The new Museum’s first special exhibition
Our first travelling exhibition was In The Money, which premiered in our old space in 2013.
Next on tour was Voices from the Engraver, shown here at the Sherbrooke Nature and Science Museum.
Unlike renovating a house, when we closed the Museum for its four-year re-invention, we couldn’t just “stay” at another museum until the water got turned back on. Or could we have? In fact, once the renovation was under way, that’s essentially what we did. Though we didn’t sleep on anybody’s couch, we did create a travelling exhibitions program to keep the virtual doors open while the actual doors were closed. We stayed at museums from Kitimat, B.C., to Gimli, MB, and from Timmins, ON, to Chicoutimi, QC, and we still have a few bookings available for 2019. Now that we are again back in our own house, we’ve invited one of our wandering exhibitions home for a visit: Decoding E-Money.
Decoding E-Money fits snugly in our exhibition space outside the entrance to the permanent galleries.
The exhibition relies on a lot of screens and was designed to be dark and immersive, as if you were inside the digital processes.
The rear view shows the artifact zone—a nice, analog relief from the heavily digital zones.
As the title suggests, this exhibition aims to remove the confusion about what exactly e‑money is. It’s important to make the distinction between what people think of as e‑money and what, in fact, it is. In a backgrounder on its website, the Bank of Canada defines e‑money as
…monetary value that is stored and transferred electronically through a variety of means—a mobile phone, tablet, contactless card (or smart card), computer hard drive or servers.
Despite their fully electronic environments, debit cards, e‑mail transfers and credit cards are not examples of e‑money. They are methods of payment that follow electronic pathways along which transaction information travels. It might be more helpful to imagine e-money as money that has been withdrawn from a bank account and stuffed into an envelope waiting to be spent. The “envelope” just happens to be an electronic device.
Our payments system map is a fun interactive that, with moving lights, shows you the route your money takes using five different payment methods.
Our hands-on timeline explores the relevant history of the money and technology that led to e-money.
Up to four people at a time can test their knowledge of e-money and its technological background by playing a fun true-or-false game.
The version of e‑money we are most concerned with in this exhibition is cryptocurrency and, specifically, the ever-newsworthy Bitcoin. You can purchase it using your national currency, and it can be sold for currency, but in between it acts all by itself as a token of exchange that exists entirely online. Bitcoin doesn’t actually meet the criteria for a currency, but its underpinning technology, called the blockchain, is ground-breaking—a system that allows for secure transactions without third-party oversight. We studied it for you so that you can explore it too.
Like its mother museum, Decoding E‑money has a great number of interactive features. It is, fittingly, a very digital exhibition, with games, a timeline, videos and interpretive content all accessed using touch panels and computer consoles. The only significant part of the display that is not digital is the artifact zone, a breath of old-fashioned air in a very modern exhibition. Here, you will see money that was, in its day, as difficult for some to accept as digital currencies are today. To help visitors explore in-depth information about these artifacts, we provide you with a book, an appropriately low-tech medium.
A fast-moving break from the exhibit is the cryptocurrency mining game. How fast can you find the right code?
The big central cylinders are all about cryptocurrency.
So please drop by the Museum and check out Decoding E money. It will be in our special exhibitions space until May 6, 2018.
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