The Bali Temple Explorer Project
Before this domain became a temple-focused cultural travel guide, the name Bali Temple Explorer was associated with an ambitious museum and web project designed to let people explore a Balinese temple through interactive video.
A museum project built around living culture
The original Bali Temple Explorer was developed for Bali: Art, Ritual, Performance, a special exhibition at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco that ran from February 25 to September 11, 2011. The exhibition team wanted to show that Balinese art could not be fully understood as a collection of objects separated from ritual, music, movement, community life, and sacred space.
Associate curator Natasha Reichle and education director Deborah Clearwaters worked with interactive-film director Martin Percy on an experience that used moving images rather than a conventional gallery of still photographs. The project was available on the web and was also intended for a dedicated kiosk near the museum galleries, connecting the physical exhibition with a digital form of place-based exploration.
How the original experience worked
The central idea was simple but technically unusual for its time: visitors would not watch a single documentary from beginning to end. They would choose where to look next.
Interlinked video scenes
The temple was represented through a large network of looping HD video scenes. Users could remain in a scene, observe movement and atmosphere, and then select another viewpoint.
Exploration at your own pace
Clickable hotspots connected one location to another, giving the experience some of the freedom of walking through a real place rather than following a fixed edit.
Voices and commentary
The project included interpretive commentary and first-person voices, including interviews with the temple priest and a local village leader.
Museum and web access
The experience was conceived for both online use and a museum kiosk, with alternative text-and-image and linear-video formats discussed for accessibility.
Why the format mattered
The creators described a limitation of traditional documentary filmmaking as the “tyranny of the edit”: a filmmaker decides what viewers see and how long they see it. The Bali Temple Explorer tried to preserve the emotional quality of moving image while giving visitors more control over direction and pace.
That approach was particularly relevant to a temple setting. Sacred architecture is experienced spatially. Courtyards, thresholds, sounds, movement, weather, offerings, and people all contribute to the sense of place. An interactive network of video scenes could therefore communicate something that a single photograph or linear film could not reproduce in the same way.
Recognition and the technology behind it
The project was released in 2011 and was built as a web-based interactive film experience using Adobe Flash, a technology that was common for ambitious multimedia websites at the time but is no longer supported by modern browsers. UNIT9 credits Martin Percy as director and describes the project as an interactive exploration built from more than 150 interlinked HD videos; contemporary Museums and the Web documentation described more than 200 video loops as the project developed.
The work received recognition in interactive-media awards, including Webby recognition and One Show Interactive recognition. Those awards reflect the project’s significance as an experiment in combining documentary film, museum interpretation, and user-controlled digital exploration.
The relationship to this website today
The present BaliTempleExplorer.com has a different function. It is a practical cultural travel guide focused on Bali’s temples, sacred places, rituals, architecture, and visitor etiquette. This page preserves the history of the earlier interactive project associated with the Bali Temple Explorer name and domain.
The connection between the two is thematic rather than technological: both approaches encourage people to slow down, look carefully, and understand a temple as a living cultural place rather than a decorative backdrop.
Sources on the original project
- Museums and the Web 2011 project description — contemporary documentation of the museum context, interactive concept, video loops, commentary, and kiosk.
- UNIT9 project archive — production overview, release details, technology, credits, and awards.
- Asian Art Museum education resources — context for the relationship between art, ritual, performance, and living culture in Bali.
For a closer explanation of the original interaction model, continue to the Interactive Temple Explorer page.