A mixed media research project for a temporary outdoor exhibit for Alghero’s city prison has allowed us to confront with a domain that lays at the frontiers between the physical dimensions of space and the narrative component of audiovisual communication, and to explore its potential in presenting meaningful information to a vast public.

The result of this effort is the ‘Sidewalk Museum’ an experimental project aimed at extending the boundaries of exhibit design within a hybrid territory in which the narrative power of space and the idea of revisiting a collective dimension of audiovisual communication team up in a part in shaping exciting informative participatory experiences.

The project takes place yearly for one weekend, during a special event in which unique monuments and cultural sites usually not accessible are occasionally opened to the general public. Within this frame, our temporary exhibit was triggered by a very special set of circumstances: unique in its genre, the historical Museum of Alghero’s prison is if fact hosted in a fully functioning detention structure. This inevitably poses serious security measures, resulting in long queues on the road facing the prison’s entrance, as prior to accessing the building visitor must ID and hand over various personal items.

Our response is a series of modular displays that are lined up over the sidewalk to inform and raise awareness about the general topic of life in prison and incarceration, while entertaining the public waiting in line.

On the tracks of the classic design’s knowledge-in-action model, and in the tradition of wonder cabinets, our project for a Sidewalk Museum draws by design on the activation of short-circuits between extremes, aimed at sparking the curiosity of an otherwise distracted audience.

In this framework the project is shaped by contrasts between pairs: a series of apparently identical display-boxes transform, once open, into the most possible diverse informative contrivances; sophisticated and absolutely no-tech solutions confront throughout the whole exhibit; old-school theatrical artifices and subtle cinematic narrative hints oppose palpably in almost any of the displays; contrasting presentation formats change from display to display shifting from allowing visitors full interactive freedom to forcing them to bend over to access information through a peephole.

A research grant form the Regional Government of Sardinia allowed us last year to extend the original project, started as a pro-bono endeavor in collaboration with the Direction of Alghero’s city prison, to more ambitious goals.

The core of this research development was to further implement the audiovisual dimension of the project, in direction of its nature of a multimedia installation.

In line with the project’s concept this development followed two parallel but rather different paths.

The first, conceived for a display devoted to present tattoos as a ‘living’ language, widely worldwide used by convicts to communicate a complex, and often vital, set of information, offered an opportunity to investigate the intimate relationship between the audiovisual text and its possible presentation, or ‘screening’, surfaces.

The second involved the re-design of one of the early displays illustrating the relationships between the changes the idea of punishment in society and the evolutions of the architectural shapes for detainment. This particular display, that worked very well in its original form based on simple scale models of typical prisons to be illustrated by a live presenter, was re-thought to offer an interactive exploration through Artificial Reality, an informative environment that beyond its original areas of application in the industry, assisted training and maintenance, has been recently widely used in the area of heritage valorization but still fails to fulfill its promises in improving our ability to access information and interact with the outside world.

The present paper aims at presenting some early findings generated by the project in the direction of provoking a public such as today’s, intoxicated by the questionable social experiences of networked social media.

In this perspective, the two experiments we have introduced above can be seen as engaging environments, aimed at reconnecting, through the combination of elements deriving from the narrative power of audiovisual communication and of the capacity of space to create meaning, with a sense of collective participation. The very kind of shared, even ’subversive’ character, that according to Noel Burch is typical of genuinely popular spectacle forms such as the popular theatre, the cabaret, the fairground. Forms in which a variable degree of audience participation is a key component of a show/performance setting that preceded the kind of solitary and individual forms of spectatorship associated first with the advent of cinema, then of home television, and ultimately of on-demand digital streaming entertainment.