Archive or exhibition?: A comparative case study of the real and virtual Pitt Rivers Museum

Abstract

Museums are exhibitionary complexes which communicate using aggregated space, objects, and people. For the visitors of museums, two distinctive modes of experience – “archive” and “exhibition” experiences – stand out and are in conversation with one another. One might expect these experiences to have contradictory aims, or be mutually exclusive, but the distinction between the two has not always been clear or rigid. The distinction can be observed in details of museum practices, which cater to public expectations for change in museum spaces and public history. This paper will take the Pitt Rivers Museum as a subject and will embed a 3D virtual thematic exhibition – Rites of Passage – to illustrate the relation between the two experiences. Within the virtual exhibition a study of bodily movement is depicted for the comparison between the two experiences, which might further help us grasp the substance of replying to future generation of museums.