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.