OK, this is extremely exciting: the University Museum is making an exhibition about research in our Machine Vision in Everyday Life project! They’ve been working on it for months, and COVID has made everything look very iffy, but now it really looks as though it is nearly ready, and we hope to be able to open it on March 18. Fingers crossed there isn’t a new lockdown before then…

You’ll enter the exhibition through this tunnel, which will be lit up and “scan” you – then a mechanic guide (a talking head video) will greet you and instruct you to draw a card that gives you a specific role. You’ll view the exhibition from the point of view of your role – a wonderful touch that our larp development team came up with. (The actual larp is planned for November.)

The exhibition is beautifully thought out. Our whole project team contributed ideas, with Andreas Zingerle, Linda Kronman and Gabriele de Seta leading, and the curator team came up with excellent ideas for how to actually make the exhibition exciting to visit. The focus is on the research, but as we research art and games and narratives there are also a lot of artworks in the exhibition – I am thrilled we were able to include this, because there is a lot of evocative art that directly engages with or critiques machine vision technologies.

There are a lot of details involved with organising an exhibition. Thankfully the Museum are extremely professional, and Andreas was immensely helpful in coordinating with artists and so on (if any of the artists are reading this, your contracts are on the way, we had a few bureaucratic hurdles that are figured out now).

I also loved learning how the museum curators work when designing an exhibition like this. This is the floor plan they developed after many conversations with the research team.

Sadly the University Museum isn’t able to accept school classes now due to COVID, which is a real shame, as this is an exhibition that would have been so well suited to school visits – and that is usually a major part of what the Museum does. If we’re lucky we’ll be able to have visiting school classes later this spring.

I’ll share more as the exhibition is closer to being ready to show!