In early 2005 several folk at the Cleveland Museum of Art begin exploring the idea of how we could let visitors experience museum objects (specifically objects from the Victorian and Arts & Craft Periods) online in a venue free of their relation to the museum. The goal was to allow visitors to discover objects as objects as they might if they ran across them in an attic. We knew we wanted to present rich, deep, content in a playful manner. We very consciously were trying to not take ourselves as seriously.

We decided to work with Rory Matthews (www.rorym.com) who proposed a plan as follows:

What I have in mind is an animated collage style inspired by Terry Gilliam’s Monty Python animations. We would combine object photography with background and character elements taken from sources such as engravings from Victorian catalogues.

What evolved was the idea of an attic in a slightly creepy Victorian home could be a venue to explore any type of object. Intentionally slightly old-fashioned, the visitor to the original attic flips through the pages of manuscripts or reads newspaper headlines to discover information. Short Victorian picture-slide shows reveal more in-depth didactic information. If you don’t like what you find in the attic, a Victorian bell pull at the far left will populate your attic with a different set of objects.

The result of our work www.museumattic.org — the Arts & Crafts room of the attic — opened to the online visitor in October 2005.  Even as the first door in the attic opened we registered a domain name that was general — not specifically affiliated with the Cleveland Museum of Art in any noticeable way — envisioning an attic that could have an unlimited number of doors, and an unlimited number of rooms, filled with objects from anyone and anywhere. So, to test this concept further we have now opened another room which is, to refer back to the original concept, about “something completely different” — Ancient Egypt.

The Ancient Egypt room has the some of the same features of the original Arts & Crafts attic room. A quiz, slide-shows with more information, but instead of books you'll find papyrus scrolls, and instead of newspaper articles with interesting tidbits about the time in which a work was created, you'll find "Infobelisks" to give you more information on things you need to know about ancient Egypt.

We hope you'll find something to interest you in The Attic