The Museum's Mind: a cybermap for Cultural Exbitions

The fruition of artifacts inside a museum is often dramatic because the original connections among objects, sites, territory are removed and the possibility of interpretation depends on the re-contextualization of cultural contents through new maps of relations and meanings. A museum re-creates a new context/alphabet in the topology/ontology of the exhibition. Therefore the "map" becomes the mind of the museum, its communication system. According to this premise, is it possible to identify this ecosystem of relations? Is it possible to understand how a museum or a cultural exhibit communicate? In this paper we try to demonstrate that a VR cybernetic map can be the new code for interpreting virtual heritage's items in museums and cultural exhibitions. VR, as map, can solve problems of conflict between maps and territories. The museum' s mind is actually an ongoing VR design project of cultural communication aimed to analyze the relations between visitors and museum artifacts/items through which it is possible to perceive, to interpret, to storytell the experience, in order to create a self-sense of place. The map is a symbolic environment, a cognitive space, where contents are represented through abstract codes: simple geometries will suggest objects; different colors can be associated to particular properties of items according to their similarities, affinities or correspondences. But this semplified representation can suggest also narrative contents. The cybermap is the metaphor of the 3D space of the museum: the plan of each room is extruded; the walls become transparent and represent "branches" of the spatial relations within the environment. Finally, in order to test the communicative level of artifact, items, features and relations, a multi-avatar environment will be created, where people can meet and interact with cultural contents and change the maps according to new interpretations, relations/affordances, and emotional feedbacks. A first prototype of cybermap was created for the VR project of the Scrovegni Chapel (eContent award Italy); a second one is in progress for the archaeological museum of Castiglion Fiorentino.