Dropping the role-playing and fantasy, amusement park thrill rides provide a more affordable and immediate rush of disorientation, fear and risk. The engagement is short and controlled. The rider is essentially subjected to a completely mechanized event. Every dip, twist and turn has been designed. Unlike the ecotourist, there is no appreciation of the unplanned. But the idea that something could go wrong with the technology is part of the thrill.

Perhaps a more extreme version of living through the potential for technical failure is space tourism. Space tourism was initiated by the Russians out of financial necessity by selling civilians time to float above the Earth aboard a Soyuz spacecraft. Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic hopes to be the first private space tourism company in the world. At the time this was written, Virgin Galactic had approximately 340 civilian “astronauts” booked for rides into sub-orbital space at $200,000 with a $20,000 deposit. There are a number of other companies working towards offering similar sub-orbital experiences, complete with take off, weightlessness and landing. Big money plays part in many of these experiences. If our individual experiences form our character then fantasy adventurers, space tourists and ecotourists alike buy their character. The more personalized, the more expensive it becomes.

While it would seem that roll-playing would only apply to the fantasy adventurer, we should consider that the ecotourist and space tourist seek to fulfill a sense of self-identity. Ian Munt published an article called “Eco-tourism or Ego-tourism” describing the ecotourist as participating in a mode of travel that supports a perception of themselves as having an alternative lifestyle, allowing them to play the role of traveler, adventurer, explorer before an audience of friends and family, sipping cocktails. But regardless of the role playing aspects, we should not undervalue the qualities of the experience. What all of the experiences mentioned here share is the participant’s subjectivity in the varying levels of exposure, struggle, risk, fear and disorientation. In all cases there is a sense of survival or accomplishment to be found. And regardless of their fabrication, these conditions allow the tourist to act as a the “traveler” by extending the experience beyond the primarily visual, highly mediated and hyper insulated conditions that most museums offer.

When a museum desires a hands-on, curiosity driven, exhibition offering visitors the opportunity to explore and discover what ideally are unforgettable experiences, some of the non-museum options mentioned above may be considered. But what we want to ask ourselves is not necessarily how to design museum exhibitions like a theme park ride, fantasy adventure or eco-tourist escapade, but how we might incorporate elements of risk, struggle, role playing, disorientation, even fear and certainly a sense of accomplishment. How could these physical and emotional components help visitors engage in content? How might content be embedded in these circumstances? How can we inspire through such activities, not only personal achievements, but a sense of responsibility, empathy and the motivation to act beyond the exhibition?
 

Tinkerers and Explorers

The experiences described above are, of course, highly corporeal. The body’s subjectivity is central to the achievements and knowledge gained. There are other examples of using digital technology that draw on our sense of curiosity and experimentation as it relates to our fundamental techniques for survival, examples that recast the tourist as traveler. In fact, these might push the participant to the far end of the traveler spectrum, into a role better termed explorer. These examples do not have as much to do with participating in preconceived circumstances as much as in trying to figure out how the circumstances work or how they might be hacked to do something else. They encourage the participant to enter a virtual “no man’s land” A study done by the MacArthur Foundation, Learning and Living with New Media (Nov.2008), has some wonderful, unbiased observations on how youth use technology. The section Tinkering and Exploring provides some interesting insight into the way games and websites can be compared to how humans learn and survive regardless of the landscape. Personal pages on social sites and digital games require an ample amount of tinkering or what those interviewed called “messing around”.

“Because interactive media allows for a great deal of player-level agency and customization, messing around is a regular part of game play. In the early years of gaming the ability to do player-level modification was limited for most games, unless one were a game hacker or coder, or it was a simulation game specifically designed for user authoring. Today players take for granted the ability to modify and customize the parameters of the game. Not only were youth in our study constantly experimenting with the given parameters and settings of the game, they also relied on game modifications and cheats to alter their game play”. ²  The self guided, curiosity driven, exploration occurring across a digital landscape is one that holds all sorts of interesting possibilities for museum visitors. In some cases this tinkering is goal driven, but often it is simply exploratory, focused not on the prescribed goals of the game, but on the nature of the game’s functionality. 

Many of the things being described here, if applied to a museum’s efforts, involves re-imagining the exhibition space. Even inserting gaming spaces into museums can be tricky. The need to accommodate large numbers of visitors often prevents museums from offering these sorts of activities. And certainly, the space required to build a real interactive landscape where visitors engage with other players can be costly and difficult to maintain. But we are now seeing GPS linked mobile devices allowing the merging of interactive game spaces with real locations. Sometimes referred to as “location aware games”, these activities can take many forms and might allow highly interactive informal learning experiences to be designed for spaces that stretch beyond the museum walls. We can begin to imagine ways in which existing environments, external to the museum, are “seeded” with virtual clues, breadcrumbs, rewards, etc. to instigate modes of investigation and discovery. The participants are given a limited orientation in order to get started and then released into the environment, one that could conceivably stretch across the entire globe.

If we accept the premise that the average museum visitor is “the tourist” then the expanding opportunities offered by the tourist industry may provide us with points of departure for imagining new museum experiences. The examples mentioned above only begin to scratch the surface of possibilities and are offered as seeds of inspiration rather than fully developed ideas, ripe for museum application. Still, some may feel that these examples are inevitably fraught with legal issues, or that they are not cost effective, or too limiting in terms of accessibility. This should not stop us, but instead offer a place to start.

As the poet, Antonio Machado wrote: "Travelers, there is no path. Paths are made by walking".

MWB, 2011

Footnotes:

1 The film “The Game” has been sited as an inspiration for forming Ultime Realite.

References:

2 The Mac Arther Foundation, Learning and Living with New Media (Nov.2008).