Time Machine is an hommage to the classic diorama, being a spatial image. It also fulfills childhood dreams: to travel through time and enter the worlds of painted images.
The Museum of Prehistory and Early History dedicated this permanent exhibit to children and teenagers. Its idea originates in a children´s book about a street over centuries. By today’s research, Silvia Nettekoven, artist and archaeological illustrator, developed fictional but believable everyday scenes of prehistoric times. The resulting five panoramic images depicted people living thousands of years apart from each other, but all in the same spot of land.

To guarantee children´s attention, hundreds of isolated drawing segments were assembled into coherent 3D scenes and rendered in fluent camera movements synced to the narrator´s voice. On a wide panoramic screen, the seemingly flat imagery opens up to let the audience dive into an unseen depth to discover what hides around corners, inside huts or behind fences. Back at the original viewpoint, the clouds start to move. With increasing speed, a time travel across thousands of years begins: glaciers flow, vegetation changes and forests move. A timeline provides orientation and illustrates the gigantic periods of prehistoric time. On a separate screen in front of the installation, a graphic interface indicates the currently playing chapter / era or time travel. Several pieces of the museum’s exhibition are woven into the story so that the context of the movie and the exhibition can spark a vivid imagination of these times long past.

In 2016, a study on digital strategies in museums (pdf) within the framework of the European research project RICHES conducted a visitor survey and greatly valued the installation. Visitors quote: “I mostly liked the fact that you could ‘enter’ the story, as if you were living yourself this moment with these people”.