Stories beyond Museum Objects: the Case of the Kunágota Sword

The purpose of using multimedia in a museum is the creation of an artificial system that technologically and symbolically reflects the 'dimension' of life. Thus it embodies and transmits content that otherwise would not be perceptible, increasing the awareness and understanding of ourselves in the flow of history. History that is no longer far away, 'behind the scenes', extraneous, but becomes part of our present and floods us with voices and colours. This is the role of narration and evocation inside museums. Objects become the occasional points where history condenses, 'coagulates'. Indeed a dramaturgy takes place. Storytelling is the fundamental tool that allows us to recreate the context, to penetrate the form and meaning of things. The act of narrating does not mean merely providing captions or descriptions. It means creating a harmonic convergence of script, image, light, sound, mood and atmosphere, in order to compose an expressive unit of which the object is the protagonist, the starting point and the end. The more the essence of the message is conquered, the greater the emotional impact on visitors will be. Their ability to process thoughts, to understand and establish associations will be activated, but also their faculty to enter into a dimension of creativity and self-transformation. Museums often are overly redundant: the exhibited objects are so numerous as to give the impression that they lack the living space. Similar objects are repeated in the showcases, recalling the usual analytical criterion which favours the comparison among the variations within a certain typology. The visitor easily gets into a state of information overload or frustration. Thus many objects are not looked at, or only for a few seconds, randomly selected. Multimedia languages are a powerful means to communicate the cultural object on three levels: legibility, contextualisation, and narration. They affect both its form and its content, the message it conveys. Moreover, the modalities of an object's exhibition determine the narrative structure and consequently the language to be used and the level of interaction with the content. If media are enjoyed in the presence of many objects, along the main stream of visitors, mixed with ambient lights and noise, their contents will necessarily have to be explicit and quick to use, not too deep, the level of interactivity almost null. If on the contrary they are played in a dedicated space, dark, quiet, predisposed to favour the visitors' concentration, the level of sensory immersion, evocation and interaction may be more layered and deeper. As an example we will discuss the work we created for the Kunágota sword.