“I cannot believe we are not doing this” a colleague from National Gallery in Washington spontaneously uttered a couple of years ago when seeing our CAD-model (Computer aided design) presenting the display of the actual exhibition. By then this method was used as a compliment to the architectural drawings, giving possibilities for curatorial changes in details before the installation began and still being able to, through the CAD, produce installation plans to the art handlers. Now ten years have passed and this method, which awoke from pure curiosity and a will to explore the possibilities of using new technology for improving visualization of exhibition display in the working process, is implemented as a routine in the exhibition planning process. In the beginning it was mainly a tool for the art handlers in planning the installation phase; reducing the overall time needed and as a positive end result the museum could keep the galleries publicly open for a longer period.
“you feel like you´re in the exhibit. It´s surreal. It´s awesome. It´s the future , an American architect this summer blogs when virtually having visited the Carl Larsson exhibition on show in Stockholm in the model he downloaded from the museums website. This quotation expressively high light the topic of our paper in which we will focus on the adding value in curatorial practice, especially concerning public and museological aspects, when using CAD as a tool to enable visual experience in virtually space. In two case studies the following aspects will be discussed:
- Curatorial possibilities in planning the content and design in collaboration with other museums.
- Enable visiting an exhibition without boundaries in time and space
- Enable revisiting a former exhibition
- Enable reconstruction of a historical display – getting better understanding of the interplay between space and narrative
- Valuable documentation for future museological research.
