This spring, Associate Professor Carolyn Tang Kmet brought her Medill Integrated Marketing Communications graduate students to the Block Museum for an experiential learning module exploring how consumers engage with physical, digital, and spatial representations of the same object.

The project, led by Kmet and developed in partnership with Sony XYN and Northwestern Emerging Technologies Lab, gave students early access to a Sony prototype rarely seen outside professional design and visualization settings: the Spatial Reality Display, a screen that produces realistic 3D images without glasses or a headset. The display uses eye-tracking sensors and real-time rendering to adjust the image as the viewer moves, allowing a single viewer to walk around a virtual object much as they would a physical one. Sony loaned the display to Kmet’s course for the duration of the module, and The Block was glad to support the work by making a collection object available for close looking and helping facilitate the museum visits. The collaboration is an example of the kind of cross-disciplinary use of the collection central to the museum’s academic mission.

The object Kmet’s class examined was Shan Goshorn’s Cherokee Burden Basket: A Song for Balance (2012). Goshorn (Eastern Band of Cherokee, 1957–2018) wove the basket from strips of Arches watercolor paper printed with texts from the Indian Removal Act, the Treaty of New Echota, and the mission of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, balanced against the four directional colors of Cherokee cosmology and traditional songs of healing.

Over the course of two sessions at The Block, students moved through three modes of encounter with the work. They began at a computer screen, viewing the basket through a 3D scan the Block hosts online, produced in earlier collaboration with the Emerging Technologies team. They then moved to the Sony display, where the same 3D model appeared as a spatial image that responded to their position as they shifted around it. Finally, they examined the basket itself.

The Sony component gave students an unusual vantage point. Most encounters with emerging spatial display technology happen at trade shows or industry events, framed around product demos. Here, students approached the technology in a museum context, with a single work of art as the through line, and were able to compare what the display offered against both a conventional digital rendering and the physical object itself.

Curatorial Coordinator Kirsten Lopez and Associate Curator of Collections and Academic Programming Essi Rönkkö supported the sessions at The Block. Lopez observed that students consistently identified the same tradeoffs across all three class sections. Color and lighting felt less reliable in the digital renderings, where context-specific illumination didn’t translate. Scale was difficult to gauge from an image floating on a blue background; students who had seen photographs of the basket being scanned still reacted with surprise when they encountered the work in person. The fact that the basket is woven from printed paper, rather than a natural fiber, only became fully legible up close, when the texts on the splints came into focus. The digital views offered things the physical encounter couldn’t: students could rotate the basket with a single motion rather than walking around it, and zoom into details in ways the physical object doesn’t permit.

From there, the conversation opened onto questions about why a museum might invest in this kind of technology, including accessibility for researchers who can’t visit in person, conservation considerations for fragile and light-sensitive works on paper, and the ways digital surrogates can extend access to objects whose materials and meaning are inseparable.

The Block visits anchored a broader course module. In parallel sessions at Northwestern’s Emerging Technologies Lab, led by Rodolfo Vieira and Zoran Ilic, Kmet’s student teams rotated through three scanning stations, including a Rigil scanner, a desktop photogrammetry station, and a PolyCam mobile setup, to capture their own consumer objects in 3D. The work carried into final presentations: one student demonstrated a photogrammetric model to show how a direct-to-consumer brand could use the technology to help customers engage with high-value items.

Supporting cross-disciplinary teaching is central to The Block’s role as a university art museum. Kmet’s course is one of a growing number of projects using the collection in unexpected ways.

Explre the 3D model of Cherokee Burden Basket: A Song for Balance (2012) created by The Block in partnership with Northwestern’s Emerging Technologies Lab.