St. George and The Dragon: Design and Production of a Cultural Heritage Museum Installation Using Media Archaeology

Media archaeology is a field of research investigating new media cultures through material manifestations. Although often recognized as an approach to art, its use as an approach to design has not been fully explored. Media archaeology can be valuable because it offers alternative qualities of mediation, as a design palette, to that of prescriptive common media devices.

St. George and the Dragon installation in the exhibition space, 2017. (© Mercedes Said)

This thesis describes a media archaeological approach toward the design of a cultural heritage media installation for an exhibition at Häme Castle in 2017—a collaboration between the National Museum of Finland and Aalto University. The installation displayed a multiview stereoscopic (3D) digital reconstruction of a medieval sculptural scene of St. George and the Dragon, based on preserved, fragmented medieval sculptures from the museum's archives. Four stereoscopic video viewers were synchronized to a rotating central sculpture, affording an effect of augmented reality, without the need for a mainstream augmented reality implementation.

The design approach achieved a well-integrated installation that was sensitive to the aims of an exhibition of sculpture within a cultural heritage museum: artistry, materiality, interpretation. This thesis therefore argues that media archaeological approaches to design can identify historical ideas that can be remediated into relevancy for new contexts and, in spite of their historical connotations, foster engaging technological experiences for the contemporary audience.