Behind the scenes at big museums, there’s a single overriding question: How to get more visitors more interested in what they do?
Chicago museums have done a thousand things — from flogging an endless line of French Impressionists to making beluga whales dance. They hold cocktail parties for single people. They install animatronics like a Disney theme park.
All of which might overshadow a truly encouraging development in many local museums: interactive computers. Smack in the middle of quiet galleries, touch screens invite visitors to surf through programs, take virtual trips, examine hyper-links and lose themselves in the magic of multimedia.
Among the newest entries on this cybernetic landscape is one at the Art Institute of Chicago. “Cleopatra: A Multimedia Guide to the Ancient World” was introduced last March in the museum’s relatively new galleries of ancient art.
Cleopatra is the first of many interactive programs to be installed at the museum. But for the time being, curators determined that the Art Institute’s small but stellar collection from ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome was a promising subject for its first major hypermedia project.
Computers pare a big subject down to size. “The ancient world left mostly fragments of its former self,” said Mary Greuel, research assistant of ancient art at the museum. “With the program, we can build the story of many objects in our collection, block by block.”
The advantage of an interactive computer, naturally, is that visitors build the stories themselves. A user can begin with a timeline or map for orientation, then choose from among 20 different objects for detailed examination.
A zoom feature magnifies many of the objects for a closer, near-microscopic look. Some can be rotated 360 degrees. Most important, each object is accompanied by answers to three or four questions that can be chosen with a fingertip to the screen.
How was the mummy made? Why are Greek figures nude? These stories are told with videos, a minute or so in length and some as intriguing as a clip of a scholar wrapping a modern-day mummy (working on a cadaver donated to science). Music accompanies some portions of Cleopatra. Spanish subtitles are always available (and are used some 15 percent of the time).
This “multimedia guide” is designed to be basic enough for children but compelling for adults. And technically, it’s simple enough to suit the adult user but can move quickly from a barge on the Nile to a magnified Roman mosaic, or even a plaster cast of what the mummy, Paankhenamun, a temple keeper from the 9th Century B.C., might have looked like.
For kids and adults alike, the objective of Cleopatra is clear — to motivate viewers to visit the actual art. “We wanted to provide a view of the objects,” said Alan Newman, director of imaging and technical services at the museum. “But we really wanted them to go into the galleries and see the real thing.”
(Art Institute of Chicago, 111 S. Michigan Ave., 312-443-3600)
A new view of a familiar subject is also the point of several interactive computers created for the Museum of Science and Industry’s AIDS exhibit. The most advanced, titled “Stop the Virus,” does what might be done with other media (such as still pictures and print): It describes the life cycle of the HIV virus and teaches what science can do to interrupt it.
But the interactive part gets visitors involved in new ways. Here again, the computer provides choices: to learn about HIV cells at the point when they enter the bloodstream, or when they enter the T cell. The animated videos also explain the possibility of stopping AIDS at various points, with AZT, for instance, or protease inhibitors.
There’s information here, but there’s also glitz. At this museum — a pioneer in hands-on exhibits since 1933 — that means intense, mind-trapping pictures, achieved with remarkable computer graphics of microscopic cells floating through the body.
“We wanted something that was both scientifically correct and visually stimulating,” said Barry Aprison, director of science and education at the museum. With computer workstations like those used in special-effects movies like “Jurassic Park,” artists created images that do more than illustrate the bloodstream — they seem to draw visitors into it.
(Museum of Science and Industry, 57th Street and Lake Shore Drive, 773-684-1414)
Other museums have entered the cyber-interactive world as well, though many admit they’re learning as they go. The Field Museum’s paleontology exhibit, “Life Over Time,” features the “Extinction Lab,” a cluster of terminals with touch screens. After viewing splendid fossils, visitors can play cause-and-effect games with the destinies of fictional species or witness projected outcomes when forces like asteroids or temperature change affect the Earth.
(Field Museum, Roosevelt Road and Lake Shore Drive, 312-922-9410)
At the Lake County Museum, a flashy exhibit on the history of automobiles, “Model A to Z28,” also offers a computer trip on Route 66 with music and an array of postcard views, using the museum’s vast Curt Teich postcard archive. Gas stations, drive-ins, and all manner of mid-century honky tonk are vividly brought back via video terminal, not far from a rich display of memorabilia from local collectors.
(Lake County Museum, Lakewood Forest Preserve, Ill. Hwy. 176, Wauconda, 847-526-7878)
The future of interactive exhibits can only be imagined, but one new entry on the horizon is something called StarRider, which will be part of a new $30 million addition to the Adler Planetarium, due to open next summer. StarRider, produced by Evans & Sutherland, a multimedia company in Utah, makes use of images from NASA and other scientific data bases and creates striking illusions of manned space travel.
Journeys to the moon, to Mars, and many farflung destinations are in the offing. In a domed theater now under construction, “it’s as if you are part of the spacecraft,” said Paul Knappenberger, Adler president who began planning planetarium expansion seven years ago when he arrived in Chicago.
In StarRider, even the jaded will be jolted into activity, as a narrator gives the audience choices of where they want to go. On a trip to Mars, for example, visitors will press lighted buttons in armrests when asked if the craft should fly low over Olympus Mons or land and collect minerals. The computer will tally votes and proceed accordingly.
(Adler Planetarium, 1300 S. Lake Shore Drive, 312-922-7827)
As computers assume greater roles in museums, traditionalists may wonder if virtual reality is getting ready to dominate old halls that were designed to display the actual objects of art, history and science.
Such a debate may slow the attack of cyber-whiz kids now populating museums behind the scenes. But connoisseurs beware: It will be difficult to resist the charms of machines that can penetrate the imagination — and teach a few things besides.
