After one and a half months participating in the MediaLab things are getting clearer. Our assignment is part of the Culture Vortex project. The aim for this big project is; to encourage public participation in online cultural (heritage) collection. There are different collections of public material but there are not so much ways of online distribution/participation in the Netherlands. A big part of the Dutch television broadcast material is being held in the archive of the Institute of Sound & Vision in Hilversum, one of our partners in the assignment. Their goal in this project is to creatively re-use audio/visual material and enrich their database with new material. Under the project Open Images (as part of Images for the Future), they release videos from their archive under creative commons license. Our challenge is to get more people working with these ‘open’ videos. The website will provide us with the content that we need in the assignment.

The other partner that we are working with is Dropstuff, a non-profit organization that is trying to create a museum without any walls in public space. They have all kinds of screens throughout the Netherlands and one big mobile screen, which they use at festivals. Their main goal for this project is to create a long term solution/application for the (mobile) screen(s). They want an interactive web/mobile application that can interact with the screens. So the experience of the digital art will be on a different level than in a traditional museum.

So, our goal for these upcoming 6 months is to create a web application, wherein the public can remix images from the database of Sound & Vision (Open Images). We hope to stimulate the public to re-use the archive material with the use of this application. The web app will be in direct contact with the screen that we are going to use, so the results of the remixing will be visible on the screen. This whole installation will be presented on a festival in the summer (June).

The past weeks we mainly focused on the research part of the assignment. We visited different conferences and presentations for inspiration. From this week on we will be in concept-phase, meaning we have to work out around 50 concepts in detail. Next to that we’re reaching out to festival organisations to get in with our interactive installation.

The team with Maarten (middle) @ Sound & Vision