Spiders, puppets and avatars explore Zurich’s digital ‘Museum of the Future’

In a VR experience, visitors can walk through a digital reconstruction of the Pavillon Le Corbusier, which was captured using a point cloud scan. © Visualization and MultiMedia Lab, Institute for Information, University of Zurich

Visitors to Zurich’s Design Museum can plunge into a medieval battle, step into the world of a spider, and even engage with an uncanny avatar that mirrors their own identity – all in an exhibition that foresees the digital future of museums.

How can we still see museum objects if the originals are not available? Zurich’s Design Museum poses this question about the Benin Bronzes, which may soon be few and far between in European museum collections.

Visualization of the digital processing by means of polygon reduction of a belt mask from the Benin bronzes collection of the Museum Rietberg, Zurich. © Museum für Gestaltung Zürich

Thousands of these sculptures were looted from Nigeria by British troops in 1897 and subsequently acquired by Western museums. Some institutions have begun returning them to their place of origin, in recognition of crimes committed more than a century ago.

The Zurich Design Museum’s current exhibition Museum of the Future, showing until February 1, 2026, offers some alternatives to the real object. Photographs taken for the project Digital BeninExternal link, an online platform listing more than 5,000 objects from the former kingdom in 139 institutions, are here animated to rotate the sculptures and reveal intricate details from every angle. 3D printed reproductions of a ceremonial mask are extraordinarily accurate.

Even so, it’s hard to banish a sense of disappointment at a single empty vitrine with a label explaining that the original mask, in the collection of the Rietberg Museum in Zurich, is currently the subject of restitution negotiations with Nigeria and therefore cannot be displayed.

A Western museum visitor’s sense of disappointment is no argument for holding on to the objects; after all, the people of Benin have been deprived of their own heritage for more than a century. But it underlines what we expect from museums: the original, the authentic, the genuine.

“You can’t replace the original,” says Christian Brändle, the curator of Museum of the Future. “I think the reason museums are experiencing huge success worldwide is because they offer the real thing – not transient stuff that appears on TikTok and disappears. But digital technologies offer a lot of interesting options.”

Curator Christian Brändle (left) and Sarah Kenderdine, professor of Digital Museology at the EPFL. She leads the laboratory for experimental museology, exploring the convergence of aesthetic practice, visual analytics and cultural data. Museum für Gestaltung Zürich/ZHdK

The largest digital image in the world

Especially in cases where the original is not available. The 19^th-century panorama painting, The Battle of Murten, has long been rolled up in a Swiss Army depot. Between 1880 and 1910, almost every European city displayed at least one of these vast 360-degree paintings in a rotunda to thousands of admission-paying visitors, but the fashion faded with the advent of cinema before the Second World War.

The Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL) Laboratory for Experimental Museology has created a virtual reproduction of The Battle of Murten that is the largest digital image in the world, with 1.6 terapixels (1.6 trillion pixels). Visitors to the Design Museum can navigate around the painting, here projected onto a huge screen, and zoom into its tiniest details.

The spooky side

Mounted to celebrate the Zurich museum’s 150^th anniversary, the exhibition encompasses 17 “experiments” exploring possible museum applications for technologies including artificial intelligence (AI), virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR). It offers a glimpse into an interactive, immersive and somewhat challenging future for museum visitors.

Even, in some cases, quite creepy. Perhaps one of the charms of visiting museums is the anonymity of simply being a member of the public and the permission that gives to contemplate without needing to respond.

Brändle is sure VR will find its way into more museums. “In another 10 years it will be commonplace,” he says. Um-berto Romito & Ivan Šuta, Museum für Gestaltung Zürich/ZHdK

There is no such anonymity here. One interactive media artwork on display, TRUST AI by Bernd Lintermann and Florian Hertweck, shows a face on a screen that invites the visitor to sit down and start conversing with it. Using artificial intelligence, the machine collects and analyses the data and produces an avatar of the visitor that tells untruths.

My avatar was not completely convincing: the mouth looked deformed, and it spoke with an American accent (I am British). But it was close enough to be disturbing – and to raise consternation about what data visitors might unwittingly relinquish in museums of the future.

“We erase all the data in the museum every 24 hours,” Brändle says. “But we are powerless concerning anything that goes outside the museum, for instance to a cloud. That’s the price we pay.”

Bugs are part of the ecossystem

Not all the technology on show was working on a Tuesday in November; a reminder that experiments carry risks. A “multisensory virtual reality experience” that lets visitors feel what it’s like to be a native buzzing spider hunting for prey at night, for instance, was cordoned off and out of order. These expensive headsets can be temperamental.

Brändle says he has noticed that lone visitors tend not to try the VR headsets – it is more often visitors in pairs or groups who use them. This is perhaps understandable; alone in a public space, visitors might prefer to remain alert to the real world around them, especially if carrying valuables. Yet Brändle is sure VR will find its way into more museums. “In another ten years it will be commonplace,” he predicts.

One interactive display that has delighted children and adults alike brings to life Sophie Taeuber-Arp’s wondrously surreal puppets. The celebrated Swiss artist, a key member of the Dada movement, created them for a 1918 play, König Hirsch (King Stag). They include a robotic silver creature with five legs and swords extending its five arms and the white stag of the title with crescent-shaped gold antlers. They are now too fragile to be used.

But here visitors can dance and move in front of a screen on which the puppets mimic their choreographies. In another digital interface that is a little too complex to master in a single museum visit, spectators can become puppet-masters by moving their fingers to operate the same marionettes on a screen.

Perhaps best of all, the Design Museum is also displaying the original puppets made by the artist – quite conventionally, in a traditional vitrine.

Edited by Virginie Mangin & Eduardo Simantob/ts