If you’ve visited M+, you might have come across a gallery where panels displaying paintings, posters, and photographs move in front of your eyes. Here, there are no detailed work descriptions on wall labels; there are only questions on a screen asking what you think about what you see. This is the experience of The Cabinet, an open storage system and interactive digital experience that is distinctly different from the typical white cube gallery.

As you enter The Cabinet, you will find three large panels on display. The two on the sides showcase works from the M+ Collections; the one in the centre invites you to join a game of interpretation with friends or fellow museum visitors via publicly available iPads or your own mobile device.

The game prompts you to share your views about the works on display in two rounds. In the first, a question asks you to look closely at a work or group of works and share a specific interpretation or detail of interest. After each player has input a response, a selection of these entries are displayed anonymously onscreen. The second round invites all players to react to each other’s responses through commenting or voting, before the game moves on to the next prompt.

In total, there are forty moving panels automatically shuffled every two hours, creating a seemingly endless supply of new objects and artworks for visitors to observe and interpret together.

What inspired this experiment in looking? The answer spans collecting and sharing practices from sixteenth-century salons to twenty-first-century mobile phones.

A memorable museum visit is often made up of serendipitous encounters. Discovering an unexpected artwork or object in the gallery that makes you look or think twice, that speaks to you and moves you, is a powerful experience. Sharing that moment with another person can make it even more special. The Cabinet heightens this sense of the magical chance encounter.

We took inspiration from sixteenth-century collections of wondrous and eclectic objects: the Wunderkammern, otherwise known as the cabinet of curiosities. These cabinets acted as displays for the private collections of European aristocrats, showcasing anything from historical relics and archaeological specimens to works of art, antiquities, and other cultural objects. Meant to be encyclopaedic as well as sensational, they were seen as microcosms of the world in their arrangement and selection, reflective of the particular interest and worldview of the collector.

The cabinet of curiosities is often considered the origin of the museum, with its potential for making meaning out of a collection through display. It aims to invite curiosity in the items on display, in reading the correlations between them, and in discovering ideas beyond one narrative thread—telling us as much about the objects themselves as the people who put them together.

So, what does our cabinet of curiosities say about M+?

First, you’ll need to know about its predecessor: the Pontus Hultén Study Gallery at Moderna Museet, Stockholm. Our Stockholm counterpart was designed by Italian architect Renzo Piano to host donations from the private collection of the museum’s first director, Pontus Hultén. The system runs on a user-on-demand mode, where visitors can call out a specific panel to view the works. Apart from hosting seminars, workshops, and small exhibitions, the space is used mostly for research by appointment.

Our first executive director, Lars Nittve—former director of the Moderna Museet—proposed building a similar open storage gallery at M+ as an alternative way for visitors to engage with our collections. The team started planning in 2017, when museum construction was still underway. We decided to take the on-demand, mechanised study gallery concept a step further by turning it into a collective viewing experience integrated in our public galleries.

The curatorial team aimed to create a sense of wonder in the encounter with our collection, encouraging visitors to look deeper and bringing personal meaning to the forefront. We started with a series of big questions: what can The Cabinet do that other galleries cannot? How can we use it to rethink curating, collecting, and exhibiting? What can it tell us about how we engage with visual culture, or the physical space versus the digital?

Our initial curatorial team of five members reviewed all the two-dimensional works in our collections and voted on those with the most potential for open interpretation. With a mindful balance of works from different mediums and disciplines, we narrowed the selection to some 200 works. When distributed across the forty panels, these create an image saturation effect that echoes the visual landscape of billboards, commercials, phone screens, and social image-sharing that occupy our daily lives.

The works are grouped on each panel for reasons ranging from a sense of visual resonance to similarity in composition, colour, or subject matter. One panel might feature works showing solitary figures, close-ups of faces, or circles; another could showcase varying shades of red, repeating patterns, or landscapes. We intentionally left the logic behind these groupings unspoken in the gameplay. Why? Often, we are confronted with a multiplicity of visual images in our daily lives, and it is left to us to decipher the message or the intent.

At The Cabinet, your viewpoint matters more than what the images are supposed to say. In your opinion, why are these works placed together? How does a grouping influence your view of an individual work? What do you notice in this arrangement?

In this way, The Cabinet features your voice. The game’s prompt design evolved from our thinking around principles of visual interpretation and conversation. One of our core references was Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS), developed by museum educator Philip Yenawine and cognitive psychologist Abigail Housen in the late 1980s. This art curriculum ‘fosters collaborative, inclusive, community-building dialogue’. The essence of VTS is facilitating artwork viewing in a group setting through three guiding questions:

• What’s going on in this picture?
• What do you see that makes you say that?
• What more can you find?

The first question involves open discussion about anything from observation to emotions to personal associations. Then, visitors are asked to give evidence of their opinion by looking deeper and drawing associations. The last question encourages further observation or consideration of others’ viewpoints. In the process, VTS gives people a chance to learn to listen and consider different ways of seeing. The experience emphasises how there is no right or wrong answer in art appreciation.

The Cabinet takes these VTS principles as inspiration and asks you, the visitor, what you see and what makes you say so. We invite you to draw connections between the works on display and your observations, guiding you through the process of reading visual cues.

To amplify this collective moment, we project every step of the game onto the central panel. This allows us to include even the non-players in the room—just like the digital sphere, where engagements can be active or passive, and dialogue can sometimes unfold as a spectacle for others to see.

From time to time, The Cabinet will display earlier visitor inputs, showing an accumulation of exchanges and unique perspectives. These visitor responses might imagine a dialogue between characters in the works, highlight forgotten details, or add contemporary relevance through pop cultural references. We hope people find inspiration, resonance, or surprises in the contrast of words and images and feel excited to share their own views and observations. Collectively, we might uncover something more.

At a time when visual images are an integral part of our lives, informing how we communicate and understand the world, it is crucial for us to think deeper and be more aware of this process of reading images. With an understanding of how visual interpretation and conversation work, we can feel empowered to use these tools—to know ourselves better, to communicate differently, and to ultimately transform ourselves, our interactions with others, and the world.

‘Visual culture is a way to create forms of change,’ writes theorist Nicolas Mirzeoff.^[1] ‘Once we have learned how to see the world, we have taken only one of the required steps. The point is to change it.’^[2] The Cabinet invites you to become an agent of change.