Objectif Terre – an ambitious exhibition about the Anthropocene
Objectif Terre is the name that the Natural History Museum of Valais chose for their alarming world-first exhibition about the Anthropocene: the new geological era defined by the effects of human influence on the geological record. To preserve the legacy of the exhibition, the Museum asked us to document it on the web.
In one small room in the old prison of Sion, a local deer, exactly as found in the wild, dead from carrying around a length of fencing entangled in its antlers, is mounted on the wall as a hunting trophy.
This arresting exhibit is how the Objectif Terre exhibition begins to challenge us to think about the consequences of human consumption, the effect on the environment and on the planet.
The Musee de la Nature du Valais has asked us to come and see the displays we will shortly be documenting on the objectif-terre.world, and we cannot help but be moved.
The idea
Before starting work on this project, the Musee de la Nature du Valais invited us to the old prison in Sion to see the exhibition ourselves. As we are led from one cell to the next the message is never spelled out, but revealed gradually simply by presenting the evidence in an immersive way. Man's ideology, rooted in the conquest of nature, driven by a quest for convenience and growth, is producing a permanent effect on the planet's geological record.
The question is, how do we transfer the stark impact of some of these exhibits to a web page?
Development
Our challenge was to present the evidence, and reproduce as much of the experience of the exhibits as needed to communicate well in the virtual environment of a web site. Working with :ratio, we started by identifying key exhibits and making them interactive, for example:
- A series of photos of a disappearing glacier are made interactive with a history slider
- A page about water consumption fills up with water and makes the content unreadable as you interact with it
- Three dimensional, volumetric population charts are rendered as 3d interactive graphs using WebGL
These are presented in a scrolling interface in three parts, divided in the same way as the floors of the original exhibition: 'Human Impact', the 'Origins of the Anthropocene', and 'Metamorphosis'.
The result
The exhibition at the old prison is over, but the experience and the message it delivered lives on on the web. Through presentation of evidence we are led to understand the extent to which human ideology, focused on improving human life and human development, is warping the geological equilibrium of the planet, leading to the declaration of a new geological era, the Anthropocene.
