Transcript
Jennifer Berglund 00:04
Welcome to HMSC Connects!, where we go behind the scenes of four Harvard museums to explore the connections between us, our big, beautiful world, and even what lies beyond. My name is Jennifer Berglund, part of the Exhibits Team here at the Harvard Museums of Science and Culture, and I’ll be your host. Today, I’m speaking with Adam Aja, the Chief Curator at the Harvard Museum of the Ancient Near East or HMANE. On March 15, HMANE will release a new augmented reality experience for its From Stone to Silicone exhibition that will transport visitors from modern Cambridge to the ancient past to pay tribute to an Assyrian king at the Palace of Nineveh. It’s called The Art of Intimidation: A Journey to Ancient Assyria. Adam is going to tell us about the app, its creation, and the adventure HMANE has planned for visitors. It’s not to be missed. Here’s Adam. Adam Aja, welcome to the show.
Adam Aja 01:20
Thanks for having me.
Jennifer Berglund 01:26
The Harvard Museum of the Ancient Near East is about to release a new augmented reality experience for its galleries. What is it and tell me a little bit about where the idea came from.
Adam Aja 01:40
HMANE is developing a new augmented reality app for its exhibit From Stone to Silicon, and in the app, the museum visitors are going to take on the role of dignitaries who are coming to present their tribute to the Assyrian King, Ashurbanipal at the palace at Nineveh. The app is going to run on Snapchat, so it’s going to function on any smartphone. We’ll provide an iPad at the visitor desk, but the existing gallery is going to have virtual content mapped onto it as a Snapchat filter. It’s going to be viewable through the screen as if the visitors are having a window into the past. With interaction with this app, visitors are going to learn a little bit about the reliefs that are on the third floor, and they will immediately be greeted by a digital figure who is a contemporary of the king — and this virtual guy is going to speak to the museum visitors as if they’re present in the ancient palace. He’s going to speak an introduction setting the scene for them, the tone for the app, then he’ll leave them to view the gallery and so digital triggers are going to map onto the reliefs. In animated artwork, it will come to life with color and sound and it’s going to have relevant content for each unique scene. Visitors are going to be able to approach the artwork in any order they’d like. The guide, the narrator, is located in the lower right-hand side of the screen, and he can also be activated to provide a story for each relief. Each scene is independent, but viewing all of it will give a more complete picture of palace life around 650 BCE. The intent is to provide more information about Ancient Assyria in a narrative, entertaining and, I hope, innovative fashion.
Jennifer Berglund 03:14
Can you set the stage for us a little bit? What was the time period like? This was ancient Assyria. What part of the world is it then? Just give our listeners a little bit of an idea of what the world would have been like.
Adam Aja 03:28
This is designed to set the stage of the visitor in the past. This is around the 600s BCE. It’s really around 640 BCE, and this is the part of the world that is now known as Iraq — and in this period, this was the great Assyrian Empire, the most powerful empire that controlled the region. Like most empires, they rise and fall, but in this time period in the mid-600s BCE, this was the most powerful force in the region, which really dominated the politics, and the reliefs that are on our third floor are taken from palaces primarily at Nineveh and Nimrud. Now, these would have been different palaces for different kings, so we had to bridge the gap between these different time periods and we do this by setting the stage in one of the later kingdoms, the later empires that were centered around Nineveh, and the visitor comes before the king. Now, the Empire conquered a lot of the neighboring territories, and these kingdoms would have to continually bring tribute before the king in order to continue to pledge their fealty to the king — and so I wanted to set the stage for the visitors in that role presenting tribute to the king, and this would be an intimidating position to be in. You were representing your kingdom. You were coming before the conqueror, the ruler of all of this empire, and really demonstrating that you were happy to be in the empire, that you were going to continue to support the king and support the Assyrian Empire, and you would present gifts. This could be agricultural products. This could be gold and silver. It could be spices, and this would have been done in these reception halls, and these reception halls were decorated with ancient artwork showing the power of Assyria. The king — being the leader, in a military sense of conquering neighbor enemies — he would be depicted showing what would happen to those cities, those peoples that would not bow to the power of Assyria. It would show them being led off into captivity, and you would also be shown demonstrating his power over the wild beasts of the world. There are a lot of scenes of him showing this practice at the time, the kings would have done of killing lions, ritually killing lions. Now, the lions were not captured in the wild and fought. They actually would have been raised from captivity using these ceremonies, but these animals represented the wild outside of civilization and the enemies that needed to be controlled and conquered, and so the king would have performed these ceremonies in front of a lot of others, and almost imagine the Roman Colosseum, where the performances were done in front of a wide audience. And so these were scenes depicted in these reception halls. The message would have been very clear. This was political propaganda in the day, so if you were coming before the king to present your tribute, the message would be read visually loud and clear. If you didn’t feel it, you would certainly see it on these walls of the King being powerful, the King dominating, the King controlling, and your place in society would be quite clear. This was the art of intimidation, visually and politically.
Jennifer Berglund 06:54
And this is the name of the app, right? It’s the Art of Intimidation,
Adam Aja 06:59
Right. We call it Art of Intimidation: Journey to Ancient Assyria. So Art of Intimidation by itself didn’t quite relay enough of the messages to what’s happening for audiences, you want to set the stage and let them know that there was ancient Assyrian, and it was a journey back there. Art of Intimidation — it was a title suggested by one of the affiliates of the museum. I loved it. It actually perfectly captures the message behind what I was trying to do with this app.
Jennifer Berglund 07:24
Can you talk a little bit about the role of propaganda in these ancient reliefs? I mean, you’ve alluded to it, but these reliefs that were commissioned by royalty, by the members of society in power, really depicted what the people in power wanted to be depicted. Can you talk about the role of propaganda in the ancient past?
Adam Aja 07:49
These reliefs were in the role of propaganda. I’m not an Assyriologist. I am a Field Archaeologist and the Museum Curator, but these stories really grew out of the conversations that I had with the Assyriologist here, Gojko Barjamovic, who really helped guide these stories. So I had laid down the preliminary script, and then in discussion with Gojko, we really hammered out what was going to be happening in terms of the actual dialogue. Political propaganda was something that has always been used, right? It’s always been used. It’s always appeared as the political tool. In this specific time period, the use of this in stone relief, in low relief, is a special time. It’s a different time. It just wasn’t done throughout the Assyrian Empire, which had a long reign. But it was in these centuries where the stone relief was used in these throne rooms, and it would have been colored and it wouldn’t have been as we experience it in this degraded state of stone. So when you go to places like the British Museum, the Louvre, where these original pieces are now housed, many of them, certainly not all of them, you see them in their degraded state. There are traces of paint that let us know as scholars that these would have been brilliantly colored. There are other media that show colors like painted wall plasters and fragments so we know that these palaces did have brilliant color. Not a lot of it survives because of the nature of the archaeology. These materials degrade over time, but there’s enough that lets us know elements would have been brilliantly painted. Now this wasn’t just a wall relief. This would have been a three-dimensional statue. That scholarship informed our decision to color these animations as well. Even though it was stone artwork, and we as modern people experienced it in its degraded state where it looks just like basic stone, in the ancient world, as you came before the king, you would have seen this stone artwork painted in lifelike colors. And these images would be readable, much like modern posters are to us, or a narration in a graphic novel. You would see the color. You would see the scenes, and even though there are only a few still images when you read them together, it forms a story. Now the story to the ancient viewers would have been quite obvious. Maybe to modern audiences, they’re a little less easy to interpret, but the message that they were delivering would have been quite clear to someone coming before the king. When you are definitely a lower status, you are coming before a powerful figure, and you would see these images in brilliant color that could be read as a narrative, in many cases, showing the king being very powerful, subjugating people that rebelled against the Empire, showing him dominating wild animals in this powerful, strong message. If I went before a leader of a foreign country, I would be intimidated, and they could put up different sorts of images that would reflect their status above me. I think these rulers were making a very deliberate choice to prop up their image. Now, not everyone would get access to the palace, certainly, but those visiting dignitaries that did have access would be able to go back to their home countries, their home regions, their lands, and deliver the message that they saw the king being powerful, they saw the images. They didn’t just hear the stories about it. They could see it depicted, and they could experience it and feel those emotions, and it’s very powerful stuff. Political propaganda is still very powerful, and it sways opinions. If you want to control people, you control the message. You control the images, and I think that these palaces and reception halls where they were meeting the dignitaries from a variety of regions could have been very effective in doing that. So, what I hope to do by animating these reliefs is for our modern audiences, to really help them understand the story that’s happening, help them be able to read the images where they might not know why the king is standing there holding a bowl with liquid dripping from it. They can see that but maybe they didn’t know that that liquid was wine. All we can do is we can show that red liquid spilling out over the edge of the bowl. I can show people that are holding something. What are they holding? Ah, they’re playing an instrument. They can hear the music. And so our modern audiences that might not be familiar with those types of instruments or the types of items that the individuals are holding, whether it’s a weapon or a bowl, in the using them in the scenes that might help click that message on for them, coax them forward understanding some of this, and I wanted to do it in a narrative way that wasn’t just an expert, a talking head, standing up in front of them and lecturing them about what’s happening in the scene. I wanted them to have something at stake in these messages, and if you are put in the position of the visitor coming before the king, they’re a little uncertain about what’s happening. Maybe approach these scenes, and then they hear the messages from the palace overseer, telling them “Ah, yes, when I was in the army, these Elamites, they were like sand in my bread, irritating and troublesome.” As opposed to a lecturer or professor standing or a curator standing in front of the relief, and saying “This scene shows Elamites being led into captivity.”
Jennifer Berglund 13:26
So you play video games…
Adam Aja 13:28
Sure, who doesn’t these days?
Jennifer Berglund 13:30
True. And the idea came about in 2018 to do this more participatory experience. Can you talk a little bit about the origin of the idea? You mentioned that it was suggested by another scholar, but then it sort of got your gears turning and how did it come to be?
Adam Aja 13:48
Back in 2018, it wasn’t long after we installed the exhibit From Stone to Silicone, and this exhibit is in our third-floor space, which is a beautiful space. It’s a 19th-century building, and the building has been renovated over the years and still now holds offices and classrooms and sort of cuts away some of that exhibit space, but in 2018, we had really refreshed the gallery, and we were excited to find new ways to interest audiences in that exhibit, and in that space in our museum in general. In 2018, we still were using the name Semitic Museum. We hadn’t changed the Harvard Museum of the Ancient Near East, so this is going back aways and we were trying to find a way to engage your audience and help them to understand what we had, and our Director was curious. “Should we do things like digital projections in the room or light shows? Or could we do something with virtual reality headsets? What kind of modern storytelling could we use?” He was fishing around for ideas, and I just say I do enjoy playing some video games, and video games are a great way of storytelling, where you, as the player, are an active participant and you may create a character and you have something at stake in the story. You are helping to push it forward. That’s a great way of storytelling. I was curious if maybe there was some way we could do that. Now we’re a small museum and our budgets are small, and I knew we weren’t gonna be able to do a AAA game, but we thought maybe we could do something with virtual or augmented reality, and using these reliefs, maybe even casting the visitors in the role where they could create a character. Now, we had big ideas and big plans for what we wanted to do, but back in 2018, the technology really hadn’t evolved to the point where we, as a small museum, could do a whole lot with that. We were kind of developing tech that hadn’t really come out or was just on the cusp of emerging. In 2020, of course, the pandemic closures made it very difficult for us to even be at our own building, it really put a halt to the project, and we didn’t really return to it until just last summer so technology had emerged that was brand new off the shelf and was much more easily accessible, and we could just use that to tell some of these stories. Now maybe not everything that we wanted to do. We can’t have people create their own characters in that same way, but we’re going to use Snapchat and use these filters to map onto our reliefs some of this animation that we created. We’d already done the sound and we’d done the color and we’d done the line art. We had all of these components kind of ready to go, and so we could map it on into this new application for us. Some of the storytelling elements are still there. We still have the narrator. He still speaks to the visitors as they come in. And I love this — we actually used one of the Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations Professor Shady Nasser. He’s the voice of our narrator of our palace overseer. So he’s a native Arabic speaker, and he speaks to the audience. It was fun working with him developing this character as he got into this intimidating voice in character, and that’s actually where I started the whole script from, in the first place. I started from this narrator character, because the question became, “How do I center our visitors as participants if they can’t create their own character? How do I let them know that they are in ancient Assyria?” Well, they are greeted by an ancient Assyrian, who speaks to them in the first person and greets them, “Greetings traveler, I see that you’ve come a long journey”. And the language, in some cases, is literally taken from ancient Assyrian text so it sounds a little archaic in some ways — because it’s deliberately designed to help set the stage with these visitors.
Jennifer Berglund 17:37
What’s an example of that?
Adam Aja 17:39
Part of the archaic speech is taken from Akkadian, which is phrases are turn of phrases. “Greetings.” No one says ‘greetings’ anymore unless it’s deliberately archaic. “I see that you have cleansed yourself before greeting his majesty.” “Cleansed yourself”? No, no, no one says “cleansed yourself.” So there’s just a few archaic phrases that are thrown in there to remind people that this isn’t just a common, local speech that we’re hearing — it sort of goes to who was going to be the voice of this character as well. I mean, it wasn’t going to be me. In old Hollywood, all the foreigners speak with British accents. That always sounds archaic. Even though we know how ancient Akkadian looks, and we can maybe have transliterated it, we couldn’t do everything in an ancient language, we can’t just have everything translated, I wanted to be accessible. That’s why we chose English, and we chose a native Arabic speaker just to sort of give the flavor of that portion of the world so it sounds plausible to a modern audience.
Jennifer Berglund 18:38
I love it — that you’re bringing up the narrator because this is the guide, this is the person who sort of takes you through the whole story, and it wasn’t just the voice that you put a lot of thought into. It was also the costume. Tell me a little bit more about how you developed this character. What inspired what ultimately became your narrator?
Adam Aja 19:00
When I was trying to start from this character that would be greeting the visitors, I actually was looking through some of my old emails recently. I found the genesis of these first ideas. I actually wrote a character sketch of who this was going to be. I wrote down “clothing: knee-length tunic, short sleeve, long fringes, short skirt, wide belt, gold earring in both years. Military veteran of many years, mild scarring possible on left side of face but not too disfigured.” I was trying to really develop who this was going to be. Personality on the Myers Briggs scale, possibly an extrovert, intuitive, and I’m trying to understand the dress and the garments. We went online. We were Googling trying to get some images of Assyrians in palace artwork, and up came links to a YouTuber who’s a cosplayer in Australia, who is part of the modern Assyrian community. His name’s Donald Barkho, and he runs a company or a small studio called Assyrian Props and Costumes, and he replicates what he has seen in this ancient Assyrian artwork, and it is incredible how he does it with color and modern materials. They tried to do ancient materials, authentic materials, where possible, and we reached out to him and asked if he would be a participant, and originally, we thought we could get a sort of a 3D scan of him wearing one of the costumes and use that character, and some of our very early models, were actually Don Barkho wearing one of his Assyrian costumes. And the final character is still based on him. His costume work that it was done, which is really tremendous and wonderful, and he was an active participant early on, and this is back in 2018-2019 when we tried to get this going. But now the character isn’t quite him. It’s a little bit more like a stony image that has stepped out of one of these reliefs that’s speaking to you, but it has still got evidence of Barkho.
Jennifer Berglund 20:52
Interesting. I just love that story, and I bet he was just absolutely thrilled that you were doing this.
Adam Aja 21:00
He was, yeah. He was really excited, and there was a lot of correspondence early on, and he’s done not just costumes, he does props as well. He does weapons, and one of the big things that he was doing at the time was a chariot. So he was reconstructing a full-scale chariot based upon ancient relief and archaeology and art history, analysis of these works, and he’s not a professional, he’s not a scholar, but he is very passionate about the material and has done just an incredible amount of research. The work is fantastic, so I’m glad that we were able to keep him, his character, in this show as well — in this app.
Jennifer Berglund 21:38
Absolutely. What about the pigment, the colors of the clothing — would that have been accurate, as well?
Adam Aja 21:45
The costumes would have been colored, just like the wall reliefs were colored. They had access to the colors just like we do now. Certainly, not all the chemical dyes that we have, but there would have been a lot of natural dyes. The fact that our modern audiences are so used to experiencing the ancient world in black and white — it’s false, right? So you go into some museum galleries and you see degraded art. You see glass is degraded and the color is wrong or the sculpture, the paint has all flaked off, and you just see them in this white state. Or you may even see a plaster copy. It’s giving a false impression of the ancient world as something that is kind of devoid of color. Our modern world is filled with color, just like the ancient world. It’s the same world. It’s just a few 1000 years ago. The color in the wall reliefs, I don’t emphasize it strongly in the app other than — it’s — the artwork is animated in color. I think there’s one line in the script where the guide character says, “Ah, isn’t this color beautiful? My king had the pigments brought in from all over the empire.” Just sort of acknowledging that this was material that was assembled. Some of it would have been brilliant, rare materials. The colors of the cosplayer’s costumes was highly plausible. Where we do have pigment preserved in wall reliefs, we do see the reds and blues and pinks and blacks and whites and everything that you can imagine.
Jennifer Berglund 23:14
Would the pigments have been sort of symbolic? It seems like there would be a message in that too, right? Because the pigments come from all over, and so in order to acquire those pigments, to paint the reliefs, the king would have had to have had widespread power and influence. Am I correct in saying that?
Adam Aja 23:34
Natural pigment would have been local, right? It would have had to come in from say, seeds or berries that came in from another region. There could have been a mollusk that they were grinding up the mollusk to get the different colors. For a landlocked area, it wouldn’t have been possible except through import, and so it would have been quite rare and valuable because it was harder to get in different parts. In terms of the meaning behind them, if the color had meaning or symbolic meaning by itself, it’s difficult for us to get at as a modern audience. There may have been blues, or reds may have had some power or importance, but it’s difficult for us to get at that. It’s cultural changes in differences we don’t know.
Jennifer Berglund 24:10
I think that’s so interesting. I have to ask. You mentioned that analyses have been done to analyze what pigments were used. Can you speak to how those analyses are done, like what processes were used to figure that out?
Adam Aja 24:23
Every aspect of this app was informed by scholarship. Not just the costuming of the lead characters, but the colors of the pigmentations was informed by scholarship, the music and sound effects, the instruments that are being played in the scenes, the script is informed by ancient texts and Assyriologists. This was a big team, actually. All of us contributing scholarship towards this end product that we try not to hit the visitor over the head with. I hope that there’s a lot of learning that’s taking place without people even being aware because they’re being entertained, but passively they’re learning a little bit about the history and culture and artwork. The color on the reliefs was informed by a scholar named Shiyanthi Thavapalan, who was at the time at Brown University. The music was done by Richard Dunbrill. The Assyriologist was here, it was Gojko Barjamovic. This was an impressive team, and it was fun meeting with all of these scholars and learning about this piece that I’m not particularly expert in. I do Bronze and Iron Age, mostly domestic architecture. That’s my area of focus, but working with them and putting together these pieces was fun and exciting, and I’m glad to finally see it very close to completion. Within a few weeks, I’m hoping that all these pieces will come together again. Now the color on the reliefs can be tested in a variety of ways. I believe that X-ray fluorescence is one common way you can point at the reliefs. If you can’t see any visual pigment preserved, you can get actual trace elements, and you know, if you’re getting a hit of copper, that will probably include a blue or a green if you’re getting hits of lead. So different pigments would have been used for different elements, and so that would affect the color choices there.
Jennifer Berglund 26:10
So interesting. You mentioned the music was based on music that would have been from the time. Do you know enough about the music? Talk about how research was done to understand that that was the music at the time.
Adam Aja 26:26
I don’t know enough about how Richard Dumbrill bases his work. I know that he reconstructs actual instruments based upon the images, and plays them, and experiments with the types of sounds that they make, but I’m not sure of the whole scope of his research process.
Jennifer Berglund 26:43
Yeah, well, that’s just fascinating. I just love that you can learn so much about the ancient world just from what’s inscribed on those reliefs. There’s so much scholarship that went into this and all the subtle details, so as the visitors are experiencing this augmented reality experience, it’s important to pay attention to the small stuff because it all matters.
Adam Aja 27:11
That’s what I hope. I hope that this app will encourage the visitors to pay closer attention to what’s happening in the scenes. We’ve all been in galleries and seen some visitors that just sort of breeze in. They may see a couple of items that are of interest. They might read the little caption, then they breeze out, and they may miss so many great stories that could be told. Now this is just one story that could be told using these reliefs. There are a lot of them. But this app, I hope, encourages the visitor to go up to relieve and really try to understand what’s happening in the scene and engage with the artwork in a way that they might not otherwise do. It might not be for everyone. Some people might just want to come in and look at the artwork as it’s presented and read the text, but this is a new way to explore this artwork in our gallery that I hope is a lot of fun, and I’ve been very encouraged by the different audience reactions. We’re not finished, and I’ve been showing this to a variety of people — Harvard undergrads, artists, staff members, as we’ve been experimenting with the app and showing it in development, and watching the reactions is really encouraging. You get this…
Jennifer Berglund 28:19
I can imagine.
Adam Aja 28:21
…wow factor. “Wait a minute, how is this happening? I didn’t expect that.” And that joy that they’re getting by experiencing that, even in this preliminary state, is really encouraging for what I hope our museum visitors will get, and not just our museum visitors, but actually, faculty and students who are studying the ancient world, perhaps want to go a little deeper with the stories than they’re getting.
Jennifer Berglund 28:43
Along those lines, what do you hope your audience comes away understanding from the experience that they might not have gotten from a static gallery?
Adam Aja 28:53
A static gallery offers a number of things already. We use the show to really highlight the use of casts in museums. It’s called From Stone to Silicone. It really talks about recasting ancient monuments, but it does use the ancient Assyrian artwork in every single case so that I was able to pivot the show in the future to something more focused on ancient Assyrian history and culture. Already, there’s a couple of stories that I was hoping to be able to tell but these reliefs are just sort of in simulated stone colors. They’re all based upon plaster casts that would have been white and the white plaster casts were taken from primarily the British Museum and the Louvre, which is where the originals are housed. So I’m hoping our visitors gain that story about the use of casts in museums, and what perhaps some of these stories are but they don’t always get the knowledge that they were painted. They don’t always necessarily know what’s happening in the scene. Sometimes the story behind the artwork is missed. You can’t say a whole lot in a sentence or two in your text on a wall panel. Not everyone wants to stand and read a paragraph about what’s happening in the scene. So you’ve heard “A picture is worth 1000 words”, you can gain some images just by looking at them, but not everyone looks at them closely enough. They might get an idea, “Okay, there’s ancient lions in here.” But then if they look closer and spend a little bit more time, and maybe the lion limps in, because it’s wounded, dragging a paw behind it. You’re like, “Oh, wait a minute, there is an arrow, I see the arrow now sticking in it. I wonder what happened? Why is this lion hurt? Why has this lion been shot?” and then they click in the bottom of the app. This guy, the narrator, telling them about the ritual hunt as part of a practice that the king did regularly, not just hunting for food, but a symbolic act of controlling the wilds, and that’s just one scene. So if they do that with all of these scenes, they’ll get more than a sentence or two from the tombstone information, the text information on the panel. They’ll get more from maybe just glancing at the image. They’ll get an interpretation from an ancient Assyrian point of view, not a modern look at what’s happening in the scene, but an ancient person talking about their experience in the Assyrian palace life, and I hope they come away with a deeper understanding of ancient Assyrian culture. They may have misinterpreted when they first look at this ancient art. Maybe they didn’t know a whole lot about ancient Assyria. It is political propaganda and does project a very strong image of the king, and our app goes beyond just that same story over and over again, repeated. It does talk about the fact that the king assembled animals and plants from around the kingdom, and put them in gardens that people could go see. He talks about these captured people being reorganized in the kingdom and contributing to the function of that society, and building the bridges, and cultivating the land. That these were not slaves. These were not just political prisoners — that they actually continue to contribute to the Empire, and so when you first look at the image, it looks like people being led into slavery, may not understand how deeply that can go. It’s a different culture. We’re not going to get every story out of these ten reliefs that we’re showing, but I hope that the story is richer and more layered for our modern audiences after they use this app.
Jennifer Berglund 32:33
I can’t wait to experience it myself.
Adam Aja 32:36
I’m excited, too.
Jennifer Berglund 32:38
Yeah! When is this coming out? When is it going to be ready?
Adam Aja 32:41
All the bits and pieces are ready to go, and we’re assembling them now. You can actually see it in its working state, sort of behind the scenes, but we’re hoping for a public release March 15, and you don’t have to actually be present in the museum to do it, which is really exciting. You can do it here, and I think that’s the best experience but through our homepage and our website, you can virtually visit our museum and our galleries. You can sort of scroll through to the third-floor gallery, and you can use your phone if you have Snapchat up on your phone and you bring up the app and you shine it and you point it towards your screen showing the reliefs. It will work on your phone through the website, as well, so that’s kind of fun and we hope in the future, maybe we’ll be able to add additional elements on our website that we can’t do in-gallery because of the limitations of the app, but we’ll see.
Jennifer Berglund 33:30
That website, by the way, is HMANE.harvard.edu.
Adam Aja 33:36
One of the things that we’re also adding in is a “Making Of” video. Because of the scholarship that was involved in creating this and there was such a long development time, I really wanted people to understand some of the scholarship behind things because we don’t highlight it, or we don’t state it explicitly. When people are experiencing the app, I want them to know that scholars are involved, so we have been “Making of” video that will be available on our website. There’ll be a little, 30-second blurb that appears downstairs by our visitor desk and probably using promotion. That’s also taking place now, so there’s a lot of bits and pieces that are coming together. We’ve got a lot to do before March 15th, but I think it’s all doable. All the pieces are there ready to go.
Jennifer Berglund 34:15
Well, that’s great. I’m super excited about it. To all of our visitors out there, come check it out — March 15, at the Harvard Museum of the Ancient Near East.
Adam Aja 34:26
Yeah, thanks for letting me talk about it.
Jennifer Berglund 34:29
Adam Aja, thank you so much for being here today. This is really exciting to learn about this new experience.
Adam Aja 34:39
Thanks, Jennie. It was fun.
Jennifer Berglund 34:40
Today’s HMSC Connects! podcast was edited by Eden Piacitelli, and produced by me, Jennifer Berglund, and the Harvard Museums of Science and Culture. Special thanks to the Harvard Museum of the Ancient Near East and to Adam Aja, for his wisdom and expertise. And thank you so much for listening. If you liked today’s podcast, please subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Podbean, or wherever you get your podcasts. See you in a few weeks.