Every Object Tells a Story: Bringing Historical and Cultural Artifacts to Life through Object Theater

Abstract

Historic and cultural museums have experimented with a variety of techniques to overcome the limitations of out-of-context display of their artifacts. Modern technology offers intriguing new possibilities for bridging this gap. One of the richest of these is object theater, which employs audiovisual and multimedia technologies to re-create a contextual reference for museum artifacts. In history or cultural museums, recorded oral histories or narrated source texts such as diaries or letters provide an authentic storyline that reaches visitors through their hearts as well as their minds. It is this storyline, illustrated by artifacts, that provides the intellectual framework for the development of the technological presentation. This article discusses several examples of successful object theater visitor experiences, and explores as a case study the author's experience at creating an object theater exhibit centered on an antique Irish harp.