Session 97 summary
Nikita shares the experience of working with museums, particularly tribal museums, around 2009-2010. Through a couple of their projects she shares experiences of each kind of medium and how their interactions progressed through those mediums with various museums and with the communities themselves because all their work in tribal museums has been done with tribal communities and documenting their ways of life to be presented within a museum format- which is two different balancing acts.
Introduction to Myth Interactives
It is an interactive and immersive design company. Started in around 2009- with the goal in mind to inform and entertain visitors and provide them a memorable experience that they cherish (perspectives) and also in a way showcase cultures through the museum environment, which they thought was largely lacking in a lot of Indian museums at that point of time where one goes in and looks at the artefacts, didn’t really know the stories behind them or the way of life of the communities they were supposed to be portraying. At that part, one could not even guess that the communities have changed or evolved overtime, a lot of them are stuck in time. The team set out in this realm thinking it could bring about a change, one display-one museum at a time.
The team started as telling interactive stories and interactive kiosks, overtime they have branched out into Signage, audio tours, documenting tribal life, into multimedia tours, projection mapping and a variety of solutions that allows them to leverage technology, to tell stories. So, the focus for them have always been the story and the telling of it, in ways that are engaging and therefore harnessing newer technology to that end. So, story driven in their perspective rather than technology driven. Therefore they come in the conceptualization stage, they do a lot of research with either museum staff or communities or cultural centres. They have people who are well versed in content writing but also have people who have a lot of experience within the particular realm. (A lot of their work is in Odisha, and Eastern and North-Eastern India.) From there they move to production, graphic design and hardware installation. They like to refer themselves as an end to end company. They don’t leave it at giving the museum the content, they take on the responsibility of making sure that everything works even 10 years down the line- that is important because museums right now in particular are not equipped to maintain the technology. So, telling stories through technological medium also requires one to be able to keep those technologies running, their up keep is also a major factor otherwise the whole thing falls flat in a year or two, where they are unable to maintain technologies and therefore it is an effort wasted and something Myth Interactives prefers doesn’t happens.
Myth Interactives started working with the Tribal Museum in Bhubaneswar in 2009-10. Their first project with them was to do interactives for their museum galleries. They had five galleries over there; costumes, personal belongings, hunting, agriculture, and music & art. This is the way the museum had categorised it. Sometimes it happens that Myth Interactives comes at a stage where the museum is built- well established 20-30 years old and the team has to work with the existing display and the way it was categorised and displayed, sometimes according to 60s or the 80s and work technology into that environment to tell a story. The Odisha Tribal Museum, Bhubaneswar, has a diorama kind of layout which is their PVTG gallery, as they have named it and this gallery showcases the 13 PVTG groups in Odisha, each with its own kind of diorama and once this space was built, the museum approached Myth Interactives and told them that they wanted to make that interactive. In both of these cases they were working with galleries which were already built and they had to bring in some kind of story-telling into the whole space. So, for the main gallery the team started with interactive kiosks for the five kind of thematic zones covering 62 communities and later the museum asked if it could be converted into audio tour- so there were cases with QR code scanning and one can take a tablet and walk around- but the question arouse what content would be there. Initially the team started out with choosing artefacts and asking the museum what are the artefacts, the stories behind them and what can be told about them. The museum gave Myth Interactives about 80 artefacts to start off with and said that it is a mix of communities and some of the stories were relevant, while some of the stories had died out. A lot of cultural erosions happens as the communities are letting go of different aspects of their way of life, some because they are no longer relevant or valid and others because their religious beliefs are changing with time, education and therefore a lot of things added to education have made their way in, where the younger generations are kind of letting go of the old way of life. From 2015 Myth Interactives has also been working with the museum in documenting indigenous knowledge and practises regarding agriculture, practises regarding food preservation, practises regarding collection of certain forest produce and they are trying not only to tell stories about the artefacts and how they were used and their cultural significance but also document the ways of life and bring in the voices of the members of the community- “what was, what is and how it is going to be in the future”.
In the PVTG gallery a kiosk is a 15-20 min engagement if one sits and looks at everything the kiosk has to present. It begins with a glimpse of the community; where do they live, how far is it from the nearest district headquarter, so that one gets a sense of the environment, then diverges about what are music and dance, what are the festivals, is there an oral tradition, is there a story of origin, etc. When looking at stories of origin the team looks at animating them with the community if they have an existing art form that lends itself to animation. Similarly when looking at something like a fish trap, then they focus on how does it work, animating the schematic of fish trap along with footage of the actual process of capturing the fish or making the fish trap/bird trap or laying out the bird trap, how it is actually done- actual footage and schematics to show how it is constructed/ used and why it is so ingenious. Apart from that they also do promotionals (because they are meant to get visitors into the museum space) for which they have the ‘360⁰ tour’- where one can walk through a space digitally- to get the visitor curious about the space and encouraging them to visit the museum. For ‘Audio Visual Tours’ there are tablets rather than screens. The screens are fixed installations where one has to go infront of that diorama and it talks only of that diorama and only that community and their way of life, but something like a tablet one is walking around the museum with and it will give information about various displays and it is pretty useful when displays are non-categorised. Immersive experience was the next thing they planned to take over with the idea “why don’t you go to the village?”. For this they started documenting in the villages during festivals, during dances, during melas with 360⁰ cameras and bringing those as 2-minute clips into the museum. The reason for it being a 2-minute clip and not a 15 min documentary is because VR sets have their own limitations; they induce nausea, loss of balance, etc. so 2-minutes is the upper limit for enjoying an experience. The team started bringing in dances- the basic village life where one can visit the cattle shed, field, farm, watch someone go for crab catching in the mud, etc. The audio tour is something which they do for certain things where it is language driven, where one would want to hear the poetry/translation/song, etc. They did it for the Bhasha Academy, in Tejgadh, where the academy wanted to talk about language and so the team created a mix of interacting with printed material and listening to the songs and poetry in those language via headphones, so that one can hear the story in the original language with the translation in front of them and so visitors would know what is being said. They also did a small application for Odisha Museum- “how do you look at a community?”. They had a huge board put up at the entrance of the museum and they had little mobile phones attached to it where one can go and scan a code for the name of the community- then they would automatically get a map which shows where the community lives, their basic information and get the sense of the vastness of the state, the extent of its communities, where they stay and get a sense/an overall picture. It is not meant to give a lot of information but set the stage for the rest of the museum. They did the Video Wall Interpose for the client, Tripura Museum, who wanted to talk about the history of their community, because they are a history of 14 communities, out of which some are migrants, some are locals and some have been brought in forcibly, communities brought in as forced labour in the tea gardens of Tripura (but still considered as the communities of Tripura). So, the team made a wall which talked about that history, migration of communities, which is an entire animation talking about who came in when and where. It acts as an introduction upon entering the museum i.e. who are the communities and then look at the communities individually which has a diorama kind of set up. Tripura was different as they didn’t wanted to talk about each community individually. After the introduction they wanted to talk about two main things for them: one is bamboo and the other is cloth/weaving. They said that they wanted two stories apart from the history, one about bamboo; how it is grown, used, do they cook it, do they make it into crafts, household utensil, what do they do with bamboo. The other story about what do they do as weavers; what kind of textiles, how those textiles identities, how are they produced, is it cotton or silk, how is it woven.
“Take me to the Forest”: The Interactive Projection Wall (Odisha State Tribal Museum, Bhubaneswar) is the latest project Myth Interactives has done which is an interactive projection wall. There are three walls with a mural printed, the mural was created especially for the interactive, and it is a hand-drawn mural which was printed across almost 38 X 7 feet with 5 interactive projectors on it. The projection gives an introduction of 13 communities in Odisha. So, although one is looking at the dioramas, they are moving into another space especially designed for interaction and with children in mind, where one can just touch and get a small brief. The kiosk gives the actual footage, the actual history, etc. but the interactive wall gives a very brief info about the communities and their relationship with the forest, hence the name “Take me to the Forest” as it is talking about the communities, what do they gather from the forest, is there a kind of involvement with conservation efforts, etc. So, it a very brief overview and it was done for a purpose very different from the kiosk which provide very detailed information about different communities-their history, origin, etc.
Video Wall, Tripura State Tribal Museum, Agartala, Tripura- Here the client said that they needed an introduction to their space. The team prepared a short clip about 10 minutes long, talking about four communities with the same ancestry, other communities that migrated in and the communities who came as forced labours. They are all recognized as tribal communities of Tripura, Tripura having an autonomous administration is very active in talking about all these community. The challenge they faced in this project was, the artwork was done locally in the northeast, but the challenge was to get the history right from the perspective of the community, despite what the historians and anthropologists say. They did this because they were trying to balance what was written by in research, with what kind of government perspective, with the perspective of the community saying that “you might be saying this, but we say this, and our voice also deserves the equal platform”. For the Immersive Experience, in Museum of Tribal Art and Artefacts, Bhubaneswar the team had VR Kiosks and 360⁰ Immersive Videos which includes everything from walks, to markets, to dances which are happening in the middle of a mela, etc. these kinds of documentation were done in the villages with the communities.
About the Speaker
Nikita Desai
is theFounder, Creative Technologies Director of Myth Interactives. She did her Bachelors in Instrumentation and Control Engineering, Master’s in design (Multimedia) and Ph.D in Design. Nikita’s role at Myth Interactives is to combine computing technologies with design and humanities. Some of the outputs of her team include interactive applications, 360-degree tours, virtual reality experiences and interpretive and interactive kiosks. She also works with the conceptualization team advising on user centric design and interactive experience integration. About Myth Interactives- Born out of the idea of Myth as the sacred story present across cultures and eras, Myth Interactives is a multimedia design studio located in the historic city of Vadodara, Gujarat. The core competence of the company lies in developing interactive and immersive experiences for cultural spaces, heritage and educational tours, historic sites, real estate, hospitality, education and healthcare sectors. The goal of the company is to inform and entertain your visitors, patrons and customers and provide them a memorable experience that they cherish. Towards this end Myth Interactives offers a wide range of multimedia content delivery solutions across multiple digital platforms. Our innovative solutions are flexible, easy to customize and can be adapted as per needs and business goals.
