The Centre of New Enlightenment (TCONE) is a cinematic, interactive tour for young people at Kelvingrove Art Gallery in Glasgow, the UK's most visited museum outside of London. Programme Curator John-Paul Sumner talks Shrek, Jedi Knights and determination…
What made you enter the Art Fund Prize?
We felt that we were doing something new and completely different. We've actually invented a new way of interpreting a museum collection and so what we're trying to do is use it to actually tell people about our new techniques. That was the most important thing for us to try and get out, so we could share it with everybody. Entering the Prize and being long and shortlisted is great because it gives us the opportunity to tell more people about these new and innovative ways of interpreting a collection.
Tell us more about the Tcone project.
What we're trying to do is change young people's behaviour, so that they question the world they're in and to actually try and change it. If they're in a disadvantaged place or they live a chaotic or unhealthy lifestyle we want them to take a look at their environment and change it for the better. Essentially that’s what happened during the Scottish Enlightenment [a period of intellectual revolution in the 18th century] – people looked around them and thought 'look, we've got all this pestilence, disease and unemployment and lack of education…let's actually change this to make it better.'
The visitors go on what is called the Heroes Journey and if you think about a film like Shrek or Star Wars or The Wizard of Oz or any of these traditional hero stories they follow the same format every time. The hero goes to somewhere new, alien to them, and they’re given a number of trials and tribulations there. During these they discover something about themselves that’s always been there, that is true…a quality which existed that they didn’t know about. Dorothy goes down the yellow brick road and discovers she doesn’t want to leave home, Luke Skywalker goes off to the Death Star and discovers he really is a Jedi Knight. They're not the actual characters we use, but here the visitors go on a tangible journey. They go into an unusual gallery that’s all pristine and flashing lights and unusual and are then set a number of challenges. They have to find a number of objects that are on display in our collection and given clues to find them.
I would say it's an emotional journey that you go on so it's not just about learning facts and figures, it's about drawing out values from within.
Was that difficult to design?
We can take 32 people going round – which is the size of a class – and have them all going round at the same time trying to find 16 objects. So in terms of the design process each challenge has to last the same amount of time and the visitors have to take the same amount of time to find a particular object. The timing of it runs like clockwork as they all go round, so that seems to work reasonably well. We’ve had a visitor evaluation asking what they liked and what they didn’t and then we’ve had a more in-depth one from Cambridge University looking at how it actually influences young people and changes their behaviour, because we spoke to young people before we started and found out what was important to them, what values were important to them, what they found admirable in other people. By speaking to them we could then take a step towards our audience and say 'the values you like and admire, determination and trust and endurance – we've got that here in the museum.'
What has the reaction been like?
The local Art Fund has been in and they’ve done the experience, and we've also had lots of publicity and press and held loads of activities. It's been great.
What will you spend the money on if you win?
What we're hoping to do is further develop this experience so that we can do it in different locations and venues, so we can spread it around the world and do it anywhere. That’s the next step that we've got planned. We want to expand it and build on what we've already learned so we can do this value-based learning in different places.
