Museum Augmented Spaces

I went to the MFA for this assignment. I was not able to find much augmented spaces with technology. One of these spaces explored quipus from the Andes, which are cords with knots used by those people to record and write history. The way they augmented the space was by having huge quipus hang from the ceiling in the center of a square room with projectors illuminating them which produced some patterns. They had a soothing music coming from inside, probably with speakers in between the cords, one could not go in between them and they had a security guard making sure. They then had the usual written information on the walls of the room.

The other augmented space I found was an exhibition called Love Story. This exhibition was about refugees that escaped from their oppressive countries. They had a main room with a large screen showing a video of actors Julianne Moore and Alec Baldwin, who acted out excerpts from the original refugee interviews. There was then a room behind this that had six screens with one bench each in front of it with 3 headphones each. These screens had each of the original interviews and were positioned pretty close to each bench. The creator of this exhibition really wanted to add the sense of immersion there with the headphones and close screen. Although the use of headphones was pretty good to make people more immersed in each interview, no one was cleaning those headphones so I think there could be a better way to facilitate the interactions.

Besides from these two installations I could not really find any other technology using augmented space. Most of the museum consisted of paintings and objects displayed with text printed somewhere next to them.