Zou je voor ons jullie eindproduct, de interfaces, een stuk concreter kunnen maken? We hebben nu nog niet geheel een idee wat we ons daarbij voor moeten stellen.
Central to this project is the following paradox:
The Rijksmuseum's masterpieces can only be fully experienced through gestures that are forbidden in a traditional museum context.
Digital media offer a way out of this paradox by setting up a virtual space where these forbidden gestures are in fact allowed. More often than not, however, the resulting digital environments remain detached from the physical exhibition. They offer an autonomous experience that is best enjoyed in the comfort of a visitor's home rather than the museum itself.
In this project, we want to develop new interfaces for the Rijksmuseum that integrate the digital and the physical collection by facilitating several (ideally all) of the following gestures:
The visitor should deviate from the designated paths and open locked doors.
The total collection of the Rijksmuseum consist of 1,000,000 pieces, but only a fraction of them (8,000) are on public display. In order to make a larger number of artworks explorable for the public, simply digitizing the archive is not enough. Interfaces are needed. These interfaces should not merely give the user access to the archives but also provide her/him with the tools for orientation.
It is easy to overlook both the importance and complexity of making the archives of the Rijksmuseum accessible to the public. A key part of this process is their API (Application Programming Interface.) This interface currently makes 130,000 images and over 1,000,000 data entries available to developers, scientist, and the (technologically savvy) general public.
Unfortunately, however, most users are not yet equipped to access the collection through the programming interface. In order to compensate for this lack, the Rijksmuseum has collaborated with Kiss the Frog, Fabrique, and Q42 to create some award-winning user-interfaces (Rijksstudio, mobile app). In this project, we will work with these same partners to develop further (features of) interfaces that make the, otherwise hidden, collection available.
The visitor should tear the masterpieces apart, peel off their layers, and destroy their aura.
In a traditional museum setting a masterpiece is presented as a completed product rather than a fragmented process. However, it is often a small and hidden details or the (past and future) trajectory of a masterpiece that defines it. For that reason, it is important to show the visitor the different pieces and layers that an artwork consist of.
Additionally, the aforementioned API also enables a new way of dissecting artworks. Apart from layers and pieces, they can now also be dissected into bits and bytes. Data can be used both to reconstruct the original artwork, as well as place them in new contexts and narratives, such as:
- a history of its reception
- the biography of the portrayed people
- stylistic similarities and differences with other works of the same artist or its contemporaries
- the spatial and conceptual itinerary of an artwork
Shailoh Phillips' earlier, award-winning project Go van Gogh. A Global Treasure Hunt in which she traces the complex displacements of Van Gogh reproductions can be seen as a prototype for such an approach and interfaces
Currently, Rijksstudio and the mobile app already present some these dimensions of the artworks to the user. They allow users to zoom in on high-resolution images, peel off the surface to discover hidden, earlier version or completely different paintings, and to search for stylistic and affective metadata (color, mood, etc.). Nonetheless, these interfaces are not integrated in the physical collection. In this project we will develop interfaces that not only reveal the small details and hidden layers of the masterpieces, but are actually part of the experience of the visitor.
On the input side, we are thinking of interventions that make it possibles to bypass some forms of metadata altogether:
- Using body sensors to determine a user's affective response to individual artworks or the collection as a whole.
- Using light, temperature, and sonic sensors to measure the interaction between the artwork, the audience, and their physical environment.
On the output side, we want to break the holistic experience (their so-called aura) of the artwork and confront the visitor with its mediated status:
- large transparent monitors that are placed in front of the actual artworks and provide the visitor with contextualizing information
- smart phone and tablet applications that provide the user with new ways to interact with the artwork: zooming in, peeling off layers, replacing (parts of an artwork) with sketches, studies, actual photographs, etc.
The visitor should improve the artwork by adding new layers to it.
The Romantics found that an artwork's creative and critical reception actually improved it. Journal reviews, academic articles, and other artworks were all part of a masterpiece's trajectory. In this project we would like to use digital technology to realize this Romantic conception of artworks. Our interfaces are meant to enhance the knowledge and creative dimensions of the Rijksmuseum's masterpieces.
Rather than only accepting experts as a valid source of information, the interfaces that we want to develop will allow the visitor to add new layers of knowledge. This can be in the form of facts, interpretations, visualizations, etc.
This project does not consider the artist and his/her intentions as the endpoint of the work of art. Instead, it wants to treat the work of art as an ongoing, creative process. The interfaces that we want to develop thus enable the user to mix, transform, and recreate a work of art. These interventions, however, do not replace the original but are added to it as extra layers
As a result of these acts of augmenting, the interfaces that we want to develop destabilize the position of the artist and the expert as well as transform the role of the visitor. The latter is no longer a passive consumer, but is now part in an artistic and/or research practice. It is important to emphasize, however, that this project does not propose a naive democratization of knowledge and art. One its main challenges will be to come up with strategies and tactics to filter good contributions from the bad ones.
The visitor should take the (augmented) artworks home or bring them elsewhere.
The interfaces that we want to develop are aimed at transforming the visitor from a consumer into a researcher. However, one of the most important aspects of doing research is to share the results and discuss them with others. For that reason, the Rijksmuseum already publishes all of the data available through their API under a Creative Commons License.
The legal dimension of dissemination, however, is only part of the story. In order to further stimulate knowledge production we want to ensure that the output data produced by our interfaces can be used as input for further research. This means that in the future the API should not only cover the 'original data' but also the new data that is added by the visitor/researcher.
In this context, it is also important to mention some of the advisors that have agreed to be actively involved in this project:
Robin Boast is the Professor of Information Science and Culture at the University of Amsterdam, Department of Media Studies. Until the end of 2012 he was the Deputy Director and Curator for World Archaeology at the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Cambridge (MAA). Robin has an ongoing research project on the governance of digital collections in which he work with several renowned museums. We have no doubt that his knowledge and expertise on these questions will push our project forwards.
Jonathan Gray is director of policies and ideas at the Open Knowledge Foundation and editor of the Data Journalism Handbook. Jonathan's experience with practical experience with the dissemination and democratization of public knowledge and art will be invaluable in the development of these new knowledge interfaces for the Rijksmuseum.
Zou je in meer detail uit kunnen leggen wat de afzonderlijke bijdragen van de genoemde partners worden (Rijksmuseum, Kiss the Frog, Q42, Fabrique)?
Rijksmuseum Media Lab will serve as the central research hub for this project, coordinating the collaboration with the other private parties involved. The Rijksmuseum is the product owner and main stakeholder in the project. The researcher appointed with this grant will have access to design documentation, code and databases of the exisiting interfaces to the digital collection, which are owned by the Rijksmuseum.
The other parties involved (Kiss the Frog, Q42, Fabrique) will contribute knowledge, existing code (for the website and app), time, feedback, as well as having access to the research results. The collaboration includes on-site meetings at each company, interviews on the design and insight into the coding choices thus far. This includes sharing prototypes and concepts that did not make it into the current interface designs.
The collaboration will have an iterative structure, with short cycles resulting in concrete deliverables. The project will start with a creative phase involving input from all of the partners in order to formulate user stories. Each deliverable will be presented to the collaborating parties for testing, feedback and tweaking the features as necessary. This process will generate a series of prototypes for interfaces, resulting in a final product tested by industry standards and users (museum visitors).