This was not the first 'spin-off' from the project.
Through interviewing lecturers at each of the main Universities I had also secured a seminar/lecture for mixed subject PhD students at De Montfort University, as well as a 5,000 word chapter about the project and its themes for a published textbook on Materiality, and one of the palimpsests was to take part in complexity theory research at Nottingham Trent. The seminar at De Montfort had further ramifications when one of the PhD design students explained that he wanted to create a virtual exhibition, and I will explain more about this later.
Time passed, and it had been almost a year since I started the project, that the New Walk museum got back in touch.
“I have just been finalizing our Business Plan for 08-09 and we have had to make a lot of cuts to our proposed work schedules.”
A little less surprised this time around, the exhibition was not on, again. But I was not particularly bothered by the news. This way of working felt quite liberating. Sure there wasn't going to be any big macho exhibition for people to come gawp at, but so what? It was creating interesting relationships between otherwise unrelated academics and the religious representatives. It was creating debate and stimulating the creation of new research areas. I felt all warm and fuzzy about it.
I still had the problem of audience figures. Despite no exhibition, there were figures of people I had spoken to, presented to, had taken part, would read the chapter, had visited the museumcabinet.com website, and then experience other aspects of the project. The audience was monting up almost virally!
About this time the PhD design student also got back to me explaining that he had formed a group of experienced design students that would like to produce the virtual gallery. It would involve cutting edge 3D virtual modelled versions of each of the palimpsests existing in a purpose built virtual space, and existing as a permanent online feature. Online visitors would be able to manipulate the object and even experience the affects of light across it's surface as they moved it. It would even be possible to have the audio guides for each artefact set to play as you experienced them.
I began thinking about two things: the virtual exhibition (especially the virtual artefact) would be the natural successor to the re-made artefacts (the palimpsests); and also that I wondered if the New Walk might want to have these virtual versions of their archaeology displayed in their museum somehow… but I felt I had already had enough of them, and probably them of me.
