THE INCREDIBLE WORLD OF PHOTOGRAPHY
INTERACTIVE INSTALLATION
Bachelor Project by
Designer Tin Nguyen
Developer Raphael Andres
Kunstmuseum Basel Exhibition / 18.07.-04.10.2020
Curators: Olga Osatschy, Paul Mellenthin
process documentation
My whole process documentation: process_documentation (German)
Cooperation
The exhibition is being created in cooperation with the Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron Cabinet, Basel.
Collaboration
iart, Basel
Involved Partner
Kunstmuseum Basel
Fondation Herzog
Herzog & de Meuron
Hochschule Luzern
My Role
Visual & Interaction Design
Motion Design
UX/UI Design
Design & Concept / Visuals / Animation / UX/UI Design / Prototyping / Testing
Tools
After Effects / Cinema 4D / Adobe XD / Premiere Pro
Timeline
8 months
In the summer of 2020 a photo exhibition at Kunstmuseum Basel entitled “THE INCREDIBLE WORLD OF PHOTOGRAPHY” presented a small selection of photographs of Ruth and Peter Herzog's private collection. The couple have amassed over five-hundered thousand photographic works: from prints, portraits, negatives and x-rays to years of photographic history. The curators Paul Mellenthin and Olga Osadtschy sought to illustrate the focus of infinite potential of connections through it's everyday photographs - around four hundred images were selected for this exhibition.
This was the backdrop to our bachelor's project for the Digital Ideation study programme at the Lucere University of Art and Design. In collaboration with iart, a Basel art tech company, we got the opportunity and chance to develop an interactive installation for an exhibition. The aim was to translate the curator's view of the collection into a presentation that would facilitate the playful reception of happy coincidences and conncetions between adjacent images.
Goal & Requirement
Interaction
Visitors interact individually with the installation
Mass
The mass of the photo collection should be visible
Filter
Visitors should be given the opportunity to go trough the photo collection and filter it independently
Collective moment
The visitor's selection of an image should become collectively visible
Lingering
The room should serve the visitors as a place to rest and discover
Haptic experience
The haptic experience and active involvement is an important part of the installation
The result was a large projection that visualised constantly changing selections from the breadth and depth of the collection. Two scanning stations in the gallery to interact with the installation. The visitors would choose an object and move it into the foreground; an alrgorithm would then search through the background to find optically similar objects; these photographs - a family of images - would then form a cloud around the first object. One result of this was that items from the collection were grouped according to different criteria: color, motif, frame type and so on. If two visitors chose their images at approximately the same time, the algorithm would connect them via a chain of more or less similar images. Thus new connections and visual narratives were generated all the time - and the public were left to supply the meaning. The Herzog collection contained the potential for serendipity; our installation helped realize it.
Postcards/ Tickets
The interactions were activated using a QR code on the visitor's ticket. The original intention was to install the boxes containing postcards of the exhibits that could be picked up and scanned using a computer-operated camera. In the event, this haptic access to the virtual archive was impossible due to coronavirus pandemic.
Scanning stations
Two scanning stations were placed in the room in front of the visual projection. Exhibition visitors were invited to interact and use their ticket to let the algorithm unfold it's work. This station is the bridge from the analogue to the digital form in this interactive installation.
Wall Projection
Our inputs were eleven thousand photographs from the collection. These were arranged in a high-dimensional space, then analysed and organized using the t-SNE machine learning algorithm. We also wrote a program that allowed us to translate a so-called Ptersburg hanging - with pictures hung as densely as possible - onto a wall in the gallery. Two projectors were used to visualize the wall projection - ten meters wide & three meters high
Storyboard
Idle Mode
Continous display of random objects arranged according to Petersburg Haning with a slow movement
Scan 1 Object
Objects fade/blur out. The scanned object appears on the left or right side
Relationships
Similar objects are gradually placed around the scanned objects
Scan 2 Objects
Objects fade/blur out. The scanned object appears on the left or right side
Relationships
Similar objects are gradually placed around the scanned objects
Path
The two relationships connect and form a path in a series of images
Algorithm: Path
The images from the path are recognized by an algorithm (visual recognition) and a connection between scan 1 and scan 2 is shown using a path.
Scan 1
Scan 2
My process documentation
My whole process on this project can be seen on this link: process_documentation
HSLU Werkschau
The work is presented to the public on several platforms. The Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts has put this year's work show online: wwwerkschau
Digital Ideation Museum
Digital Ideation also offers its own virtual museum, in which the entire class’s work are also exhibited: DI Museum
HSLU News & Stories
The university has also published an article on our work: HSLU - News & Stories
iart documentation
There is also a project documentation on the website of our partner company iart.
