Pre-Aging Media

Have you ever re-watched an old film you once loved for its special effects — only to find it didn't age well?

The media and tech industries raise the bar on production values daily. Museums can’t keep up. But an exhibition might have video, interactive or immersive content running for years. How can we keep our media fresh longer?

Pre-age it.

What do pre-ripped jeans, retro 8-bit graphics, and antiqued decorations have in common? They’ve been pre-aged.

If our media looks interestingly old now when it’s new, five years later it will look … still interestingly old.

Meanwhile, what looks cutting-edge now will look out of date … in a month.

The list of possible pre-aging approaches for museum media is endless. Here are just a few styles that are interestingly old when they’re new:

Manga 
8-bit
Watercolor
Black-and-white
Oil painting
Grainy
Woodcut
Underexposed
Overexposed
Papercut
Sketchy

Here's the thing:
Almost every exhibition includes media that needs to stay fresh.

Avoid media content aging badly by making it interestingly old to begin with.

Pre-age it.

Warmly,
Jonathan

- - - - - - - - - - - -

MtM Word of the Day:

Credit line. A short phrase that accompanies a displayed object, reproduced image, or video clip that acknowledges who provided it. This could be a maker, donor, or lender of the item. A credit line is not universally mandatory, but can be a requirement of some loans or permissions agreements.