Two new interactive activities—an audio tour and a passport project—are now available for visitors to the exhibition The World at War, 1914–1918.
Daniel Carter, a PhD student in the School of Information at The University of Texas at Austin who researches how people interact with cultural objects, facilitated the pilot project.
“I spent some time in the gallery watching people move through The World at War exhibition,” said Carter. “I became interested in thinking about other kinds of interactions that might happen in that space.”
Carter reached out to designer Brent Dixon and local theater group Paper Chairs to ask them to produce something for visitors in the gallery. In response, Dixon created the passport project, and Paper Chairs recorded an audio tour for the exhibition.
Visitors can receive a passport booklet with a map to guide them through the exhibition and to illustrate the larger story of how each country was affected by the war. Within each country’s section of the exhibition, visitors will find a reproduction of a major artifact—for example, French poet and soldier Roger Allard’s description of conditions at the frontline. The passport project, reminiscent of a scavenger hunt, provides visitors context with another way of engaging with the exhibition.
“Our hope is for people to approach each section of the exhibition with a slightly richer context,” said Dixon.
The Paper Chairs audio tour brings textual material in the exhibition to life so that it can be experienced on a personal level. Kelli Bland of Paper Chairs chose 15 letters and poems in the exhibition and recruited talent from her theater community to read them aloud. Rather than mimicking the dialects and accents of the writers, the actors instead aimed to capture the emotion of the letters and poems and to give a human voice to the documents so that visitors could connect with the material.
“We, as a society, are separated from the experience of war,” Bland said. “I am hoping that our little guide will support the message I received from the exhibition: war is consuming, thrilling, and terrible. It changes the world and all of the people in it.”
The current exhibition, including Dixon’s passport project and the Paper Chairs audio tour, is on view through August 3. The audio guide and passport are available at the visitor desk during regular gallery hours.
