Grants and residencies

Arts

Museum Futures: Art games for diversity and inclusion

Application summary

Throughout the working period I will develop performance-based games for museums that destabilize the institutional and social norms of these cultural spaces. The games that I design and facilitate are immersive theatre performances that use public museums as their medium. They are created in response to pre-existing exhibitions and employ gaming modes such as role-playing and conversation as well as card and video games in order to evoke participation and deeper engagement. This practice is a critique of the disengaged style of consuming art that defines museum spaces. As an artist, I confront this critique and explore different ways of connecting with art. My aim is to shift focus from the object to the experiential. These museum games foster an environment conducive to exploring multiple perspectives rather than being limited to the perspective of an artist, curator, or critic. Alternatively, the games may stimulate critical thinking regarding the normative ways in which we conduct ourselves within a museum: how we talk (whisper), walk (half-asleep or rushed), learn (through text or audio lecture), and dress (in our Sunday best). For example, my role-playing game ‘New Stories of Finnish Art’ encourages wider discourse and interpretations of Finnish art to the broader public. Through play, I open up museum spaces to different cultural and ethnic groups and to people who might not see themselves as part of the art world. At present, there are few established funding streams within museums to support projects of this nature. The support of Koneen Säätiö is essential to enable the development of this new artistic initiative. The grant will enable me to explore the capabilities of the latest game development and VR technologies and to experiment with various performance modalities and immersive theatre techniques. In collaboration with Finnish museums, I will develop participatory performances and digital media platforms to create new forms of experience in museums.

Early 2024 saw the release of 'Ateneum Game', a cross-device multiplayer game at the Ateneum Art Museum created in response to the exhibition 'A Question of Time'. Participants are invited to select from a catalogue of games and play with other museum visitors using their mobile devices. The games explore the exhibition’s themes through activities such as humorous art history trivia, ruthless art criticism, and competitive creative writing. Since its launch, the game has attracted thousands of players, transforming the museum into a space of collaborative play, where visitors can also become gamers, if they choose. The game remains available to visitors at the time of writing this report in 2025.

The project was featured at MuseumNext’s 2024 Museums, Games & Play Summit. For this, a short film about the game was produced in collaboration with the Finnish National Gallery titled 'Ateneum Game: Multiplayer Mobile Games and the Museum Game Console'. The film was not publicly released but remains available for viewing upon request.

Research, conceptual development, and prototyping were carried out for additional game collaborations with Serlachius Museums and the National Museum of Finland. Due to time and financial limitations, these partnerships remained at the prototype stage and did not progress to full development.

State budget cuts to museums in autumn 2024 aligned with the concluding months of this project, leading several institutions to pause new initiatives and special projects.

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