Dear CRUMB list readers and respondents,

well, September has been much slower to start than I had hoped, but
we are here to rectify this...
some of the CRUMB team went last week, at last, to see the exhibition
Our Cyborg Future?, curated by Andrew Chetty at the Discovery Museum
in Newcastle. The exhibition description (http://www.dott07.com/go/
health/our-cyborg-future-me-or-machine) reads: "Our Cyborg Future?
looks at the shrinking divide between us and the technology we use.
 From prosthetic body parts, to smart textiles and wearable
computing, a range of technologies is penetrating the different
‘skins’ we surround ourselves with - from our biological skin, to the
clothes we wear, the buildings we live in, and the communication
networks we connect through."

I hope that Andrew might comment about the process of curating the
show, the selection of the works (I didn't see much about the
buildings we live in, for instance), and the exhibition design, but
for now I will comment only on the exhibition design, and not the
content.

The exhibition is installed in the top floor of the Discovery Museum,
in the Great Hall (promotion photos of it as a venue for hire are
here: http://www.twmuseums.org.uk/discovery/venuehire/) - a fantastic
wrought iron vaulted interior with wood floors and a stage - perfect
for a sunday tea dance! The building is the former Co-operative
Wholesale Society Headquarters, designed by Oliver, Leeson and Wood
opened in 1899 (so says their website). The museum itself has
collections mostly concerning the industrial and scientific heritage
of the region, but is not lacking cultural artifacts either, and is
home to the Tyne and Wear archives. The exhibits in Our Cyborg
Future? -- predominantly 'wearables' or technologically inflected
clothing and prosthetics, from fabric made from old cassette magnetic
tape (Alyce Santoro - SonicFabric) to the beautiful dresses made by
Hussein Chalayan to the victimless leather project by The Tissue
Culture and Art project -- are 'housed' in the metal frames of garden
sheds.

To describe a little more clearly - the entire great hall is a maze
of open framed garden sheds (for lack of a better term). Hanging from
the ceiling of the hall is a gigantic neon outline of a human figure
-- with the exhibits in the sheds beneath corresponding into
'zones' (head, hand, etc.) Some sheds have translucent walls, some no
walls at all. Some sheds are double sized, with open doors for you to
walk through, most of them are designed for you to walk around, with
the exhibits displayed inside. The steel frames act as an armature on
which plasma screens are hung, showing video documentation of some of
the projects, and illuminated (lightbox) text panels. There is a
small photo here, if you scroll down the page, to the description of
the Stone Island Reflective Jacket :http://www.dott07.com/go/health/
our-cyborg-future/the-exhibition/the-exhibition.

A few of the projects installed are responsive (such as Marcel·lí
Antúnez Roca - Requiem - robotic 'exo-skeleton'), though none are
truly interactive (I don't think), and the garden shed system makes
it quite clear that most of it is not to be touched, and you can
easily stand and look, or watch the screen. I think the exhibition
design cleverly solves the initial problem outlined in our original
questions this month: Given the overlapping of works in large and
sometimes crowded exhibitions how are spaces “divided” and/or to a
certain degree hybrid? Where does a particular work ‘begin’ or
‘collaborate’ or interfere with another? Here, there is no overlap --
the sheds work both to isolate a given work (in some cases one
project per shed) as well as to group like-minded projects (all of
the jewelry projects, which are smaller, are installed on different
sides of the same shed). My complaint would be that while this was a
simple and effective/practical installation design solution (you can
run wires just about invisibly up the metal girders of the shed to
power the plasma screens, hang the lights from the shed itself,
meaning the show didn't have to fuss with the huge vaulted ceiling of
the great hall), the sheds seem at odds with what is contained within
them. At times it made the exhibits, many of which obviously had
mannequins on which the wearables were displayed, look like they were
renegades from a swanky shop window elsewhere in town, hanging out in
a kind of shanty town. The human figure outline hanging from the
ceiling might not have been noticed at all if you weren't tempted to
look up (which if you haven't been in the room before you might do,
but if you were easily seduced by the objects on view you
wouldn't)... and i think it could have been reproduced in tape on the
floor, simply and effectively. I didn't feel as though there was a
particular route through the exhibition, and indeed, there wasn't a
single handout piece of paper, pamphlet, guide or anything of the
like to indicate as much.

Perhaps others on the list could describe some of the exhibition
design solutions they have used in large group show contexts, like
this one, which includes both interactive and non interactive design
projects?

Sarah