Where Digital Meets Place: Deriving Strategies for Curating Mixed Reality Exhibitions in Public Spaces

TL;DR

This paper explores curatorial strategies for integrating Mixed Reality art exhibitions into public spaces, emphasizing the role of contextualism and analyzing expert and audience perspectives to enhance experiential engagement.

Contribution

It introduces a novel interdisciplinary approach combining expert insights and user studies to develop curatorial strategies for MR exhibitions in public spaces, grounded in contextualism.

Findings

Insights into expert and audience perceptions of MR exhibitions

Strategies for curating engaging MR public space exhibitions

Highlighting the importance of contextualism in MR curation

Abstract

Mixed Reality (MR) technologies are increasingly being used to enrich exhibitions and public spaces by blending digital content with the physical environment in real time. However, little is known about curatorial strategies for embedding MR exhibitions into public spaces or promoting audience experiences. To explore this, we designed and curated a campus-based MR art exhibition, using contextualism as the fundamental concept. We conducted an interdisciplinary expert focus group alongside exhibition viewing to identify opportunities, challenges, and design strategies from multiple perspectives. In parallel, we conducted user studies with general audiences to examine how curatorial strategies foster ex-periential qualities. Our findings reveal insights from both experts and general users along with strategies in curating MR exhibitions and highlight the foundational role of contextualism in curating MR art exhibitions in urban public spaces.