My initial interest in taking this course was the technological component. I have never before studied interiors, and my only experience with the concept of space comes from a class entitled “Anthropology of Cities.” I was intrigued with the intersection of the humanities and the digital world. I firmly believe that computer skills and knowledge are increasingly necessary to be competent and competitive in any field, and “A Virtual Enlightenment” was my way to combine two of my interests.

At first my project focused exclusively on the digital future of museums; as collections and information are becoming increasingly common online, I imagine that the future of visitor engagement will happen on that platform as well. A presentation by Sebastian Chan, Director of Digital & Emerging Technologies at Cooper-Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, on the inclusion of technology into museums redirected my focus back onto the corporeal museum. These spaced, I imagined, would be reinvented not as curators of objects, but curators of experience. Through our lessons in class and at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, however, I came to realize that museums already do this, and they do this quite well.

Although I have often walked through period rooms, before this class I rarely stopped to think about them, their contents, or their purpose. The truth is that period rooms are a crafted fantasy, the essence of story telling. The concept behind a period room is not just to replicate a historical interior, but to bring the lessons and virtues of that period to life. A successful period room uses careful construction, staging, and lighting to project a specific image to the public. This image encapsulates what the museum thinks is most important or vital about the time period it represents.

Take the Tessé room for example. Its identity is coopted to project an aura of bourgeois elegance, innovation, and increasing individuality. But the Tessé room neither acts as its namesake (a receiving parlor) nor resembles the room beyond the inclusion of the original paneling. If you “go behind the scenes” of the room, you will see that the room has been built as a movie or television set. There is a small corridor running between the walls of the room (which have themselves been enlarged to enhance the fantasy, as well as to fit the larger than life royal pieces held by the Met) and the actual bounds of the building, which contains all the support structures needed to maintain the illusion of the room. This includes scaffolding (to hold the walls in place), ventilation, lighting systems, monitoring devices, etc. All this technology goes into making the imagined space seem plausible, seem real.

Given the technological innovation inherent in creating a successful period room, it makes sense that the next step is to move towards emerging breakthroughs. What I have come to understand through this process is that our projects are not about replacing the period rooms or making them obsolete. Instead they make these spaces more approachable and palatable to the average consumer. Also, digital is sexy; it is quite the seduction to wrap reliable technology in a new, digital skin. It makes the subject more exciting, more enticing.

This is where i see the future of digital innovation in museums. We must not let our infatuation with technological progress lessen our willingness to visit the corporeal spaces. The opposite must happen. Technology represents an incredible way to enhance existing structures of experience. Our websites do not replace the material objects, but extend their presence, as well as that of the museum into the digital world. Marketing does this most masterfully; they create content with a certain psychic pressure that increases our awareness and understanding of a product, which we seek to incorporate more fully into our lives. Museums must do the same; they must catch up.