TYAMA Exhibition Melbourne

Inspired by the sacred clan stories of Gunditjmara women, the TYAMA interactive exhibition invites visitors into a multisensory world of story. Here they have the chance to fly through pheromones to pollinate the sky, awaken the sea with their kin, and see in the dark through sound. Experiencing the world anew, visitors to the immersive experience will discover that all our stories, no matter how unimportant or unremarkable they may seem, have the power to shape our world in wondrous ways.

We wanted the TYAMA exhibition to be an experience of empowerment; one where visitors would explore new senses and perspectives to gain not only understanding but transformation. Traversing imaginative, immersive and interactive worlds, visitors experiment with different ways of perceiving the world around them. In these worlds of immersive exhibition, which merge the physical and the digital, the real and the abstract, visitors find a framework to engage with both the scientific methodology of the museum and First People’s philosophical ways of being.

Entering TYAMA at Melbourne Museum, visitors find themselves surrounded by immersive environments. Collaborating with Creative Director Mike Daly, the worlds we crafted have a tactile base, with physical architecture giving each space a visceral shape and tone. Meanwhile, the all-encompassing projections laid onto these structures are dynamic and reactive, changing colour, luminosity, clarity and more as visitors move and interact with the space. In this way we give visitors to the Melbourne Museum interactive exhibition the sense that this world – and therefore their own – exists without them while also being enhanced by them.

Our art direction was inspired by the duality of the TYAMA Melbourne Museum experience: the coming together of scientific and First People’s epistemologies. The idea was to weave together realism and abstraction into an art style that embodied the relationship between ways of seeing. Realism found its place in anatomically correct proportions, colours and movements. Meanwhile, gestural abstraction was used to ignite imaginations and invite visitors to see the world differently.

Throughout the Melbourne TYAMA immersive exhibition, our art direction focused on capturing the inherent character of not only plants and animals, but the ephemera of the world in which they exist – the dance of refracted moonlight, the pulse of flowing water, the glow of biofluorescent beings. Depth, colour and texture created a world of magic, but a magic that is deeply grounded in real-life. A world that has and always will exist, but that can be richer for our presence in it.

In crafting the TYAMA Melbourne Museum exhibition, we had the chance to create a truly industry-leading piece of work: one that harnesses the power of the physical object and the magic of the digital environment. It can be all too easy to assume that physical objects have no place within an immersive environment. But this isn’t the case. In the context of a museum exhibition, meaning-making is a central tenet of experience. Indeed, an unsatisfying search for meaning could be just as detrimental to our visitor experience as the potential of breaking immersion.

To realise this ambition, we integrated collection objects into each of our immersive spaces, accompanied by graphical illustrations and whispered narration to aid in meaning-making. In doing so, we were able to more fully realise the idea of ‘embodied experience’ – catering for both sensory and cerebral engagement. Indeed, we trust our visitors with the opportunity to seek, find and discuss layers of meaning within and throughout the interactive experience.