The Peoples’ House: Sydney Opera House at 50

Art Processors partnered with the Museum of Sydney (Museums of History NSW) to create a new exhibition, The People’s House, celebrating the iconic Sydney Opera House in its 50th year, and examining its significance in the cultural and social life of Sydney and the nation.
Deep interpretation of the people, place, performance, design and engineering that makes the Sydney Opera House a living phenomenon far beyond its function as a performance venue is explored. Through innovative technology and meaningful, experiential content, we delivered a creative concept, developing original interactive moments that invite visitors to commune and collaborate with a future-facing sense of creativity. The People’s House goes beyond traditional museum displays to create a space for play, experimentation and delight.
Four interactive visitor journeys were designed for the exhibition, highlighting the performative, aesthetic and nostalgic sides of the Opera House’s history through the present day:
In The Drafting Table, visitors can try their hand at drawing elements of the building, and submit their own remembrances of the Opera House to a digital wall of memories that will be preserved in the public archives.
The On This Day experience, a dual-screen interactive, explores 50 years of performance, presenting hundreds of past performances for viewing.
The playful immersive interactive called Maestro, invites visitors to perform in a stunning interactive musical experience, participating through gesture and movement.
Visitors explore a rolling visual of text and imagery and add their own moment in Thanks for the Memories, a data visualisation that depicts the growing collective memory of how the Sydney Opera House unfolds in our lives.
Sam Doust, Art Processors’ Creative Director shared, “The framing for this exhibition as ‘The People’s House’ has been a fascinating lens through which to view the past 50 – really 65 years – of the Sydney Opera House. Art Processors has delivered curation, exhibition and interactive design and development, in collaboration with the Museum of History NSW’s staff, to co-create an exhibition that will form a wonderfully memorable experience that will evoke wonder, nostalgia and reverie.”