The British Museum

The British Museum houses a vast collection of the world’s artefacts that were sourced during the era of the British Empire. The Asahi Shimbun Displays in Room 3 of the Museum, showcase a single or small group of objects from the collection, with the intent of deeper examination. These displays are also a testing ground for innovation in exhibition design.

Contribution
Concept design

Team
Tea Uglow, Jonny Richards, Emila Yang, Simon Blanckensee, Deborah Ho, Annabel Blake, Tim Paul, Jude Osborn, Hugh Kennedy 

Agency
Google's Creative Lab

Year
2017

The challenge

The focus of the upcoming exhibition was a double-sided, limestone relief from the The Great Shrine at Amaravati. The relief was first carved on one side in the 1st century BC (featuring the Buddha as an empty throne), and then turned over and carved on the other side in the 3rd century AD, featuring a corporal Buddha standing in front of the shrine.

The curatorial team at the British Museum wanted to create an immersive experience of the Shrine site, enabling visitors to imagine themselves as ancient pilgrims, circling the shrine, and to allow visitors to understand the historical and social significance. 

A video explaining the process and intention of the project.

A projection of the relic from Amaravati augmented with interactive touchpoints.

The concepts

Following the success of a proof of concept, our team braintstormed ways that visitors could interact with the relief. We came up with a range of ideas which included:

• Magnification: allowing visitors to magnify the intricate carvings
• Illumination: allowing visitors to uncover the original brightly painted colours of the relief
• Recreation: recreating a digital version of the stupa in order to display the relief in context
• Passage of time: highlighting the time that has past between the two sides of the relief
  

We worked closely with the BM’s curatorial team, based in London, to determine a concept that would best suit the purpose of the exhibition. The curator of the exhibition, Imma, wanted to visitors to imagine themselves as pilgrims visiting the shrine that this relic once belonged to. We drew upon our previous experience with Griffin Theatre Company to create an experience where visitors could interact with projected images of pilgrims. I visualised the interaction touch points and drafted rough spatial plans for the experience.

Experimentation

We tested a range of different fabrics for the projection, to see which would carry the best image without sacrificing transparency for quality, ranging from mesh fabric to high quality projection materials. Our team re-created the space that the exhibition would be housed in, to begin prototyping the physical and digital experience. We darkened the room by hanging up black fabric all around the room’s window, and printed out repeats of the relief to mimic the enlarged background. 

By hanging a semi-translucent fabric for the projection, and creating mock videos of how the virtual pilgrims would interact with the audience, we were able to specify how the videos were to be produced and stitched together, and the final physical setup that would be required. 

Reflection

I was involved in this project up until the prototyping stage. This project was continued by the Creative Lab, with the exhibition being displayed between 10 August – 8 October 2017. Read more about Virtual Pilgrimage in The Guardian.