Client: Strathnaver Museum (with Abound Design), July 2023
CMC collaborated with Abound Design to develop digital installations for the refurbished Strathnaver Museum, beside Bettyhill on the north coast. Located in the former Parish Church of Farr, with a newly-built accessible annexe, the museum tells the fascinating story of human occupation in north-west Sutherland. Many of the exhibits relate to the early 19th-century Highland Clearances which were particularly brutal in Strathnaver. The varied audio-visual installations, delivered by CMC, are particularly important to how the Museum has brought alive how people lived, and indeed live, in the Strath and along the coast.
A central feature of the former church is the pulpit with surrounding pews. Here we used a high-end video projector combined with voiceover audio accounts to create a powerful visitor experience. The visual strength of this installation comes from our use of AI to ‘reconstruct’ portraits of known tenants from the time of the Clearances. Combined with witness accounts of what happened to their homes and families, the results are, rightly, deeply moving.
In other parts of the exhibition, we use audio handsets to deliver local recordings in Gaelic and English of the traditional use of plants in healing and medicine. At a further audio post, while sitting in hand-made Orkney chairs, visitors can hear local recollections of life in the Strath.
On flat screens in other locations, we present documentary films of the ceilidh culture of the area with interviews about people’s experiences of the local language, music and gatherings that knits the community together. Further film clips show traditional local crafts such as knitting, sheep shearing, weaving and dyeing. In the Mackay area a large screen features a short film that traces the origins of the Clan Mackay and how the family were known, not just in the local area, but spread their influence around Europe and the wider world.
Finally, we produced a range of interactive games and info stations for visitors. For instance, in the ‘Cast Out’ game visitors are put in the shoes of evicted tenants and make choices about their future occupations and locations, mixed in with random events like bad weather, their selections affect their ultimate fate. While in the new annex interactive touch screens provide digital labelling for a range of larger objects including the museum’s most curious artefact – a buoy made from dogskin!
