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The Project: Self-Reflection

The sole purpose of the core question was to create solutions for our future life, because this COVID-19 pandemic has made us realise that tomorrows are basically out of our control, and the only thing we can do is to minimize the risk and damage by anticipating and modifying our living pattern. However, we realised that transformations come with risks, so the next step is to lessen the unwanted risks, which in this case is loosing the human connection.

Going digital seemed like a totally cool idea, until the realisation hits, that we are also about to lose the pure human connections if this continues. At first, we were also too focused on using digital technology to solve on-going social/political environment issues in South East Asia. However, we realised that our ideas were not innovative nor was it effective to make up for the amount of loss of human interactions that we experienced during the peak of the pandemic.

This Interdisciplinary Project has opened my eyes on new perspectives from various art streams. I found out about the general problems the film and fashion industries were facing during the pandemic, as well as how they were trying to cope with it. However, I felt regretful that I could not be of much help during the whole process in terms of designing the moodboard, website, and product, and I was not always initiative because I let my awkwardness and hesitation prevented me from giving opinions. Nevertheless, I am thankful for my group-mates for being supportive and still considered my opinions and ideas.

Our Virtual Museum project was a success, and this experience has made me realise that there are actually so much that can come from a group of people, whom each is from different backgrounds.

[martaliauw]

Virtual Museum: "Galaxy in a Box"

This is the final version of our museum box, which was drawn by one of our team members, based on the ideas that we have all discussed and thought that fit the theme and purposes.

The box consisted of (from top left) a solar system projector, a resin pencil holder, colouring book, the museum ticket, an interactive origami card, 3D zines, and finally, a pair of 3D glasses for the origami card.

Below are the reference pictures that we used for the items.

Art Book

Gallery Invitation

Resin Coaster

3D Glasses

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The Virtual Museum

Above is the final version of the mood-board we created for our gallery's website. We decided to go for space-theme because after another review session with our facilitator, he suggested that it would be easier for us to have specific target audience because the target audience could help us streamline the kind of art that we wanted to present, hence as mentioned in the second post, we chose to target families with young children aged 7-10, and according to our research, one of the things that they are very much interested in is space and galaxy.

By positioning the children as the target audience, we finally had clear goal and could design our museum in a more detailed way. Attached below is the final design of our virtual museum's website.

The internet surfers, or visitors of the website can turn on the attached background music by pressing the play button at the top right corner, as well as experience the 3D moving images and space background.

[martaliauw]

Case Study: Loewe's "Show-in-a-Box"

When the pandemic hit, none was able to cope with it immediately because it was very sudden. Fortunately, we are already walking towards the domain of digitalisation, hence it did not take us long time to switch everything and somewhat return to the "new" normal.

Especially industries that are dependent on gatherings and public performa, many move to live stream and recorded shows, including fashion runways. However, Loewe took a step further by introducing the wonderful show-in-a-box to share its story. It was particularly designed to celebrate its brand S/S 2021 menswear collection.

The box was designed in a 360-degree view manner including bird's eye. The men and women collection' logbooks were printed in paper blocks, a pair of sunglasses from the collection were also replicated in a form of perforated paper that "audience" could try on, shoes that were photographed as postcards, and even a portable cardboard record player — which allows the reproduction of the runway's tracks — as well as the real fabric swatches

This is the brand's innovative way to overcome the lack of physical interaction during this time, while still maintaining our distance. RUSSH, an independent Australian fashion magazine praised the innovation, stating that "it translates the peculiar language of the fashion show into another realm, opening a wealth of possibilities for the future."

Of course, this is not a completely new idea in general, as it was inspired by Marcel Duchamp’s Museum in a Box - an example of an ambitious and portable solution that still offers viewers a holistic experience.

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Virtual Museum: The Process

We started by looking for reference and examples, because as far as we knew, virtual museums have already existed, so our goal was to enhance it further that by making it more "physically" experience-able.

We took quite some time discussing the approach, as we were unsure about the digital part — whether in a form of app or website or even both. However, as the discussion went on, we realised that we didn't have very clear goal yet, as to whether to enhance physical connection with the gallery artworks, or with the human connection that we get during visit to the gallery.

In the end, we decided on working through the question "how to make virtual galleries feel more real" because we agreed that to enhance physical connection required more complex approaches and most likely higher cost. Also, the latter goal fit our current ideas more — the box and virtual gallery — and consumed less time to plan as we only had around five days.

We also chose to create website that was accessible through PC and mobile instead.

We also elaborated the pros and cons and solutions regarding the question.

We added in mini projector with the reasoning that even though it still has not very often used yet since the art community still values physical appearance of the works over digitalisation, but because of the pandemic we have no choice but to lean on technology, and it also helps the gallery to reach people who want to promote and showcase their works before but could not.

We imagined a VR (virtual reality) system that could scan the room then placed the artworks on the walls on the room the "audience" were in. We believed that this was possible because VR has endless ability to be improved in the future, and one of them is to make it more personalised.

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"How Do We Own the Future?"

We asked each other to throw in ideas as our first step to see what we could further worked and developed on as a group. Some of the ideas include: social and environmental issues in South East Asia, like the future of foreign workers in Singapore, sustainability, and even the use of future technology especially in rural parts of Vietnam. After discussing for some time, we came up with one question that we were planning to use as the core of our project, which was "how the environment affects us as artists?" We used Vietnam and Cambodia as examples to present to our facilitator in the first meeting.

However, our facilitator said that similar projects had already existed, and it would be difficult to come up with new one while still being under the umbrella of the core question. Then he suggested a few possible topics, one of them was the issue of losing human connection with almost everything starting to go digital already. We found that quite interesting, so we decided to build from that.

The idea of virtualising a museum came up, and all of us immediately agreed to work on that.