Jialin Wu

“AN UNGUIDE” invites you into the Venus of Willendorf’s museum archive office, a filing cabinet, some scattered paperwork, books, and the faint light of a desk lamp will bring out the backstage of the artefact display. 

In this stage, the filing cabinet can be opened at will, and it acts as an audio guide to take you to different spaces. With audio, you can think in your imagination or interpret it in your investigation. This project explores more possibilities for the exhibition experience and how museums can survive in this changing world.

"is their right to be heard in some way, and they must be considered as more than just an object, their existence is more important than the existence itself."

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The interpretation of museum authority and artefacts are placed in the daily flow of the gallery. I wanted to show something behind the artefact display, give them a sense of agency, and access the archive. It is an Audio Guide, but in fact, it is un-guide, In the museum experience, we are facing the impossibility of finding out how things really were. But I’m not trying to guide them to the truth, it emphasizes openness, it can be a provocation, it can be a metaphor. Imagination makes sense of this space.

Audio Guide plays an indispensable role in the museum experience, a medium that has the same validity as other media in the exhibition, representing an authority that tells the viewer the official aspects, while sound provides a huge space for the audience.

Then I intend to re-define and create a new kind of audio guide, in which storytelling is at the center of this work, where the Venus of Willendorf becomes the protagonist of all narratives, an ancestral source of wisdom whose unrecorded archives give room for later generations to imagine and encourage an interpretation of the object which is personal. These unique soundscapes combine sound, music, and sound effects to narrate four corresponding speculative scenarios that respond to my idea and questions in the whole research process.

• Introduce basic information about the object, guide the audience to an immersive soundscape experience, and bring them into the atmosphere.
• The object acts as an identity lens for the viewer, guiding the audience through the object to understand our relationship with others and the world.
• Through the act of imaginative re-staging, the audience is guided to imagine a future scene, to ask what the role and responsibility of the museum are in the present, and to evoke questions about official and authority institutions.
• Attract the curiosity of the audience, then guide them to the next step of their exploration experience.

I edited and lay-out some of the information I gathered and put them into the experience I created, these will be placed on the desktop as clues waiting to be picked up and checked by the viewer, these clues will act as triggers for the viewer's interpretation and become a chain reaction.