The Murder Mystery

I really liked this one; it stood out to me immediately due to the interactivity with the audience, and I always love a good murder mystery, so I was intrigued and wanted to try it out. The story was pretty straightforward, but I think that was the point: to illustrate the genres and tropes within the murder mystery form and to put a greater emphasis on solving the mystery. Still, it was easy to get immersed and in the mood to solve the mystery thanks to the great set design and ambiance, which I really liked. The mystery itself was quite well-thought out and planned; each section flowed into the next quite well, and solving the whole mystery required you to think about the clues from past sections you had already completed — to think about the mystery as a whole instead of just thinking about the last puzzle — which tied the whole thing together and made it a nice mystery to solve. It was full of multiple suspects, red herrings, motive, and multiple ways of getting the puzzles wrong: all tropes and cliches of the murder mystery form, which I think aided in trying to deconstruct what a murder mystery is and how to tell one using the physical medium and audience participation. 

Alienation

I think that this exhibit was really good, and really showed how a personal story could be told through metaphor or through the guise of being something else. Similarly to The Rise and Fall of the Codans — which used an alien culture to reflect how we tell stories — Alienation uses an alien culture to depict the experience of international students studying abroad. It was a really nice and well-thought out project, and the booklet with the story of Rae felt extremely personal and endearing, making the reveal at the end that it was all about the struggles and experiences of international students all the more touching and emotional. I also liked the additional real-world elements used; the alien origami was a nice way to involve audience members and draw parallels to the first class in that ‘anything can be real world media’ sort of way. I really liked the overall project, and it definitely succeeds in drawing out emotions and making the audience reflect on the struggles and experiences of others.

The Festival Experience

For this exhibit, I attended both the Trivial Fundraiser, as well as the opening night, where students organised, funded, and presented a festival which showed debut films of many well-known, as well as user submitted, films. It was a really nice and impressive thing from start to finish, from raising funds through a film trivia to watching a film in that festival atmosphere.

The main thing that separated DIFF from other film festivals was that it focused entirely on debut films, showing some from well known directors (I attended a showing of The Hunger by Tony Scott) as well as some submitted by up-and-coming filmmakers to embrace both the known and the unknown when it comes to celebrating film. It was quite a unique theme to present a film festival around, and one that I quite appreciated, as it shone a light on film’s past, in the form of debut films from established directors, as well as film’s future, in the form of audience-submitted works. 

I cannot even begin to imagine the amount of work and planning that must have gone into organising and staging a multi-day event, let alone the fundraiser projects and organising which films to show, and that effort really shows in the festival experience. The amount of talent, both on the screen as well as behind it, and the amount of organisation on display impressed me to no end, and I hope that the students who organised this were as proud of the festival experience as I was attending it.

Now that the exhibition is done, it’s time to reflect on how it (as well as the assignment as a whole) went. 

I’m pretty pleased with how my group and I worked both as a team and on the assignment. I don’t think we could have done any better, and I believe that our method of telling a real-world story — a museum exhibition of a long-dead alien race — was a great idea and a novel way of telling a story that let us flex our world-building and art muscles. I hope it’s received well by the audience (who wouldn’t), but I also hope that they try and piece together the whole story based on the small fragments we gave them, using the clues from the didactics and artefacts we created to figure out what exactly happened between the Codons and the Arbors. The whole exhibition was meant to resemble a walkthrough of a museum’s gallery of old art from societies long-gone, and how they can narrate and depict a story of that civilisation, and I hope it was successfully recreated by us on that day. 

Preparing for the exhibition was easy enough (Olivia and Dani had the worst job of bringing the huge sandbox to present on exhibition day) and mainly consisted of setting everything up where we thought it matched best. It was somewhat surreal having people walk through and view it, however. Seeing people view physical pieces we had created, and try and figure out what happened to this alien society that we made up, almost falling into the narrative of the Codans being a real society, was nice to see and something that I had never really experienced before. I had shown videos and things I had created to people in the past, but I suppose that having all the media be primarily physical and the context of our exhibit changed the relationship people had with them, essentially fulfilling the role we wanted them to play in terms of the museum narrative we were trying to set up. 

In terms of our collaboration as a group, I was really happy with how our group worked together and collaborated to get everything done. We split up the overall exhibition into smaller artefacts: ones that could be completed individually on our own time before reconvening in class to check in and see how everyone was progressing. Parts that we did work on together were the worldbuilding of the Codans and didactics, as well as the general planning of the exhibit and what everyone was making.  Doing the exhibit in this way broke up the whole workload into manageable chunks, and made the time we spent together as a group much more efficient and progressive since many of the artefacts themselves were already being worked on outside of class time, and we didn’t need to meet up and have to work around scheduling conflicts. It also catered to everybody’s strengths; people got to work on what they could do best — whether that be painting or sculpting — leading to a greater final product at the end.  

Overall, I’m thrilled with how our final exhibit went. I hope that the viewers and audience managed to find the story we were trying to tell about the Codans, as well as the story we were trying to tell about the narrativization of museums as a whole, and I’m glad my team and I worked together to the best of our abilities to pull it off.

One of the major aims of our exhibition was to invite audience participation: both in a more physical sense with the sandbox, letting audiences literally uncover the artefacts left behind, as well as the more mental case of trying to figure out what happened between the Codans and the Arbors. Burke and Tattersdill describe museums as inviting viewers to “deploy their own imaginative processes, building a wider world on the basis of both the material on display and their prior experience with museums and fiction.” (2022:314), which is exactly what we wanted to achieve, and to do so we needed to figure out what needed to be withheld for them — elements of the story that our group would know, but ones the audience would have to figure out — essentially giving them a puzzle that needed to be solved. 

This was primarily done through the didactics created this week, describing what the museum speculated and theorised as to what happened, refraining from outright stating that the Codans and Arbors went to war over chemical engineering of the Arbors. The main goal was to, as Burke and Tattersdill describe, create an experience for the audience — even if not 100% accurate to the actual story — based on the artefacts recovered at the time. Deciding what to show or not show, especially in the didactics, which bore the brunt of explaining the artefacts to the audience, was the major challenge this week in the construction of our museum’s narrative, and one that I hope we’ve put enough thought and planning into where it elevates the final experience on exhibition day.

Burke, V & Tattersdill, W 2022, ‘Science Fiction Worldbuilding in Museum Displays of Extinct Life’, Configurations, vol. 30, no. 3, pp. 313–340.