Sometimes we have ideas that we just can’t let go of. We turn them over and over in our minds for days, months, and sometimes years. The trouble is, there’s something about executing the idea that we just can’t figure out. For one assemblage artist, that was Museum of Self.
Creating the sort of experience that ultimately became Museum of Self was on their mind for years. They imagined a self-guided tour of everything they owned, freely available for guests to pick up, put down, and interact with. Their things held stories within them, and they wanted those stories to be told.
Each object would have an anecdote or story to share with people, once they physically found it. It would be part scavenger hunt, part audio tour. Some objects might only have a sentence to share, while others would ramble on and on for upwards of ten minutes. To them, each object had a personality of its own, and they wanted other people to experience that.
Each object would have its own unique voice that reflected its imagined personality. They considered hiring voice actors, but the expense was a non-starter. And that was just one of many obstacles to making this a reality. The biggest challenge was finding a self-guided tour app.
They had briefly tried Stqry, but found the user interface “confusing, and that’s coming from someone who designs these for a living”. They shelved the idea for a couple years. Then they found Tourient.
“It wasn’t crazy expensive, and the clickable demo gave me confidence it was actually easy to put a tour together. And I didn't have to sit through a bad sales demo to sign up. The monthly billing option meant I could spend a couple weeks building the tour, run my event for a couple days, and be done with it.”
Having toyed with the idea for years, they had most of the stories ready to go, but hadn’t yet settled on how to bring the objects to life with unique voices.
They leveraged Tourient’s generative text-to-speech technology to create unique voices for each object, imbuing them with personality for an unforgettable tour.
“Having that was the big missing piece. If you know how much voice actors cost, it would’ve been thousands of dollars just for the voices. We were able to work together to develop voices that felt like how I imagined.”
Rather than structuring it like a traditional guided tour, where guests travel from one stop to the next in a linear fashion, they created a free-form experience. In this format, guests could move between rooms and objects however they pleased, making for a more chaotic (and collaborative) event experience.
Wanting it to be something truly special and limited, they arranged for the tour to be available for just a few days with Tourient’s tour scheduling feature.
“That was really easy. I picked a start date and an end date, and after that, the tour wasn’t available anymore. I didn’t want something people could come back to over and over again. Art comes alive in the mind.”