by Coralia Costaș
On 17 December 2025, ”Moldova” National Museum Complex of Iași, Romania launched a new digital mediation program meant to bring art and culture closer to the digitally native visitors.
Emerged around the exhibitions of the Art Museum, more exactly some of the artworks present in the European Art Gallery and the recently opened Romanian Art Gallery, with the purpose of bringing to life, scenes otherwise static depicted in the paintings, the concept was also adopted so to integrate exhibits from other museums of the Museum Complex, as well as iconic elements of the specific architecture of the edifice.
Thus, one of the bestiarum patterns that form the decorative floor rosette, has been also chosen as a way of pointing out this great architectural feature, unique in Romania, having its inspiration in the French Abbey of Saint Pierre sur Dive. Furthermore, the eagle, which is one of the most representative heraldic elements that can be found both within the interior decorations and the exterior ones, is among the architectural features which gets animated, flying from the stairway towards the glass cupola of the building. One of the historical scenes of the stairway stained glasses in its turn brings the visitors the possibility to see how the painted personages would have acted in those times. In the ”Henri Coandă” Hall, one of the angels keeping the tablets of justice moves artistically in the air to finally get down on the floor. In the Voivodes Hall, three of the portraits painted in the medallions in the upper part of the room, become animated in a sequence that involves most important rulers for the becoming of the nowadays Romanian people: Decebal, king of the Dacians, Trajan, the Roman Emperor who conquered Dacia in 105-106, and Aurelian, the Roman Emperor during whose reign Romans went back south of the Danube.
Moreover, the tusk of the single mammuthus trogontherii on the Romanian territory, displayed in the Hall of Honor at the ground floor of the Palace since 25 October 2025, is digitally completed so to help the public visualize the prehistoric animal, and even more, to see it move inside the edifice.
Inside Moldavia’s History Museum, the selection included the “Ion D. Berindei” Room which displays the original furniture elements of the former High Court of Justice, operational in the building from its inauguration in 1925 till 1955 when the edifice was assigned to the museums. Here too, static objects, such as the magistrates’ robes, the typing machine, the table and chairs become part of the script that illustrates how such law suits took place about one century ago. A medieval armor, a 19th century travel box for high officers of the army become in turn animated to give interested visitors a joyful manner of perceiving the exhibits.
“Ștefan Procopiu” Science and Technique Museum also proposes a series of animated exhibits throughout the museum itinerary: three orchestrions, unique in Romania, but also an electromagnetic violin invented by engineer Gabriel Dimitriu in 1929 while he was studying in Paris.
The Art Museum proposes a wider range of animated exhibits. Both the European and the Romanian Art Galleries include generous labels providing the visitors with details about the artist and/or the artwork. Still, except the cases when the visit is mediated by a museum specialist, young visitors tend to pass rather quickly through the exhibition rooms. This is how the idea came to attach QR codes to some of the artworks so to invite them to discover the exhibits by means of animated content. Probably the most spectacular is the Girl with the Butterfly, by Gheorghe Panaiteanu Bardasare, with the female character getting out of the painting, entering an exotic vegetative landscape and then reaching the Voivodes Hall where she dances very graciously.
This program has been very well received by the public, particularly the digitally native one, but not exclusively, as the QR codes encourage in a very simple non-intrusive manner the visitor to interact with what the museum proposes, while the AI-generated animated content is an entertaining way of bringing the heritage to contemporaneity. Moreover, in the collective Imaginarium, not only that it is not static any more, but it is not any more stuck into a further or closer past. Without being a general solution, the AniMuz program is an attempt to bring to the foreground exhibits, both 2D and 3D, which would otherwise pass probably unobserved.