Living outside Wellington won't stop you from visiting the New Zealand Film Archive's latest exhibition, Tracking Shots.

In fact, it doesn't matter where you live; all it takes is the click of a computer mouse and you can relive the final days of the 1953-54 Royal Tour, and watch the Royal motorcade of "sleek black cars" wend its way towards Bluff.

The clip from the documentary Royal Transport, complete with reverential commentary – "Throughout the whole tour there were no breakdowns and only two punctures!", is one of many film clips featured on Tracking Shots, an online exhibition which traces the history of the New Zealand film industry.

The exhibition has been adapted from the 1995 exhibition Tracking Time, which was based in the Film Archive's former premises in Cable St. According to Web Projects Developer, Diane Pivac, its virtual counterpart is bigger and better and provides more links to video and sound footage than the earlier exhibition.

"I think it works better because you can peruse it more easily, and it provides more viewer choice," she says. "You can just read up on the topics that interest you, or only look at the pictures if you want to. It also provides links to other parts of the collection for those who want to find out more."

Complementing traditional museums

Ms Pivac sees online exhibitions as being complementary to traditional museum exhibitions.

"There’s still plenty of room for traditional exhibitions. But people now expect interaction – as well as being informed, they want to be entertained. The internet opens up a whole new way of doing things. We’re lucky because it particularly suits film."

The internet also opens up a whole new potential audience. Pamela Lovis, exhibition manager for Te Papa’s first online exhibition, Maori Showbands, has been contacted by viewers from as far away as Germany since the show went live in December 2004.

"I had an email from a German man begging me to find video footage because he’d seen one of the bands playing in a nightclub in Germany in the 1960s," she says. "The showbands were an international phenomenon – a lot of them lived overseas and they are still living overseas. There was a lot of international interest in the exhibition."

It’s that accessibility that is one of the real advantages of online exhibitions, she says.

“They allow you to be in dialogue with people on a global scale. They expand your audience and influence and impact."

Māori art online

The organisers of the recently launched Virtual Exhibition Hall, featuring more than 100 artworks by Māori artists on the Apec Local Cultural Industry Virtual Exhibitions (ALCIVE) website, certainly hope that will prove to be the case.

A joint project between Toi Māori Aotearoa/Māori Arts New Zealand and Te Puni Kōkiri, the online exhibition features work by contemporary Māori artists. New Zealand is one of 14 Apec countries whose indigenous art is featured on the ALCIVE website.

According to Toi Māori Aotearoa General Manager, Garry Nicholas, the online exhibition provides an excellent international showcase for Maori artists, particularly in the wake of successful exhibitions such as last year’s Māori Art Meets America in San Fransciso and Toi Māori’s The Eternal Thread touring exhibition to Salem, Seattle and Warm Springs.

"We are starting to look at leveraging off the growing interest in indigenous art," he says.

More flexible medium

Tom Norcliffe, who helps run the virtual exhibition centre at the Christchurch branch of Archives New Zealand, says online exhibitions have other advantages too.

"With physical exhibitions you have to fill up the space, while with an online exhibition you’re not limited by the size of the exhibits. It's a bit more fluid in how you put it together."

And, unlike a traditional exhibition, an online exhibition doesn't have to be dismantled to make way for the next one.

"If we were trying to replicate our online exhibitions in a physical space we'd have to have four display rooms. This allows us to put stuff out there which is new and interesting and contributes to a sense of New Zealand identity, and to keep building on that."

Article by Ruth Nichol

Patu Kakariki by Lyonel Grant (Ngati Pikiao, Te Arawa)
Photo credit: Studio La Gonda