Twilight: On light and colour #1

This is a post that I should have written three weeks ago, during half term, when it was the annual event Twilight at the Museums. This is a day when the nine Cambridge museums and botanic garden stay open after dark to welcome visitors, and especially families, to view their collections, literally, in a different light. I thought back to this on a number of museum visits this weekend, which have inspired a series of posts on light and colour, of which this is the first.

It sounds reminiscent of the film Night at the Museum and, despite the absence of Ben Stiller, my experience of helping with Twilight at the Whipple Museum of the History of Science was not entirely dissimilar. The Whipple is unusual in completely embracing the idea of the evening and turning off all of its gallery lights. Visitors come with their own torches and follow a simple trail around the cases with the aid of some carefully placed glow in the dark stars and fairy lights. It is wonderful how effective this is at getting visitors to look closely at every case and object. Children feel both freer and more excited in the darkened galleries, and also seem to be more interested in the displays. I’m reliably informed that one young reviewer last year gave the Whipple the accolade of being ‘the darkest and the coolest.’

This year we also introduced glowsticks as prizes for completing the trail and, with hundreds of these at our disposal, this gave me the joyous opportunity to relive my stint on Anthony Gormley’s Fourth Plinth One and Other project back in 2009. The other helper and myself who were on the welcome desk had great fun decking our limbs in multi-coloured glowsticks to mark ourselves out as the first port of call in the darkened main gallery. As well as thoroughly enjoying ourselves, this seemed to go down well with the visitors as a celebration of the fun and unusual (twi)light in which this event shows the Cambridge museums.