by Hannah Lewi, Emma Williamson and Phillip Goldswain

Designing the metaphor

The Visualising the Architecture of Federation CD-ROM charts a period of great architectural and urban development in Australia; focusing largely on the developments in Western Australia that were given impetus by the goldrushes of the 1890s, and the collapse of Eastern Australian economies. It illustrates the spatial and visual histories of significant places and architectures from 1890 to 1910. Perth, Fremantle and the towns along the eastern route to the Goldfields of Kalgoorlie and Coolgardie were dramatically built and re-built during this period. This was due to a number of colliding factors including the sheer population increase, the need for new administrative building types associated with the coming of self-government in 1891 and national Federation, and the new towns that sprung up due to the goldrush.

In order to fully illuminate this architectural research we decided that a CD-ROM was the most appropriate medium of representation and reproduction. This was partly due to the educational agenda of the funding body that desired an innovative product suitable for children and the general public. Through an interactive and engaging visual medium, accompanied by scholarly texts and audio speeches, different levels of comprehension could be created by the authors and controlled by users. More fundamentally for the authors, who are all architectural educators, the project allowed us to test out a highly image-based medium, thus shifting modes of learning far more towards the visual. We were all interested in not only telling historical narratives, but also in illuminating history as a rich store-house of precedents and ideas. As Leon Paroissien (2002) has commented in relation to the new National Museum of Australia: ‘The virtual has the capacity to draw people to the real’

The metaphorical construct of an ‘architecture’ is often applied to the structuring of digital information systems. This metaphor was taken further in the Visualising the Architecture of Federation project through the design of a virtual Federation museum. As well as providing imagery drawn from the late nineteenth century museum, the metaphor of the museum structured the organisational and conceptual strategy for comprehending information. Here, the museum operates as a navigational and instructional metaphor.

The Federation CD-ROM contains a series of foyers, galleries and exhibits:

Foyers: These are rooms in which the visitor explores for information and signs which access other parts of the museum. The design of these main foyers is dense with images, information, cabinets and curiosities in the manner that nineteenth century museums were arranged.

The Catalogue Room: This room contains a series of drawers, cabinets, boxes and books filled with information on particular themes including Style, Place, Material, Type and Federation.

Thematic Catalogues: These are the catalogue paths that organise the diegetic interpretation of the museum according to possible themes. They reflect actual modes of collection and display, for example slides on a light table, material fragments in specimen drawers, and images pinned in a scrapbook. Accompanying these catalogues are academic texts expanding the thematic pathways through which other parts of the museum can be viewed.

Architects Galleries: The selected works of particular Federation architects are displayed in the walls of long galleries. Visitors may ‘walk’ down the galleries and view images, read text boards and listen to audio speeches in much the same way as a contemporary museum. Hyperlinks between the gallery and the catalogue rooms allow visitors to create connections between the two. Galleries contain small ‘dado cabinets’ of detailed information about particular architects and buildings. These are virtually accessible via the wall of the gallery.

Map Room: This is a room where archival maps are laid out and moved over as a horizontal surface.
The relationship between rooms and galleries is controlled by the foyer functions and navigational buttons indicating thematic relationships of Type, Style, Materials, Place. These buttons, along with next and back commands, allow users to navigate in loose sequences around the virtual plan of the museum.
Alternative navigation is also provided in the form of an alphabetical index system

The CD-ROM holds opportunities for a more visually rich representation of history. Typical architectural history texts, in which buildings are depicted as isolated, monotone, objects floating on the space of the page, we felt did not adequately capture Federation architecture, with its eclectic mix of surfaces, materials, textures and ornamental details. This interest in surfaces has not been fully explored in previous histories of the period, and it was our intention, from the outset, to create virtual surfaces that evoke the rich influences and preoccupations. The creation of computer generated collaged screens, surfaces and wallpapers is a sympathetic language of representation. For, as William J. Mitchell (1998) discusses in ‘Antitectonics: The Poetics of Virtuality’, virtual spaces are concerned with surfaces rather than thickness, construction or structure.

Through the digitisation process we were able to collect and archive a vast range of information including drawings, maps, historical and contemporary photographs, materials and texts. CD-ROMs allow for easy storage and future access. However, the immense storage capability was also misleading at the outset, because in the research process we gathered far too much visual material than could actually be finally included due to limitations on cost of reproduction, programming complexity, the size of the screen, and ease of comprehension.

Important, also, were the possibilities afforded by the graphic software, allowing for manipulation and re-presentation of information within the museum metaphor. The galleries and foyers were literally collaged from an archive of images that were collected throughout the project. The realism of ‘found objects’ was exploited in Photoshop through the careful manipulation and collaging together of photographs of storage boxes, drawers and cabinets.

These collages endeavour to create spaces of illusion and mystery akin to traditional museums, but also with the interactive qualities of contemporary museums such as the Museum of Sydney.

The potentials of hypertext and multimedia as non-linear environments have been much discussed. For example, Suzanne Keene (1998) writes:

‘Multimedia products can also include hypermedia links. Their content does not need to be accessed in a linear and sequential manner, like a book or a story; it can be linked as in a network. The links carry messages about what idea or concept is connected to what, and so they are in important ways meaningful like the content area they connect.’

As Keene qualifies, non-linearity itself does not hold magical properties for revealing meaning. If not reliant on conventional linear sequencing, alternative modes of navigation must be carefully considered in order to potentially enhance meaning and comprehension. In the case of the Federation CD-ROM, it is the museum metaphor that structures navigational networks and enhances meaning in particular ways, whilst allowing for a less linear representation of information.

In the design and programming phase of the project we struggled with the issue of linearity considerably; at first being seduced by the educational possibilities of open-endedness, and non-linear networks. However, we came to realise that a totally non-linear environment was unrealistic. Difficulties were encountered in the way information could be structured and comprehended by a general audience. We found that the creation of multiple links on every screen was a complex, time-consuming and expensive programming task that involved rigorous project management of material. The degree to which multiple virtual journeys could be made proved problematic and limiting. On the one hand, too much freedom left the user lost, and the thematic relationships accessed by the buttons Place, Type, Material and Style were soon dissipated. On the other hand, too many restrictions on journeying defeated our aims of a non-linear medium offering a different mode of representation to the conventional history text.

The museum construct therefore came to replace the textual narrative but now translated linearity into pre-planned spatial connections. This pre-determined mode of navigation is akin to setting a known course, as in the process of mapping or planning. It therefore also has the effect of limiting free browsing.7 Limits on non-linearity were also created, firstly through the thematic pathway buttons and back and forward jumps, and secondly through the thematic catalogues which must be viewed and read in a linear sequence. This sequencing attempted to lay the foundations of themes by which the user could then view the rest of the museum.

Other basic limitations came with the ease by which large amounts of text could be read, which is far more difficult on a screen than hard copy. This was partly overcome by scrolling and animation, but has still proved to be disappointing in the sense that large amounts of scholarly research have gone into the texts which we suspect are not being read.

Through the use of thematic sequences and groupings, the Federation virtual museum mimics a number of CD-ROMs that deliver interpretive information about ‘real’ museums. This approach creates legibility of information accompanying large collections. For example, Fiona Cameron (2001) outlines a typical approach to designing CD-ROMs for museum institutions:

‘Digital objects are presented in a linear hierarchical narrative of theme/sub-theme. This solution employs a static HTML approach utilizing traditional museum metaphors such as object labels, graphics and didactive text panels, but are light on interactivity and hyperlinks.

Typically it privileges one thematic interpretation over another while limiting the interpretative potentials of digital collections, their thematic possibilities and relational connections.’

The virtual and the real

So why then did we not construct an exhibition, rather than a virtual CD-ROM museum to deliver this architectural and visual history? We felt that the CD-ROM afforded a heightened role to information and interpretation. As Keene (1998) suggests:

‘We used to build collections of objects. Now we can make collections of information too. Objects were the centre of our world in museums … Now, information technology, and digitized multimedia in particular, make it possible to store their associations: to capture the information dimension of their collections.’10
Within the virtual museum, the role of the object or artefact has taken on quite a different status to that of a conventional museum. It is no longer a precious ‘real’ thing with a sense of cultural value or aura. Cameron (2001) qualifies: ‘Whereas real collections operate to a greater or lesser extent on the visceral thrill in the presence of the original, with the digital world the information potential of objects predominate.’11

This questioning of the status of the artefact is particularly interesting in respect to architectural displays. For architectural artefacts already have unique properties which make their exhibition in museums often impossible, and their reproduction in books often inadequate. One obvious property is their size and scale, which is often prohibitive for display. Another is that architectural artefacts are tethered to their location and site. Therefore architectural exhibits must inevitably deal in the dismembered fragment or the reproduction. They are shown through mediated reproduction – whether one-to-one caste, drawing, photograph or model. So although the technology of Photoshop may liberate us into dishonesty through collage and simulation, in some ways there is always a sense of dishonesty and mediation inherent in architectural exhibition. As Walter Benjamin (1973) predicted, ‘technical reproduction can put the copy of the original into situations which would be out of reach of the original itself.’12

Many questions remain to be tested about the practice and value of creating multimedia visual histories. Do the demands of negotiating an interactive non-linear CD-ROM with dense contemporary graphics overshadow or distract the user from the content of the history? Is the graphical interface too complex? Here we have certainly not followed the advice of one CD-ROM authoring manual that states:

‘Go for clarity: it is often better to resist ornamentation. When presented with a new screen, the user has to take in every part of it, however rapidly, in order to work out what their choices are. If they have to take in icons and illustrations, or surplus words or text, and then discount half of this information, it is a waste of their time.’13

Ultimately, is the medium too glaringly anachronistic to the character of turn of the century architecture? In answer, one might argue that new histories, no matter their medium, constantly serve to reinterpret the past, and thus anachronism is inevitable in re-writing the past from the perspective of the present.

Endnotes

1 This project was undertaken in the School of Architecture, Construction and Planning, Curtin University of Technology, through funding by the National Council of the Centenary of Federation. Project authors include Hannah Lewi, Emma Williamson, Philip Goldswain and Kieran Wong.
2 This is partly in response to a review of the CD-ROM in The Australian newspaper, October 3, 2001 that stated: ‘as a typical product of its kind, it is simply an electronic book, and it offers less than would a printed book of middling production standard.’
3 Paroissien, L. 2002, Modelling a Museum for the 21st Century. In Reed, D. ed. Tangled Destinies, Canberra: National Museum of Australia. p. 173
4 Andrew Dewdney, A. and Boyd, F. 1995, Television, computers, technology and cultural form. In Lister, M. ed. The Photographic Image in Digital Culture, New York:Routledge, p. 149
5 Mitchell, W.J. 1998, Antitectonics: The Poetics of Virtuality. In Beckmann, J. ed. The Virtual Dimension, New York: Princeton Architectural Press, p.207
6 Keene, S. 1998, Digital Collections: Museums and the Information Age, Oxford: Butterworth, p. 14
7 Dewdney and Boyd, 1995, p. 162
8 Dewdney and Boyd, 1995, p. 156
9 Cameron, F. 2001,Wired Collections – the next generation’. In ScienceDirect -Museum Management and Curatorship, Electronic Journal, p.2
10 Keene, 1998, p.10
11 Cameron, 2001, p.2
12 Benjamin, W. 1973, A Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. In Illuminations, New York: Schocken Books, p. 220
13 Keene, 1998, p. 69