Page 44 - AC/E Digital Culture Annual Report

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318,000 entries in their dictionary. The words are briefly displayed in alphabetical order and it would take nearly 100 days to read them all. This display by Ecke Bonk is part of the installation Buch der Wörter / Book of Words: Random Read- ing, which was shown at Documenta in 2002.
In addition to the acquired works, another prominent feature is a piece created specially
for the museum by Ai Weiwei: five oversized coloured roots entitled Colored Roots 2009-2015. A nearby mirror replies to Snow White’s classic question, “Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the fairest of them all?” – a reference to the Grimm brothers’ other aspect of tireless compilers of oral narrative tradition. Although the museum might have been designed with a merely doc- umentary focus, it was thus given a hybrid role as a showcase for both contemporary artworks with a markedly digital component and historical and testimonial pieces in what we might call a transmedia approach.
The Friedland Gate Museum in Kaliningrad is another interesting example in this survey of unique exhibition venues. Housed in a building that was part of the Konigsberg defence ring built in 1862, it was opened as a museum in 2002 owing to a number of somewhat chance circum- stances far removed from a premeditated action plan based on a specific museum layout design.
Fig. 8. Interactive installations of the Friedland Museum (2016), developed by MESO Digital Interiors GmbH. http://www.meso.net/Museum-Friedland/
The building was used to store antique objects found when work was carried out to adapt and
clean the ornamental lakes in the park located south of the city adjacent to this fortification. Over time all the objects discovered during cleaning work in the city in general, during the demolition of old buildings dating from before the revolution and in the attics and basements of abandoned old buildings and other places began to be collected and catalogued there. The resulting array of conventional and not-so-con- ventional found objects with an unquestionable historical value provides a glimpse of a past way of life in the city.
Fundación Telefónica’s Espacio Realidad Virtual encourages the participation and collaboration of sector agents wishing to show their abilities to produce content and/ or hardware.
Three-quarters of the museum’s space houses
a permanent collection illustrating life in the
city before the war; the found objects are sur- rounded by technology to afford the assembly meaning and an argument. The spaces, equipped with many projectors and featuring a varied assortment of images of the period, recreate rooms and public areas of the city, making for a totally immersive experience that offers visitors the chance to take a virtual stroll through the streets of the capital of East Prussia and even tread the cobblestones of the period. The remaining quarter is used to host temporary exhibitions, as well as specific concerts and workshops related to the city. We are thus dealing with a venue where the past and the present coexist in a natural manner and invite us to reflect on life in the city.
In contrast to this example of hybridisation, Fundación Telefónica’s Espacio Realidad Virtual is focused exclusively on virtual reality and, more recently, also on augmented reality, and is committed firmly and solely to digital produc- tion. Located at no. 3 on Calle Fuencarral in Madrid, it is constantly updated thanks to devices and experiences that encourage the participation and collaboration of sector agents
DIGITAL DESIGN OF CULTURAL CONTENT: TOWARDS A TRANSMEDIA EXHIBITION MODEL · UNIT
Digital Trends in Culture