If you work in the cultural sphere as a museum or gallery curator, Metasteps is a great investment. It will enable you to develop high-fidelity mock-ups of exhibition ideas, which you can use to attract new business opportunities.
"Metasteps enables you to develop high-fidelity mock-ups of exhibition ideas."
How a comics studio moved into narrative art by prototyping whole exhibitions before actually building them.
THE CHALLENGE
A niche idea in need of showing
XeLuS Mind started in October 2023 as a comic series under XeLuS Mind Studio, based in Malmö with associates in Bournemouth, Dublin and Dhahran. Its purpose is public education by informal means, and its audience is museum and gallery visitors interested in humanity, science and technology.
Comics and graphic novels are a niche sector. Reaching a larger market meant moving into narrative art, and narrative art meant exhibitions, which the studio describe as sitting between the book and the temporal-spatial landscape. The difficulty with an idea in that gap is that nobody funds it from a description. Partners and investors need to see the thing.
The constraint the studio was actually up against is that building physical exhibitions to find out whether an exhibition idea works is not a viable way to test it.
THE SOLUTION
Build the whole exhibition first, then decide whether to build it
Metasteps won on versatility. Off-the-shelf layouts meant a concept could be standing up quickly, and the option to recreate real venues from photographs meant a mock-up could be set inside the actual room a partner was considering. Whole exhibitions came together in a few hours.
The studio trialled the platform to test usability and moved to a paid plan after a couple of days. The evaluation period was so short because the main question was quickly answered, affirmatively: can this represent an exhibition convincingly enough to pitch?
The mock-up outlives the pitch
The answer turned Metasteps into a prototyping tool. Exhibition concepts are designed and presented to partners and investors as high-fidelity mock-ups, and the same spaces have since been used as single-point installations inside physical exhibitions.
THE RESULT
A pitch you can walk someone through
The studio can now put an exhibition in front of a partner before committing to fabrication, freight, insurance, or floor space. That reverses the usual order of risk in exhibition work: the expensive commitment comes after the idea has been tested, not before.
Because the mock-ups are high-fidelity, they also perform a second function. What was built to win a conversation can be installed as a component of the physical exhibition it was pitching. As a result, the prototype is not thrown away when the real thing is approved.
For a studio moving from a niche publishing sector into a new market, that is the practical difference: the barrier to trying an exhibition idea dropped to a few hours of work.
XeLuS Mind's Space
Visit the space for yourself and see what Metasteps' platform is capable of.
Visit the spacePitch the exhibition before you build it.
Put a concept in front of a partner within an afternoon, in the room they are actually considering.