By Elena Hubert ’25
European aristocrats looking to heighten their social clout in the 17th century relied on “cabinets of curiosities” as showcases of their extensive travels. These displays, often wooden cabinets, exoticized objects collected in Africa and Asia and later served as the basis for Western museums.
Thinking outside of the exhibition box, archaeology PhD student Craig Stevens ’25 looked to reconceptualize the display of artifacts with help of the Melville J. Herskovits Library of African Studies’ exhibit, Augmented Curiosities: Virtual Play in African Pasts and Futures. Stevens collaborated with Herskovits curator Esmeralda Kale to bring virtual and augmented reality to the exhibition of African artifacts.
Craig Stevens instructs Dean of Libraries Xuemao Wang on how to interact with an Idubor bust in VR.
“I think museums haven’t come really far from that foundation of just putting objects in a cabinet behind a pane of glass,” Stevens said. “I think we can do so much more.”
Stevens’ cabinet of curiosities consists of five artifacts, ranging from a brass-and-wood pipe from the Nuna people of Burkina Faso and Ghana, to a souvenir fan from the 1951 election of Liberian president William Tubman. In Stevens’ approach, however, those artifacts are now joined by their virtual and augmented reality counterparts, making them more accessible than a typical rare item locked behind glass.
For an AR experience, exhibit-goers can scan a QR code and manipulate a digital representation of an artifact on a mobile device. Those looking to explore virtual reality can use a headset and wands to fully immerse themselves in a virtual world with the cabinets and artifacts, which allows them to “touch” the objects.
With augmented and virtual reality, Stevens saw an opportunity to create more immersive and accessible exhibition experiences.
“Most times exhibitions add value to an object by its inaccessibility, putting it behind a pane of glass, telling you how old it is, how fragile it is,” Stevens said. “But in ways, they could still preserve that and also allow for intimate engagement.”
In curating the exhibit, Stevens looked at the objects’ structure, what they were made of—snakeskin, cardboard, plastic, paper—and what that meant for their physical handling. He pointed to the fragility of a Yoruba statuette of a kneeling woman and two children carved from a single block of wood and decorated with beads and blue pigment.
“This was the first object that I selected because of how much I knew that you cannot touch this. You touch that blue, it’s on your finger,” Stevens said. ”I really wanted to digitize this because it’s going to be powerful for people to be able to touch this.”
Augmented Curiosities also features a makarapa (a construction hat repurposed to support Ghana in the 2010 World Cup), a wooden bust by famed Nigerian sculptor Felix Idubor, and a beaded fertility doll from South Africa. 3D representations of all five objects are available on the Northwestern Libraries’ website, accompanied by informational videos from experts and links to related literature.
As the Media & Technology Innovation department’s “innovator in residence,” Stevens worked with the IT division on the exhibit’s virtual components. The team utilized a photogrammetry process in creating the exhibit, taking hundreds of photos to create 3D models of the objects. Stevens said the production process took about six months, while he and Kale conceptualized the exhibit for over a year.
“For me, it was an opportunity to showcase our collection in a different manner,” Kale said.
An exhibit that integrates both augmented and virtual reality is a novel idea, according to Stevens. Still, he said the “novelty is showing the possibility” for museums to routinely integrate the technologies.
Whether it be story maps or geographic information systems, Stevens said he’s always been passionate about finding ways to “connect digital media to academic knowledge production.”
“I find it just very static and I’m uninspired to just write books and write articles,” Stevens said. “I really like to create and design, so this is a way that I can take anthropological and archaeological data and give it in a form that I would have liked to receive, and I think will actually make more of an impact.”
Stevens hopes that as technologies like augmented and virtual reality become more mainstream, curators use them to take exhibits outside the box.
“I’m augmenting upon the old tradition of curation to show possibilities for the future.”
Elena Hubert is a Medill School of Journalism sophomore