Educate about beauty. Petit tour, online exhibition, as design device for a more democratic cultural heritage

Speaker

Teresita Scalco (Università Iuav di Venezia)

Abstract

Exhibitions created with computer and interactive languages, intended for the web, increasingly take on institutional relevance and an important resource for the digital strategy of producing and disseminating knowledge.

Curating, designing and producing an online exhibition involves the conciliation of humanistic and technical skills, a careful analysis of the methods of managing and communicating the contents, in order to satisfy the needs of different groups of users.

We can create exhibitions from scratch only for use on the web (web generated exhibitions) or be generated as an extension of physical exhibition projects.

An online exhibition presupposes a narrative construction of digital contents organized in chronological, biographical, thematic or semantic-associative iconographic order and allows you to:

  • reconcile the potential of the media (text, images, audio, sound, video, 3D)
  • make a greater quantity of documents and models usable
  • reach a wider audience
  • protect documents with a fragile state of preservation
  • expose for a longer period of time
  • it is a tool for learning and enriching knowledge

Along with other outreach activities, during the Pandemic, we created a platform dedicated to digital exhibitions called Petit tour, an open source platform used for the digital management and valorization of archival, bibliographic and museum heritage. The platform consists of:

  • a back end consisting of archival software adaptable to different profiles for accessing and viewing cataloged resources;
  • a front end for online publication, with a web interface adaptable to multiple curatorial, communication and information needs.

Designed thematically and monographic, the online exhibition often provide the first access to the collection itself to a broader public.

Moreover in the frame of an integrated communication, the strategy adopted was to create an innovative narrative through social media and videos, and enlarged the public engagement. My contribution will focus on the highlight of the contribution of Women Italian architects and designers.