Cycladic Art Audio Guide – The Met

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Best heard on headphones.

The approach

The Met Museum approached Aurelia to produce a 11-stop audio guide to accompany selected objects from their recently acquired Cycladic Art exhibition of long-term loans, incorporating expertise from two Bronze Age Greece archaeologists working at The Met. The project required sensitive handling of provenance and ownership issues around objects.

The archaeologists were assigned 5 objects each according to their specialism. We developed a list of 5-7 key questions about each object and conducted informal interviews (remotely) between the experts and our oral history lead, Carmen Talbot. Carmen sought to bring out the relevant factual information in a highly conversational manner, but also stories of their professional experience. We then created an almost podcast-style discussion script between a narrator character and the archaeologist based on the interviews and the interpretive goals identified by the Curators. These conversational moments were initially prototyped using temporary “scratch” narration. This iterative process allowed us to uncover the most impactful and emotional moments from archaeologists, which could never have been planned for had the script been locked at the outset.

Combining close looking with material observations and interpretative commentary, we also used the opportunity to include anecdotes from the professional archaeologists about their experiences of excavating on the Greek islands; all informing the sonic landscape that backgrounded the stops.

THE RESULT
Production of 11 1.5-2.5 minute audio stops. Layers of context to abstract objects. Multi-dimensional interpretation including reflections from archaeologists on the process of excavation and discovery. The ability to mirror/mimic the visitor’s questions in-situ using the narrator character and get an answer from an expert.

Credits

Producer: Nina Diamond for The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Chris Timpson and Carmen Talbot for Aurelia Studios

Contributers: Joseph Alexander MacGillivray, Giorgos Gavalas

Sound design: Aurelia Studios