Exuberant and fantastical: How flythroughs are changing the way museums construct their identities and build relationships with their publics

Abstract

Digital ‘flythroughs’ are increasingly being used by museums to promote themselves to their publics and to extend their spatial and experiential boundaries. These complex, multimodal artefacts use 3D animation, AI imagery, drone footage, sound, music and other modes to construct a parallel museum experience. Such an experience is markedly dissimilar from an ‘ordinary’ embodied relationship to architectural space, and instead constructs an experience of elevated velocity, height and glissade. These movement style choices construct a ‘non-naturalistic’ experience of moving through space that differs considerably from the embodied experience constructed by digital walkthroughs, augmented and virtual reality and ordinary corporeal movement through a museum. Instead, they offer a potential imaginary, a supernatural or ’extracorporeal’ embodiment of a kind typically associated with fantasy films, video games, amusement rides and dreams. This paper analyses 10 flythroughs from a variety of museums and locations through the lens of multimodal social semiotics. The systems of movement styles and visual validity are used to explore how meanings are made in the flythroughs and how they may be understood in terms of the ‘fantasy’ coding orientation. The implications for how museums construct their respective identities and relate to their publics are also unpacked.