You have no items in your cart. Want to get some nice things?
Go shopping
Interview / Museums / Future Archives
Brett Renfer, Senior Project Manager, Emerging Technologies at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, talks to Litro about VR, Oceania, audience engagement and why museums now need to preserve not only objects, but the decisions behind digital experience.
A week after the Met Gala, the easiest thing to do is tally winners and losers on the red carpet. The harder, more revealing task is to look at the institution that makes those outfits matter.
This year’s gala marked the arrival of Costume Art, the Costume Institute’s spring exhibition, and the unveiling of the Met’s new nearly 12,000-square-foot galleries beside the Great Hall. The exhibition’s premise is direct: fashion is not an annex to art history, but one of its oldest visual languages — a way of staging power on the body, negotiating visibility and gender, and fixing desire and status into material form.
The red carpet is built for instant circulation. The museum’s work is slower. It has to turn spectacle into record, interpretation into memory, and temporary attention into something that can be studied, revisited and questioned long after the cameras leave.
That is where Brett Renfer’s work becomes important. As Senior Project Manager, Emerging Technologies in the Met’s Audience Engagement division, he works at the edge of access, interpretation and experiment: the point where a museum’s archival responsibility has to meet tools that feel contemporary.
His recent projects include the Met’s immersive Atopia collaborations, among them Oceania: A New Horizon of Space and Time, which extends the reimagined Michael C. Rockefeller Wing into a digital environment shaped by sound, story, 3D imaging and feedback from delegates from Oceania. The point is not novelty. The question is what happens when a museum encounter is no longer confined to a gallery, an object case, or a single visit.
“We need to preserve a record of our decisions.”
Renfer puts the challenge plainly. That sentence turns a conversation about VR into something larger. If museum experiences now move across headsets, phones, online environments and digital platforms, then conserving the object is no longer enough. Institutions also have to preserve the choices around interpretation: what was shown, to whom, through which technology, and why.
The Met Gala lasts one night. An archive is institutional memory. The question for the Met is not whether it can generate spectacle. It plainly can. The deeper question is whether it can build new forms of access without losing the texture, restraint and seriousness that give its collections weight.
About Brett Renfer
Brett Renfer is Senior Project Manager, Emerging Technologies, in The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Audience Engagement department. His work focuses on prototypes, pilots, partnerships and public-facing digital experiences that test how emerging technologies can extend museum storytelling and reach new audiences.
On emerging technology and audience engagement
Eric Akoto, Litro
Could you briefly describe your role at The Met and how your work connects with emerging technology and audience engagement?
I’m the Senior Project Manager of Emerging Technology in our Audience Engagement department. Audience Engagement develops all visitor-facing experiences and storytelling for our permanent collection, temporary exhibitions and special projects.
My role is to develop proofs-of-concept, prototypes, pilots, projects and partnerships specifically related to emerging tech. We’re equally looking for ways to reach and engage audiences in new ways and working to understand how new tech will impact The Met of the future.
On VR in a museum context
Eric Akoto, Litro
What first drew you to working with VR and digital experience in a museum context?
Two things. First, when I started three years ago, I was blown away at the volume of 3D content our incredible Imaging team had captured. We hadn’t yet released that work to the public, so there was almost a blank slate.
Second, it goes back to that idea of engaging new audiences. We know not everyone can make it to The Met, and we see tremendous opportunities for immersive experiences that happen outside the museum. Any time we can bring our collection and our stories to a new audience, or a new platform, we’re excited to do so.
On what VR changes
Eric Akoto, Litro
What does VR allow audiences to experience that a traditional gallery encounter cannot?
You can pick things up. We love the ways that VR allows you to bend — and sometimes break — the rules of the museum, especially when that gives you a richer experience with an object or place.
Not only can you take things off their pedestals, you can also travel across time and place, see things in their original context, play with scale or materiality, and more. It can offer a different type of agency for virtual visitors.
We know visitors want more places to interact, to play, to explore, and it’s not always the right context to do so in a gallery. But in VR, it’s all on the table.
On cultural knowledge and digital form
Eric Akoto, Litro
Are there risks in translating cultural or Indigenous knowledge into digital form?
Of course, and the risks are often the same as they are in a gallery context: we want to ensure that we’re balancing authenticity with meeting audiences where they are.
Like in the gallery these objects sit in on site at The Met, we worked to incorporate perspectives and voices from across the region, and where possible involved communities in the creation process.
One small detail in the experience is that the objects can all be “handled,” but each has a slightly different set of restrictions on how people can manipulate them. This came from testing and sharing with delegates from Oceania as part of the opening of the Michael C. Rockefeller Wing. With certain objects, people shared that it wasn’t appropriate to turn them upside down or place them on their sides.
This last part is unique to VR and 3D experiences, of course. On that thread, sometimes the risks are purely tied to technicality: when we reduce objects to the fidelity that’s possible on current hardware, something is always lost when it comes to the detail of the craft, the intentionality of the choice of colour or material, and the connection one has when encountering an object in person.
We went as far as we could with each of these, and in the end felt the benefits of new audiences encountering these stories outweighed those risks.
On future archives
Eric Akoto, Litro
For Future Archives, we’re interested in what survives and how it survives. What do you think museums need to preserve now for future generations?
We need to preserve a record of our decisions.
I think future generations will be curious, as we are now, to see how scholarship and understanding has evolved over time, and how that was related to our audiences of our time — or not.
In digital media in museums, we’ve come a long way when it comes to thinking about sustainability, especially in the ways that we consider even one-off pilots as a foundation of learning to build upon. Yet we don’t have the same archival rigor as our colleagues in curatorial, conservation or other research departments.
So, in short, I think we need to find ways to capture ideas, learnings and context for our audience-facing projects in ways that meaningfully borrow from collection, conservation and research practices.
We might not fully understand yet, but I suspect being able to paint a fuller picture of the whole of the museum — how we understand and engage with our visitors, in parallel with how and what we collect and conserve — will be a rich well to mine from in the future.
What the Museum Remembers
The most useful thing about Renfer’s answers is that they resist the easy language of disruption. He does not treat technology as a replacement for the gallery, the object or the scholar. He treats it as another interpretive layer, one that has to be designed, tested, limited and remembered.
That distinction matters. Museums have always been technologies of memory. They select, frame, protect, exclude, recover and re-contextualise. What is changing is the surface through which that work now reaches the public. The exhibition can become an interface. The archive can become an experience. The visitor can enter through a headset as well as a doorway.
The test is whether the institution remembers how it got there. Not only the finished object. Not only the final installation. Not only the smooth public-facing digital encounter. The decisions behind it: the compromises, permissions, cultural consultations, technical limits and interpretive choices.
That is where the future archive begins.
