Both roles are analysed for their pedagogic potential, offering recommendations for practice, informed by the research findings. In conclusion, the implications for accessing the past via a VR artefact are critically questioned to arrive at a dual role for the VR object – as an interpretative tool to augment the physical collections and as an artefact to be interpreted in its own right. Modelling the arrangements of timespace in each demonstrates the VR mummy as a stimulus for different pictures of the past. Analysis of the interview data identifies two new forms of the chronotope which organise interpretation around the VR artefact – the chronotopes of differentiation and regeneration. Extending Bakhtin’s (1981) theory of the chronotope (literally ‘timespace’), provides a method to make visible the processes and mechanisms of interpretation in the museum which facilitate visitors to imagine the time and space of other societies.
Perceptions of ‘authenticity’, ‘embodiment’ and ‘spectacle’ occupy a central place in the analysis. Interview data present participants’ critique of VR as a display resource, and their interpretative practices around the VR mummy. Taking the display of a VR mummy in Mummy: the inside story (British Museum 2004-06), as its focus, this thesis dissects the acts of spectatorship and interpretation, via in-depth interviews with a sample of artists. Acknowledging the cultural literacies of 21st century ‘digital natives’ and Lemke’s new attentional cultures, the thesis maps an evolving taxonomy around the ‘real’/’virtual’ to conceptualise the VR artefact as a new genre of museological object. As museums are increasingly attracted to Virtual Reality (VR) technology as a display resource, this research argues for a pressing need to examine the role of VR objects in the museum and how visitors picture the past via such intangible forms.
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