Paper at the Center for Communication and Computing, University of Copenhagen Nov. 21st 2012

1. Media Challenging Museums
IT, audiences and the exhibition format
Center for Communication and Computing 21.11. 2012
Kjetil Sandvik, associate professor, Department of Media,
Cognition and Communication, University of Copenhagen

2. The main point!
• Communicating cultural heritage is about telling
stories
• It is about engaging the users in the storytelling
process (participation)
• It is about creating a storytelling device which can
be played with, manipulated, changed (co-
creation)
• A constructivist approach towards knowledge and
learning
• Mobile and networked media represent new
possibilities and challenges for this kind of
communication

3. Purpose
• Developing new ways of communicating
culture/cultural heritage.
• New museum/exhibition format – inspired by
Web 2.0:
– social software: ’architectures of participation’
– dialogue-based communication
– facilitating collaborative task solving, initiating knowledge
sharing, enabling community formation
– engaging and activating audiences (primarily by the use of
interactive mobile media: smart phones, tablets…)
– not producer-centered (producer has knowledge/user
receives knowledge), but participant-centered and
experience-oriented (knowledge is obtained through
partaking in the exhibitions experience-design) 3

4. Purpose
Museum 2.0:
• Audiences are not just participants but co-
creators through collective learning processes
(uses of creative potential, focus on the
experience dimension)
• Media do not just serve as means for
communicating knowledge, but as creative tools
for knowledge creation and learning processes.
• Based on a experience-focused and
constructivist approach to learning and
knowledge communication 4

5. Challenges of digital media
Participatory (social) media/web 2.0:
• radical possibilities for dialogic processes, for
collaboration and co-creation
• Communication as dynamic processes
• Fixed solutions  changeable, adaptive and user-
centered solutions
• Uses of web 2.0 apps mashups: combinations of
cheap, effective and constantly updated and
improved media technology
• Communication 2.0: perpetual beta way of
communication
• Mobility, location-sensitivity, networkability…

6. Death, Materiality and the Origins of
Time
• Intervening research processes and exhibition
design experiments
• Displaying questions not (only) answeres
• Displaying the researcher at work 
knowledge in the making
• Displaying mistakes, flawed hypothesis,
disagreements, controversies
• It is all about engaging the audience in
dialogues about what is being exhibited

7. Format not just for
the design process,
but for ’the exhi-
bitions’ itself

8. Window to
the researher
in the field
(or laboratory
etc.) Channel for com-
municating with
the audience

9. Trust No-one!
• A new type of city walk in Kolding: augmented
reality game for tourists
• Experience the rennaisance buildings, streets
and squares mapped onto the present day city
by the use of AR browser on the mobile phone

10. Project scope
• Mobile phones (smart phones) used for
communicating culture
• Fiction used for communicating history
• Experiments with Augmented Reality (at low
costs)
• Creating an unorthodox city walk:
– instead of an exhibition about renaissance
Kolding, we let the renaissance pop up in the city
space
• The audience as participants and co-creators

11. Project scope
• Mixed media:
– mobile phone as ’swizz army knife’
– mash-up of variety of services: low-cost and easy to
adjust (Layar, Google Maps, Youtube and other file-
sharing services)
• Ubiquitous computing:
– not so much embedded in the fabric of physical
location
– but accessible everywhere by ways of…
• Mobile and location sensitive media:
• Over-layering locations with digital information:
• Augmentation!

13. Creating an augmented reality
experience - demo

14. Augmentation
• an informational, aesthetical and/or
emotional enhancement of our sense and
experience of place by use of various framing
strategies (e.g. Ian Rankin’s Edinburgh) and
media technologies (e.g. a guided Rebus Tour).

15. Augmentation of places
• Construction of a kind of mixed reality
• the place has a status both as an actual
location in the physical world and as a
storyspace
• blend of fact and fiction
• blend of physical and mediated space
• blend of presentation and (user)
performance
• ‘charged spaces’ (Valtysson)
15

16. 16

17. Split reality vs Mixed reality
• Split reality: switching between mediated space
(e.g. inside the mobile phone) and physical space
• Mixed reality: blending between mediated and
physical space (e.g. looking at physical space
through an ‘augumented reality browser’ on the
mobile phone)
• Mixed reality implies a certain way of telling
stories connecting the actual and the fictional
space/the physical space and the mediated space
• (this is where Hikuin’s Vendetta goes wrong – and we try to
make things right)
17

19. 19

20. Trust No-one! - demo

21. Augmented
Reality crime
fiction?

22. Kolding as augmented storyspace
• Creating a dramatic meta-story connecting different location
specific narrative tableaus containing various actual historical
characters and events
– (e.g. the co-operation between the public executioner and the
pharmacist selling human fat and pulverized sculls for medical use)
• within the same fiction frame providing connections between the
narrative tableaus
– (the castle is on fire (which is an actual event), a messenger is found
murdered, a conspiracy against the King may be afoot).
• The tale is taking place in the city space and interfaces with specific
locations with historical significance
– (e.g. the square where executions took place, the building housing the
pharmacy)
• Thus: a mediated version of renaissance Kolding is mapped onto the
physical – and present-day – version of the city.

23. Kolding as augmented storyspace
• Creating a dramatic meta-story connecting different location
specific narrative tableaus containing various actual historical
characters and events
– (e.g. the co-operation between the public executioner and the
pharmacist selling human fat and crushed sculls for medical use)
• within the same fiction frame providing connections between the
narrative tableaus
– (the castle is on fire (which is an actual event), a messenger is found
murdered, a conspiracy against the King may be afoot).
• The tale is taking place in the city space and interfaces with specific
locations with historical significance
– (e.g. the square where executions took place, the building housing the
pharmacy)
• Thus: a mediated version of renaissance Kolding is mapped onto the
physical – and present-day – version of the city.

24. Physical space as media
• The physical space is to some degree
functioning as media communicating specific
types of information, specific types of stories.
• the city quarters with its streets, alleys, buildings,
ornamentations such as statues, gargoyles and so on
function as a narrative architecture like a
theme/themed park like Disneyland including buildings
and landscapes known from the catalog of Disney
fairytales
• Several parts of the city of Kolding used as
location for the “Trust No-one!” project have
these qualities of being media in themselves,
as carriers of the story of Kolding. 24

26. Physical space as media
• With the use of mobile phones equipped with
navigation tools and augmented reality
browsers this information residing in the very
architecture and infrastructure of the city may
be pulled forth and made visible, accessible
and interactive from the perspective of
communicating history and cultural heritage.
26

33. Interface
Introduction/manual
Map
Episodes
Layars of information
Guessing who the
killer is

35. The crime scenes…

37. Layers
of infor-
mation

38. Layers of information…

39. Who is the killer?

40. Layar
BuildAR
Wordpress
Morfo
Paper Camera
Strip Design
Audaciy audio editin
Pinnacle video editing
The technical stuff…

41. Storyspace

42. Summing up
• Mobile and networked media technology as
e.g. augmented reality makes us see things in
new ways:
• Buildings are not just buildings, streets are not
just streets – the carry stories, they carry
cultural meaning
• This meaning may be experienced through an
interplay between the physical locations of
the city and the ubiquitous and locative
information layers provided by mobile media.

43. Visit the project on Facebook…

44. Project participants
• Kolding Libraries
• Kolding City Archive
• VIFIN – knowledge center for integration
(Vejle)
• Dept. of Media, Cognition and
Communication,, University of Copenhhagen
• Knowledge center for Children and Youth
Culture, VIA University College

45. Relevant literature
• Robert R. Janes: Museums in a Troubled World. Renewal,
irrelevance or collapse?, London and New York: Routledge
2009
• Beryl Graham and Sarah Cook: Rethinking Curating. Art
after New Media, Cambridge MA: The MIT Press 2010
• Fiona Cameron and Sarah Kenderdine (eds.): Theorizing
Digital Cultural Heritage. A Critical Discourse, Cambridge
MA: The MIT Press 2007/2010
• Ross Parry (ed.) Museums in a Digital Age, London and New
York 2010
• Loïs Tallon and Kevin Walker (eds.): Digital Technologies
and The Museum Experience. Handheld Guides and Other
Media, New York: AltaMira Press 2008
• Nina Simon: The Participatory Museum, Santa Cruz CA:
Museum 2.0 2010