Making an exhibition with no gallery visitable

Bozar brought us a problem with no answer in the catalogue: mounting an exhibition whose pieces were scattered across the world. None of those objects could travel. For some of them the archive from the previous exhibition had disappeared, and what remained sat in printed catalogues, which is to say in two dimensions. Nobody had seen the back of certain pieces.

The exhibition is called « A Passage to Asia: 25 centuries of exchange between Asia & Europe ». It brings together eighteen pieces lent by sixteen museums, and it was launched on 7 March 2021 at the ASEM Day virtual celebration, organised by the European Union with the Asia-Europe Foundation and Bozar. The details of that launch are published on the ASEM InfoBoard event page.

Establishing what is missing before producing anything

The first job was not modelling. It was digitising the existing catalogues and analysing them to draw up the list of what did not exist: the faces never photographed, the missing dimensions, the materials mentioned in a text but visible nowhere.

That step looks administrative and it is the one that decided everything else. Without it, you model whatever is to hand, you end up with a collection of uneven objects, and nobody knows which are faithful and which are an interpretation. With it, every gap is named and settled with someone whose trade it is.

Supervision is not a final sign-off

The pieces were rebuilt in three dimensions and through 360 degrees, under the supervision of archaeologists. Not reviewed by archaeologists on delivery: supervised throughout, which is not the same expense nor the same schedule.

The difference shows on the uncertain areas. When a face is documented nowhere, someone has to decide between extrapolating it, leaving it neutral, or not showing the object from that angle at all. That decision belongs to the archaeologist, not to the team doing the modelling. Taking it in their place means producing a piece that is credible and wrong, which is the worse of the two outcomes.

The setting was not invented

The museum’s rooms were surveyed by laser. The survey gave the real proportions of the room and the behaviour of its light. The rebuilt objects were placed back into that setting, not into a generic one.

That is what explains the result. A perfectly modelled piece set in an invented space reads as computer graphics. The same piece in a room surveyed to the millimetre reads as a photograph, because the eye recognises the space first and the object only afterwards.

The detail that gives away an invented room is almost always the same: a doorway that leads nowhere, or a ceiling height that matches nothing. Here the opening at the back gives onto the next room because that is what the survey said.

What it produced

The exhibition became visitable from a browser. The result was convincing enough that visitors turned up at the museum’s ticket desk and asked how to get to the rooms. They did not exist.

The navigation and the three-dimensional journey are shown in the video published by ASEM, which conveys the movement from one room to the next in a way two still images cannot.

We tell that story because it is the only indicator we have. We have no attendance figure to publish, and we would rather offer a verifiable anecdote than a statistic we never measured.

Why this article is also about websites

The work described here is not image-making. It is information architecture with a 3D engine in place of a grid of pages. Establishing what is missing, settling what is not known, deciding what has to be seen first and in what order the rest is discovered.

A website asks exactly those questions, with smaller stakes and the same consequences. A home page that shows everything shows nothing. A catalogue presenting forty references in no order makes them all equivalent. The skill does not lie in the tool, it lies in settling what matters, then holding that decision all the way through.