You're Surrounded! Immersive Environments

In my mailbox today was a magazine called "Exhibit Builder" -- I'd never seen it before. Although it's largely an ad vehicle for shipping companies and trade-show exhibit designers, there were some great museum features, including one on a new traveling children's exhibit developed by the Freeman Foundation, Five Friends from Japan.

The exhibit is designed to be a cultural bridge to Japan for American children. The conceit is terrific: you enter into a replicated classroom, complete with desks you can sit at and art on the walls. The desks are stuffed with individual kids' things -baseball cards, stuffed animals. As you sit there nosing around in somebody's desk, the 'chalkboards' come to life -- they're actually video monitors. Video kids (five separate characters) are shown writing on the 'chalkboards' - then they turn around and invite you to visit them at home. You walk through portals into five separate spaces which recreate elements of childrens' lives in modern Japan - a tofu shop, a backyard, a bedroom, a living room, and a traditonal tatami room. Yeah -- fun.

The exhibit is described as an 'immersive environment'. The phrase jumped out at me, because it's one I used (probably overused) last fall, in a major grant application for the design of a new exhibit. It was the only phrase that could sum up what I was trying to convey: that though we could always do a static exhibit, there are ways to go beyond mere display, beyond only hinting at an environment, and into the totality of an experience. There is an incredible power, a sense of realness, in creating a situation in which a visitor is completely surrounded by objects specific to a time and a place. In which we observe the unities. In which there are no (or few, or very small) cues that pull you out of the sensation of wonder and exploration which strange surroundings create. No jarring labels, Plexi barriers, intrusive audio narration, bothersome interpreters. A place in which you are immersed.

I began thinking about immersive environments on a visit to Shelburne Museum last fall's. Most of Shelburne features traditional exhibitry, but in one building --the 1950 house -- they've achieved near-complete immersion. From the moment you walk past the garage, rusty trike, '50s car, and oil-stained concrete driveway, enter through the squeaky sheet-metal screen door into the kitchen, and take a look around -- you're there. The illusion is intense. The electric clock is whirring on the wall; the refrigerator is humming. Open the fridge -- there's a partially eaten Jell-O mold and a bunch of celery. In the cabinets and drawers are utensils, food packages, half-empty boxes of birthday candles. In the bathroom, Readers' Digest. In the living room, an ashtray on a stand, with ciggie butts in it, and a crushed-up pack of Parliaments. In the bedroom, satin quilted bedspreads and crocheted afrghans on twin beds. It feels like Grandma's house. The eerie sensation that someone is about to walk in and find you pawing through their house adds an interesting frisson.

That's part of what immersive environments are good for. They tell you, with every object and sound and experience, that you've stepped into the daily lives of real people; and because you are inclined to accept that idea based on the evidence of your senses (however faulty!), you begin to pay attention to the feelings and sensations your surroundings elicit. The objects fall into place, receive a context. In addition, we're given a freedom we hardly ever get in real life (at least, not in any sanctioned way) -- the freedom to rifle through other people's sock drawers, look under their beds, read their diaries, and burrow in their closets. We're spies, snoopers, investigators. It's thrilling.

I don't mean to suggest that the immersive environment is a new idea - it's not. Plimoth Plantation has been doing it for years upon years. On one of my first visits there, I remember walking into a village house with a colleague. Though most houses contained one or two interpreters, in character, having lunch or doing chores, this one was empty. For a quick moment my friend and I looked at each other and silenty exchanged the awareness that this stuff was all reproduction, and we could touch everything, and no one was here to see us. In seconds we were all over the place like a dog on a dead squirrel. I picked up and paged through the books on a shelf. We went down under the bed and found a chest of clothing and undergarments. We opened cupboards and looked at the much nicer china stored away from daily use. This was one of the single most memorable moments of my visit. Later, I asked one of the supervisors about the empty house -- and he told me that it was intentional. He said they always try to leave one house uninterpreted every day, so that people could satisfy their urge to explore - really, the urge to learn -- without feeling observed, without wondering whether they had permission. I can only admire Plimoth for being very early among museums in designing an exhibit that accepts human nature as it is and builds upon its strengths; they are honoring our desire just to poke around and snoop, and recognizing that this is how we, as humans, are equipped to learn.

At our hearts, what are historians and researchers but nosy people? We have questions, we want to get some answers, and we are biologically inclined to use the senses Nature gave us to do so. Immersive environments honor this instinct, and turn visitors from passive recipients of wisdom to active explorers, able to indulge the simple human curiosity about how someone else lives. Let's hope to see more of this in the future.