A boy of about eight hesitantly puts his hand on a stone, his brother follows. The stone stands on a pedestal in the Naturalis museum in Leiden. As they continue to touch the stone, the light around them seems to dim. Then the children let go, the light changes, a multiform sound swells. It thunders, tinkles and cracks, it sounds earthy and yet just not.
The stone forms the entrance to the new room on evolution, with which natural history museum Naturalis in Leiden recently completed the large-scale renovation of the museum. The room is remarkable. Not so much because of the content – yes, there are ancient fossils, Darwin’s finches and DNA – but because of the imaginative, artful way in which the story of evolution is told.
The possibilities for light, sound, sensors and data processing have expanded over the past ten years. Technology, developed for industrial applications, is now in the hands of makers of visual arts, theater and exhibitions. Small Dutch studios mix those genres, resulting in completely new narrative forms. Marijn Cinjee and Wes Broersen of the Amsterdam based wiwo.studio created the elusive light and sound for the stone. What Cinjee says about this also resonates with other makers. “As a visitor you become enraptured because you do not understand it at once.”
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Photo Koen Mol
Whales, worms, us
Life began billions of years ago when the Earth was young. Bacteria were already growing in an inhospitable world. Everything eventually sprouted from those first germs: whales, worms, us. The story of evolution is grand and all-encompassing, but it is difficult to capture in images. Evolution is an abstract process, ancient fossils are small and almost unrecognizable.
Before the radical renovation of Naturalis (from 2016 to 2019, the museum has changed beyond recognition), those unique fossils were simply in a display case. “I looked at it and saw gray slate,” says Marijke Besselink, exhibition designer at Naturalis. “We wanted to bring those original stones to life.”
Naturalis went to great lengths to tell that story. The hall design was so expensive that it had to be postponed until after the reopening of the museum, so that money was available again. In the end, the evolution hall was the last to be delivered at the end of November, and it cost more than 500,000 euros. Five external studios worked on it – wiwo.studio, Designwolf, YiPP, Shosho and Design Igloo – each with their own high-tech specialism and all from Amsterdam.
A museum cannot keep the development of exhibitions in-house, as it used to be, says former Naturalis employee Frank Vermeij. After his retirement as a technical exhibition designer, he developed with wiwo.studio the touchable stone. That collective was founded only six months ago, by designers and artists who had worked together on the light show Within Without II in Carré with which dance festival ADE opened. “They are the new generation of exhibition makers,” says Vermeij.
Read also: The metamorphosis of Naturalis is controversial and wonderful
3D animations
How specialized that work has become can be seen in a setup in the middle of the room. There are the gray slates that Besselink told about. Still in a display case, but now they are also transforming into animals that led a life in their own, 500 million year old ecosystem. 3D animations of the primitive creatures have been projected onto the fossils so that they appear to be swimming away from their rocks. They then appear in a coral reef-like aquarium next to it. The aquarium is aPepper’s ghost— a nineteenth-century illusion with mirrors — but it almost looks alive.
The creators of that illusion are Anke van Veen and Dik Mus. They started in the theater world, but as a studio Dutch Igloo over the past twenty years, they have become skilled in making Pepper’s ghosts for museums. They always combine objects with moving projections via mirrors. “It is an old technique,” says Dik Mus, “But it is quite difficult to do it convincingly.”
That is going much better now than when they started, he says, they also own patents. “Cameras have gotten much better, and we’ve learned to play with things like the type of mirror and the light sources.” They don’t want to say much about how the aquarium illusion works in Naturalis. That explanation is only distracting, says Van Veen. Then the magic is gone. We want people to look through the eyes of a child. Naturalis understands that very well. They also no longer want signs with pieces of text.”
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Photo Koen Mol
Oldest stones
The stone, the large boulder in front of the boy, is one of the oldest stones on earth. It comes from Greenland and was already there 3.7 billion years ago, when the world was young – the stone dates from the time of the first life forms.
But no matter how special, the stone still looks like an average boulder. How can it still arouse surprise without extensive explanation? In the old museum, guards sometimes invited visitors to lay their hands on it, so that they would feel connected to the earliest life. That is why the stone now really reacts to touch – and sets into motion a cascade of light and sound effects.
The twenties Cinjee (sound) and Broersen (light) of wiwo.studio beam when they tell how much technology they have incorporated in that installation. It generates thousands of different sounds depending on how the stone is touched. Cinjee: “If you hold it for a long time, you hear a synthesized primal animal. It is about stimulating the imagination of the visitors.” Moreover, when the stone is touched, the room lighting and the sound move through the room.
The assignment from Naturalis – their first job for a museum – opened up completely new possibilities for the two designers, says Broersen. “For the theater you design light and sound much more linearly, everything happens in a fixed order. This design is always adapting.” The two do not expect the average visitor to realize how advanced the stone actually works. “It could also be simpler,” he says. “But we thought it was cool to consciously push the technical boundaries.”