition is commented on, thematized and interaction with the mediators encouraged.
Océanopolis, the cultural and scientific center in Brest, has taken over the remote workshop formats previously offered in-house to school groups. The teaching methods of a one-hour workshop have been reproduced in their entirety: sharing of key notions, observation and annotation of experiments, interaction with a mediator. The only difference is that the mediator is in a room equipped with audiovisual equipment to capture the whole workshop, while the students are in the classroom with their teacher, annotating their observations in an experiment notebook (count €160 for the preparation and running of this remote workshop). To find out more about the Fondation Louis Vuitton and Océanopolis projects, check out the replay of a meet-up we organized and hosted with Museum Connections.
And the list has been growing steadily over the last few months: the Cité des Sciences recently launched its interactive virtual tours, the Centre des monuments nationaux is launching its first remote tours for school audiences in March, and so on.
Simple online transposition? Not quite…
3. The need to master new tools, new content, new skills, and to position ourselves against other offers.
As is the case for many French institutions, it took some time for them to adapt to the features of the platforms they had selected: TikTok, My tour live, Big Blue Button, Zoom, and so on. The Océanopolis mediators, for example, had to be trained over 2 days to design their remote workshops, and then build up their skills through regular use of the platform (60 workshops have been run since November!).
An example of a platform used for remote tours: My tour live (developed by a Marseille-based start-up).
In addition to training and technical issues, the content proposed as part of these online mediation initiatives needs to be extensively reworked, scripted and editorialized. They must promote a video approach to the site that is fluid and easy to follow. Moreover, interaction between professionals and the public is essential to such an experience (as opposed to virtual tours, as Omer Pesquer pointed out in this article in 20 minutes, in the run-up to the last Nuit des Musées). In this respect, while the visit to the Cindy Sherman exhibition at Fondation Louis Vuitton is based on a pre-recorded 360° video, the commentary and interaction are carried out live and in the physical presence of mediators. The conditions for a guided and adapted visit are thus preserved, if not reinforced. Last but not least, public involvement is supported by the relatively modest fee paid for access to this tour, which is limited to small groups.
On a broader level, whatever the format (conferences, workshops, visits…), such systems are full of imaginative ways of capturing the attention and commitment of a remote audience. Alternating times for exchanges, explanations and exercises seem necessary to compensate for the physical disengagement and loss of attention that can result from a long-distance relationship. Another editorial challenge awaits this type of proposal when heritage sites reopen. The challenge will then be to perpetuate these remote activities, while at the same time asserting their uniqueness by offering original additions to a physical visit: anecdotes, behind-the-scenes information, specific themes… As a mediator at Musée de la Grande Guerre recently confided, the online format must encourage off-screen activities to develop frustration and inspire the desire to discover the museum in situ.
Other venues opt for live, on-the-move filming. This is what Musée de la Grande Guerre (Meaux) offers. The Centre des Monuments Nationaux is also moving in this direction. A real technical challenge, this type of visit engages mediators in new skills and know-how more akin to video production than to commentary on a work of art.
As with physical tours and mediation activities, museums and monuments are not the only ones to offer this type of format. Guide agencies and tour operators have also recently entered the field of distance mediation, in response to a crisis that has hit them particularly hard. For their part, these structures tend to focus more on “outdoor” proposals for discovering the heritage of a site, a district or a territory. Culturemoov, for example, offers this type of guided virtual tour.
In addition to these suggestions for complementary visits to museums and monuments, which are, after all, quite natural, other offers are coming to compete with those proposed in the heritage sector. This is the case with “experiences” launched by platforms such as Airbnb, enriching their initial positioning as accommodation providers by combining new physical and online proposals for workshops, tours or meetings with locals.
Faced with this crisis, it was relatively easy for these Web players to digitize their proposals. If there is competition between offers, the audiences and, above all, the proposals are not the same.
The sudden closure of cultural venues during the first (and subsequent…) lockdowns, and the long-standing work on the Web and social networks by volunteer communication and mediation officers, has paved the way for such online mediation practices. However, the heritage sector is not alone in this dynamic, and many particularly inspiring initiatives are being developed (also) in the performing arts (cf. the innovation strategy initiated by the Paris Opera). Over time, these practices have become more sophisticated, and other formats are emerging: the creation of collaborative distance events (hackathons, creative challenges, student councils, etc.), the development of online educational and learning pathways (or a mix of distance and face-to-face), the launch of offers for the general public and businesses, etc. The vast majority of these projects are therefore intended to be ongoing, in conjunction with the reopening of physical activities in the coming months. The questions of how to maintain the public’s willingness to participate in this type of experience, their propensity to pay for access, and the strategy and resources that cultural establishments can allocate over time remain crucial.
Antoine ROLAND
