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Conformity, Process and Deviation: Digital Arts as 'Outsider' |
Caroline Claisse (Royal College of Art, London UK)
The Exquisite Cabinet: an experimental installation to encourage creative thinking and sharing stories
My research looks at how creative practitioners mediate between museums and their visitors by the creation and use of interpretive objects that encourage imagination leading to new ways for visitors to connect with artefacts on display. This research has informed my creative practice where I look at objects and how to encourage creative thinking and sharing stories.
In my practice I am interested in creating tools to encourage creativity and imagination that stimulate participants’ meaning-making in museum contexts, based on constructionist principles. My work encourages participants to both create and reflect on physical artefacts that are shared with others to open a dialogue from someone’s own perspective and facilitate new ideas to emerge.
For my diploma, I worked from the Monk’s Parlour room located in the John Soane Museum and created a series of object that reflect on both the space and John Soane’s life. Each object was influenced by participatory process where I created a tool kit, the Monk’s Parlour Room kit to capture people’s experience and interpretation of the space.
Both research and experiment led into the creation of one singular piece of work: The Exquisite Cabinet. It features four intriguing objects, all informed by the previous experiment. The objects were designed using 3D scanning and 3D printing with rfid tags embedded in them. The cabinet invites users to pick an object and to embed a snippet of a story. To encourage user’s contribution and imagination, the cabinet uses similar method as the surrealist game Exquisite Corpse. Once users have picked up an object and placed it on the top of the cabinet, it triggers an interface where a few words from the last story are visible. Once the user added his story, the cabinet prints out carrying on a physical narrative chain.
Biography
Caroline Claisse’s MA dissertation, “Interpretive handling objects for mediating experiential learning in gallery settings,” won a distinction. She has recently presented her research and practice at museum conferences, looking particularly at how creative, participatory and tactile experiences can encourage visitors’ engagement and create new insights into the artefacts on display. Her background is in Fine Art and Graphic Design. Prior the Royal College of Art, she studied in Paris and New York and graduated with a BA in Graphic and Media Design from the London College of Communication. For the past two years she has been working in the field of exhibition design with a growing interest in interaction and co-design.