In a world with an ever-increasing over-availability of stimuli, it is clear that the modern museum (or cultural organization) needs to reimagine its function for the average citizen. Instead of offering visitors a definitive pre-packed curator-led interpretation to absorb and learn, making visitors feel emotions, challenging their beliefs with difficult questions and enabling personal meaning making are new goals in museums (Petrelli et al., 2017). ColorColab’s main goal is to offer an emotional, potentially challenging, and hopefully meaningful experience to users.
To the average person—one that has only seen classical sculptures in their black-and-white textbook facsimiles, or accepted their white marble nakedness at face value— colorful replicas often deliver a shock. This was evident in the Gods in Color exhibition, which created high quality replicas based on scholarly investigation of the pigment remains, and which received mixed reactions both from scholars and visitors. The shock element will be a critical entry point for ColorColab to initialize this emotional, potentially challenging, and hopefully meaningful experience.
ColorColab's educational purpose in the context of museums is connected with the notion of awakening, which aims to arouse curiosity, to lead to questioning and develop the capacity to think. As such, the purpose of informal education is thus to develop the senses and awareness, a process which pre-supposes change and transformation (Desvallées & Mairesse, Key Concepts of Museology 2010, page 31).
As a whole, the goal of ColorColab is to use embodied interaction with historical artifacts as a critical tool for the rethinking, mending, and strengthening of the social fabric. In this way, it is an attempt to engage with the society that surrounds and house these artifacts, and to make visible the invisible through the physicalization of color. This is in line with the trend that information is not the only or most important factor which designers should think about when designing digital interaction with heritage. Rather, factors such as physical engagement and supporting the social setting are principles that interaction designers should consider (Petrelli et al., 2016). In this way, ColorColab allows for the contextualization and re-appropriation of cultural heritage in a social fabric whose details and complexities are only revealed in color.
Stemming from the initial guiding questions, ColorColab’s main goals became:
Transfer knowledge about ancient polychromy in general
Transfer knowledge about the alive-like affective experience that the statues had on daily life
Transfer knowledge about the variety of colors present in the ancient Roman Empire (in fabrics, skin tones, etc.)
Increase awareness of the negative consequences of the omission of ancient polychromy
Increase the tangibility and exploration of otherwise inaccessible objects or features
Raise emotions about the user’s place in history and the world (including of their identities and tastes, with projection of their own skin tone and clothes unto these historical objects)
Emotionally engage with the role of colors in art, history, and daily life
Allow and encourage visitors to re-appropriate CH (ancient classical sculptures as well as ancient polychromy)
Encourage visitors to better define their historical role and placement
Motivate users to create a personal story through the creation of their own palette
A crucial aspect of ColorColab is to challenge visitor beliefs with difficult questions, such as:
What is the role of color and its omission in the society surrounding me?
How different—if at all—was the ancient Roman empire’s color palette from the present’s?
Who gets reflected in ancient classical sculptures?
Did I take whiteness for granted when initially faced with these sculptures? What else have I taken for granted?
Encouraging visitors to explore the artifacts in a 3D fashion, with magnification services included (both in online app and in AR experience)
Engage visitors with their own bodies and clothes (exploration of skin tone and color palettes)
Engage visitors with their environment, including other people, for relevant colors
Creating connections between the ancient statues and modern artifacts
Situating the artifacts, the museum, and the visitors in the history of its geographical location
Situating the valence of colorful sights in the context of contemporary Italy and Europe, as what used to be ancient Roman empire
Support local, national and international education about ancient art and society
Support educational institutions in the area
To learn more about this gif, take a look at White at the Museum (A Satirical Take on the Whiteness of Classical Sculpture)