Museum tour to be digitised

Keeping culture, arts alive

SECTIONS of the Southland Museum & Art Gallery (SMAG) will be recreated digitally in a new project aimed at spreading stories from Southland across the country.

The project is being undertaken by local Invercargill startup company Mimicry and has been funded with the help of a grant of up to $30,000 from the Invercargill Licensing Trust.

Planning for the project was initiated during the startup’s time with Te Papa’s accelerator programme, Mahuki, in Wellington.

It was the first group from Invercargill to be accepted into the programme.

Mimicry cofounder Louise Evans said the idea behind the project came after the closure of the SMAG in April.

‘‘We put forward a team after the closing of the Southland Museum. We saw Mahuki as a perfectly timed opportunity to find creative solutions to that problem.’’

The prototype would aim to create a storytelling experience and find connections between stories from users and artefacts and artworks in digital collections across the country, Ms Evans said.

Users who shared their stories would have their voice converted to text and stored, which Ms Evans said would help in ‘‘crowdsourcing the cataloguing and digitising of our local stories’’.

The stories would then be combined with other digital collections from across New Zealand in a smartphone app to ‘‘mimic the serendipity of walking through a museum’’.

Licensing trust chief executive Chris Ramsay said the project was very important for all of Invercargill and Southland.

In the temporary absence of the SMAG, the project would help keep alive culture and arts in the region.

The app is scheduled to be released early next year.