Recent­ly opened at Te Papa is the Our Space exhib­it. It cost $6 mil­lion and is appar­ent­ly aimed at the 15- to 25-year-olds — you know, the sort of peo­ple who’d rather be tex­ting or updat­ing their Bebo page or say­ing “wote­va” than vis­it­ing a muse­um, etc.

At its most basic, Our Space is a pho­to album. More specif­i­cal­ly, it’s an elec­tron­ic data­base of pho­tos and short video clips of New Zealand places and events. It’s a bit like Flickr, but rather than just rely­ing on media sub­mit­ted by the pub­lic, it also taps into Te Papa’s archives and the TVNZ archives.

The exhi­bi­tion is made up of three parts: The Map, The Wall and The Rides, and in the inter­ests of prop­er grown-up blog­ging, I made vis­its to Te Papa to do a thor­ough review of Our Space.

Mag­ic wands, surly teens and motion sick­ness after the jump…

The first room con­tains The Map, a giant satel­lite image of New Zealand on the floor. The floor is made up of touch-sen­si­tive pan­els, like a more high-tech ver­sion of the “Bil­lie Jean” video. When you step on a part of New Zealand, it picks some­thing from the data­base from that place and dis­plays it on a side walls, with your eyes lead to the right spot by a trail of LED lights.

So stand on Welling­ton and a image of the Bee­hive might pop up; Napi­er might get you some archive footage of the city in ruins after the earth­quake; and Auck­land might get you the pho­to I took of some graf­fi­ti on Pon­son­by Road.

But I noticed that most vis­i­tors were not real­ly pay­ing much atten­tion to the images. The fun was in stand­ing on the sen­si­tive floor and see­ing the sys­tem react, and the trail of lights extend­ing from the adja­cent coast­line to the screen show­ing the rel­e­vant pho­to.

As far as being a medi­um for dis­play­ing New Zealand pho­tos and film clips, it was pret­ty lousy. In fact, it seemed that to most peo­ple, the inter­face was more inter­est­ing than media in it. Imag­ine if using Google to search for stuff was more fun than vis­it­ing the web­pages in the search results.

In the sec­ond room was The Wall, a giant pro­jec­tion of pho­tos as select­ed by vis­i­tors via a touch-screen com­put­er inter­face. The touch-screens allow you to search for pho­tos by key­words or (if known) the artist. So I could search for my name and find my graf­fi­ti pho­to. You can also find relat­ed pho­tos based on key­words — a bit Flick­r­ish and a use­ful fea­ture to have. There’s also a video cam­era, so you can take a pho­to or cre­ate a short video clip.

Once you’ve found or made some pho­tos you like, you can send them over to one of the adja­cent screens. Then, using a sort of giant remote con­trol mouse point­er type thing, you can select the images and move them around and do real­ly basic image manip­u­la­tion.

There’s poten­tial for great­ness, but most peo­ple seemed to whack up a few pho­tos of them pulling faces and a few oth­er shots from the archive, and then mucked around with the image edit­ing soft­ware and attempt­ed to write their name on the screen — but it’s hard to write with the giant mouse wand thing.

“What is the point of this,” I heard one teenage girl ask her friend. Well, I don’t know, but I sus­pect it’s got to do some­thing with engag­ing that 15-to-25 demo­graph­ic in a way that’s FUN and EDUCATIONAL. Appar­ent­ly this age group can only appre­ci­ate a pho­to if they can move it around a screen and write “HELLO” on it.

The Map and The Wall seem to be based on the idea of tak­ing some­thing that would work best as a web­site, and blow­ing it up to room size but with­out adding any­thing new.

The third part of Our Space is — uh-oh — rides. These are built from old gear that was part of the con­tro­ver­sial Te Papa rides back when it first opened.

In the name of jour­nal­ism, I tried both of the rides. The first is The High Ride, which is based around the sort of chairs that jolt around, attempt­ing to mim­ic the move­ment of eXXXtreme activ­i­ties in the real world. So when, say, a dude does a bungy jump, the chair lurch­es down­wards.

So I got strapped into a chair and spent eight min­utes being jolt­ed about, get­ting hor­ri­ble motion sick­ness. I realised that the ride cre­at­ed dis­tance between the audi­ence and the images on the screen. While the audi­ence is tech­ni­cal­ly look­ing at images on the screen, the atten­tion is being drawn away from the screen and to the dra­ma of the lurch­ing seats. I left feel­ing like I had a bad hang­over, with­out the fun of a pri­or drunk­en night.

The sec­ond ride, The Deep Ride, is much more gen­tle. You sit in a Dis­ney­lan­desque mock sub­ma­rine and go deep down to explore an under­wa­ter vol­cano. As it’s a fair­ly gen­tle expe­ri­ence, the ride’s nar­ra­tion hilar­i­ous­ly has to keep com­ing up to con­trived excus­es for it to have a bump or a jolt. Thud! Oh, we’ve run into a vol­canic chim­ney! Lolz!

Why does Te Papa need to wrap its exhi­bi­tions up like they’re part of a chil­dren’s sci­ence cen­tre or an amuse­ment park? Why can’t it just dis­play dig­i­tal pho­tos from around New Zealand in a more sim­ple way? Why does it have to be self-con­scious­ly “fun” and “edu­ca­tion­al”. Why can’t it just let the pho­tos and video be what they are and let us find the fun, edu­ca­tion, depth and mean­ing (or lack of) our­selves? Why does the media have to be the mes­sage?

Our Space is pre­dict­ed to last about 10 to 12 years. Well, in less than that time, Our Space is going to be hope­less­ly dat­ed. It’s going to seem as weird and old-fash­ioned as a 1990s fax-machine-based exhi­bi­tion would seem to today. It’ll soon stop being rel­e­vant to the audi­ence it’s try­ing to hard to lure in.

I like the idea behind Our Space — pre­tend­ing dig­i­tal images and video of New Zealand in a new way — but I don’t like how it’s been done in such an unen­gag­ing way. I’m out of the tar­get demo­graph­ic, but for me, a more sat­is­fy­ing expe­ri­ence would be to have a browse through Flickr. And at least I won’t get motion sick­ness that way.