The Legacy of Ancient Palmyra | Digital Exhibit

Since I didn’t have that much time this week, I needed to save time, and I wanted to visit a digital exhibit just to compare and contrast that with a physical exhibit and experience the difference. After some poking around, I found this exhibit on the Getty website. Having no idea of what to expect, since I didn’t recognize the name (Palmyra), I went into this with an open mind.

But before I go too much into the actual exhibit itself, here’s some context of what where I was while I was going through this exhibit: I was in my room with my roommate, music was playing in the background, and the occasional distraction of upcoming concerts popping up as notifications on my Facebook. These factors definitely affected my experience which I’ll also go into further throughout the post.

A quick summary of the exhibit: It introduced Palmyra, an ancient city in what is modern day Syria. The motivation behind this exhibit was to expose people to this unique world heritage site that was destroyed by ISIS in 2015. For the most part, this was a text heavy exhibit with interactive pictures that you can examine closer, the pictures and etchings being the primary artifacts that the exhibit displayed. It covered how Palmyra was an important stop in the Silk Road and had a lot of cultural influences from both Greek and Persian cultures and was known to have it’s own language and script and Greek. Some focus was also on the two main figures that preserved Palmyra in etching and photography which were kept by the Getty Research Institute.

Throughout the exhibit I was surprised by the entire digital experience. The pacing of information and where information was placed, made the digital exhibition feel very much like a live exhibition. The separation of main ideas as their own sections really helped me process what I was supposed to process. In addition, when displaying the artifacts (the pictures and etchings) they were very careful about putting them in their own section so all you focused on were the artifacts instead of juggling between text and the artifact itself. The changing backgrounds as you scroll down the exhibit also created a very immersive experience that kept you engaged with the digital exhibit because you go from just seeing the background picture as a background to understanding what it is (normally a picture or etching). And the gaps in between sections, which you can see once you scroll down further, gave you the opportunity to process all of the information you just learned about the background image as well as admire the background image which felt very much like a real museum experience. All the information felt very carefully placed, and just how everything was presented and curated made it very clear  that this was a museum exhibit.

With all of that said, the main difference I would say this had with a live museum exhibit is that when you physically visit a museum you are in the exhibitionary complex. In a way being in this complex in real life feels like you’ve spiritually been transported to the time, place, idea that the exhibit is presenting. Whereas you don’t have this complex in this digital exhibit because of all the reminders around you that tell you that you are still experiencing normal life (as I described above). Does this take away from the experience? I would say so. The exhibit definitely surprised me and challenged how I thought about these artifacts, but I definitely would have had a more immersive experience if I wasn’t reminded of everything else in my life as I was browsing through the exhibit. But even considering this, I still really enjoyed the experience and I was really surprised at how close this was to being in a live museum exhibit.