Unframed Collection partners with NUMIX Lab, an itinerant European event that brings together immersive creation professionals in dialogue with cultural institutions across the continent. The 6th edition in 2025 brought together 459 participants from around the world across 16 venues in Budapest, Veszprém, Vienna, and Linz, fostering exchanges between Europe and North America around immersive cultural practices.
On this occasion, we met with Cédric Lesec, Head of external relations and outreach at the Musée des Confluences. Opened in 2014, at the convergence of the Rhône and Saône rivers, this french institution traces how humans evolved in their environment through space and time. With its more than five centuries of collection, the museum mobilizes a multitude of tools to display, and reflect on, humanity, its cultures and societies.
In this interview, Cédric Lesec exposes the factors that push the museum to mobilize digital tools and the constraints that come with putting those in place. Those challenges outline the fundamental relationship that such an institution creates between the audience and its collection.
A museum is at its roots, a place where collections of objects that are out of the ordinary, in our history and our universe, meet an audience ready to see them.
The digital is, then, a way to give augmented elements of context to assist this encounter.
– Cédric Lesec
The Musée des Confluences mixes sciences, natural history, anthropology and contemporary museography. What place does the museum gives to the digital media or immersive experiences to enhance the understanding of the topics it approaches ?
Cédric Lesec – The place of the digital media in the Musée des Confluences is particular, in that it is very much put to use in our exhibitions, for example Amazonies uses more than 50 audiovisual set-ups, however the issue for the museum is using those technologies in a way that facilitates the connection, between the audience and the collections, that is the heart of our mission, without overtaking it.
Seeing as a museum is, at its roots, a place where collections of objects that are out of the ordinary, in our history and our universe, meet an audience ready to see them.
The digital is, then, a way to give augmented elements of context to assist this encounter.
What types of content could benefit from an immersive or digital approach, while respecting the scientific and educational spirit of the museum ?
C. L. – This narrative and immersive dimension permeates all our mediation tools. There’s not, necessarily, choices that are more expected between permanent or temporary exhibition installations and mediation tools. However what prevails is still a human and material mediation. The digital media must be used without excess and with as much relevance as possible.
What would, in your opinion, be the restrictions or specific challenges faced by a sciences and society museum such as yours, in the implementation of immersive or interactive experiences?
C. L. – Immersives experience offers several advantages : appeal, the possibility of showing novel aspects of the collections… However there’s several drawbacks. The first is the financial aspect with, on one hand, the substantial cost of those devices and installations and, on the other, an economic model still in development.
The second is the obsolescence of those tools. It could be assumed that, because those creations are digital, they could be easily modified and updated, but that is not always the case. Yet, when a video is produced it is to be used for several years, precisely because it is costly.
There is also a sovereignty issue. When you produce digital tools you need to know to whom the contents belong and the rights-holders chain that comes with it. It cannot be ignored.
Finally, there is the obvious issue of eco-responsability regarding what is produced and, for example, the sensible use of artificial intelligence.
If the museum decided, in the future, to include digital or immersive formats, what would be the primary objectives, in your opinion?
C. L. – It is a difficult question. The field is ever-evolving and you must keep in mind that what makes a museum’s uniqueness is the exhibitions of material items. The aim would then be to use the digital medium in the right place.
We cannot forget the material dimension of the heritage we preserve and exhibit, while testing new formats and devices. They are difficult to imagine, but we see, yet again, during this week for example, that the experiences of these museums and institutions are numerous, varied and that there is a very interesting diversity.
However, in our concern, the issuer would be to center everything around the collections and audience, and to not consider the tool that is the digital like as a goal in itself rather than a means to foster this relationship.
