[ARCHIVED] Collection Activation - Final

[periode]

You will come up with a proposal for turning the online database of a museum into an augmented reality application in order to tell a story about the objects in that database. This could encompass the potentially the whole database of the museum, or only a section of it, and should have a clear message that it intends to communicate. This will involve your knowledge of cultural studies, technical development, interface design, information presentation and possibilities of augmentation as seen in class.

Post the link to your Figma/Adobe XD/Wireframe below, along with a short (1-2 paragraphs) write up including:

• background research on the institution and the collection chosen
• • what kind of institution is it? rather traditional? rather contemporary? how is the collection relevant today?
• analysis of the media availabler Figma
• • what can you work with? images? texts? 3D models? can you find complimentary material on other sources?
• proposal for using this collection an AR app
• • include a short version of the design document: including core features, technologies used, etc.
• layout and mock-up of the proposed application, made with Adobe XD, Figma, or another wireframing tool of your choice.
• • including the different interfaces, possibly interactive.
• description of the user flow and of the user-experience

Full details here.

[dovebardin]

HISTORY KEEPS ME AWAKE AT NIGHT (WALKING)

In 2018 the Whitney Museum of American Art put on a show by AIDS-era activist and multidisciplinary artist David Wojnarowicz. The show was conveniently located at the new Whitney in the West Village, just steps away from what used to be the Piers - an abandoned space that was home for many queer people downtown. The piers were a communal space where artists made work and staged performances, where there was a vibrant sex culture from cruising to sex work, and it was also a home for many queer youth (mostly of color) when there was nowhere else to go. In 2001 the park was closed for renovation by the city after a decade of fighting with the inhabitants of the piers. While the park was being renovated the piers were all torn down, and the park reopened with a 1AM curfew enforced by police. The renovation of the West Side Highway, along with the placement of the New Whitney Museum, have been instrumental steps in the gentrification of downtown, and more specifically, the Village. This app hopes to illuminate the original context of David’s work by leading museum viewers on a historical walking tour of the neighborhood, superimposing the pieces where they once existed before.

https://www.figma.com/file/3Ukt9eKT7giyOAzavumuHg/Untitled?node-id=0%3A3

[luyumenq]

During the class with a guest presentation, I clearly remember they mentioned that visitors are not allowed to touch the exhibits in the Musical Instruments Museum. As music being aural art and musical instruments being an important medium between people and music, how can people explore the relationship between music and instruments? This AR platform is a potential solution, in which people can experience making sound on an "instrument" as if they are the musician themselves. With carefully modelled musical instruments, AR collision and prerecorded soundtracks of musical notes on the instrument, this experience is totally possible to make.

https://www.figma.com/proto/Wx03HActPuKXZPVTlNHmfz/Untitled?page-id=0%3A1&node-id=0%3A1&viewport=694%2C-174%2C0.31&scaling=scale-down&starting-point-node-id=1%3A2

[izzyrieken]

Museum of Unheard Things (Museum der Unerhörten Dinge)

The Museum of Unheard Things is a beautiful collection of random items ranging in size and story. The museum began with a mission of telling unheard stories and spreading the joy found in these narratives. The museum itself exists in a small space (a single room) where all the items are organized by weight along the walls, a new form of organization that resists the tradition of private institutions. While the museum does a fantastic job of creating a fresh space for viewing artifacts, it may lack in interactivity and storytelling. The website has a start to the archive: it has photos, long-stories and more information. However, not all of this information is accessible once in the museum and not all the items are listed.

I would begin by of course updating the archive with more photos or even 3D scans of items. The app would all users to explore the archive digitally and look more closely into each item without requiring the website. Options like the shuffle of the original "by-weight" organization would still exist to maintain the museum's morals. The app would also contain audio files of the lengthy text for both accessibility and ease when viewing artifacts. A "SCAN" feature would allow users to utilize AR and search items just through their cameras. A "fun" feature allows museum goers to browse through items from the archive and create their own curiosity cabinet on their phone with the option to share with the museum; furthering the mission of a more democratic museum.

Research: https://docs.google.com/document/d/18UO5x_TcqmdaCZWGMi2leudsA-3O9cmI1fOWdWYJwB4/edit?usp=sharing

Figma: https://www.figma.com/proto/SbFEK2ygQ4oEtD3E065W4J/Museum-App?node-id=1%3A3&scaling=scale-down&page-id=0%3A1&starting-point-node-id=1%3A3

[kenparks12]

The Instruments Collection - NMAAHC

For my app, users can go through the instruments collection at the NMAAHC, scan the instruments, and watch + listen as an AR animation brings the instrument to life. Ideally, there would be a 3D render of the musician playing the instrument as the audio is playing, almost as if they are getting a private concert from them (think holographic Ray Charles playing the piano in front of you). When the song from the specific musician plays, the user also has the ability to redirect themselves to their respective streaming platform, making it an artist-first project. I really wanted to use AR to bring these instruments to life as they are the vehicles that have brought so much life into American culture as we know it. The user can also get the traditional information they would get in the "Collections" tab, but the scan and AR component add a whole other element to the existing museum. There is also an AR navigation function in which the user can use the camera to follow walking directions to each object. I tried to keep the interface fun and inviting, while still incorporating the NMAAHC's Visual Identity.

Brainstorming Doc

[olivestew]

For my collection, I featured art from the Puerto Rico Plural Exhibition from Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico. The collection features a wide range of Puerto Rican artists from different generations, political alignments, and places. The goal is to unify the culture of the people, which is wide and diverse through artwork. The institution itself is rather contemporary, but holds artwork with great value due to antiquity. It features instillation, sculpture, paintings, etc. When examining the exhibit's works I noticed that a lot of the artworks could be thematically separated by decades. A lot of the issues that the country faced influenced the artwork produced in real-time. Therefore I believe it would be productive to explore the exhibition through the lens of time. Understanding the history of the country holds significant importance to appreciating the artworks of the time. The collection is relevant today because history continues to impact the lives of the people living in Puerto Rico. The history surmounts and creates a narrative surrounding the solving and creation of issues. I can work with text, images, models, video, and projections. The core AR feature that my design features is a projection application that allows users to project the artwork into their own spaces using AR so that they may experience it in real-scale and they have the capabilities to tweak it using the application. This would include impacting size/ color/ depth etc.

Figma: https://www.figma.com/file/DbePVODX0Dt8vRyh9HstPW/museum-collection-exploration?node-id=0%3A1

[kylewenchang]

The Wallpaper Collection - V&A

The V&A museum in London houses a permanent collection of over 2.8 million artifacts spanning over 5,000 years, with historical pieces from as early as 4000 BCE to contemporary pieces from the last few years. Among them is a collection of wallpapers which follows the artform's evolution from its inception in 1856 to today. As the museum states, wallpapers, being “fragile, ephemeral, and easy to replace... ha[ve] often disappeared from the historical record,” a historical pattern subverted by the collection. I wanted to explore the tension of the transient-forgettableness of the wallpaper and the museum's ability to preserve and identify them as distinguished works, by giving the user an opportunity to experience the works in their original context, as wall dressings rather than in frames.

My Figma mockup is for an app where the user can superimpose the collection's wallpapers on their own wall using AR, and learn more about their history by tapping on them, as well as scan works within the collection to identify them and provide information. I used the museum's photoscans of the wallpapers as well as their provided texts to fill out the information. While the mockup includes a few examples from different time periods (sorted in chronological order, but I would like to implement sorting by style), ideally the final app would include the entire wallpaper database to try/identify so that the experience could work seamlessly with any piece in the collection.

From the main page, the user can choose to read a brief description of the collection, or explore the collection in AR, where they can choose to view or scan particular pieces with their camera, save a photo, and tap the wallpaper to bring up an overlay with the piece's title, artist, date, description, and medium. The interface for choosing a wallpaper is based on mid-to-late-19th century pattern books, described in the collection's article on the History of Shopping for Wallpaper, that people shopping for wallpapers would traditionally look at samples from. For the wallpaper scanning feature, I think AR pattern detection would be most useful as the wallpaper designs are available as images and are typically small and tileable, and the wallpaper superimposing feature would use plane detection to be able to identify walls and their boundaries.

Link to Figma Prototype

[Alupie]

The Cornell Hip Hop Collection

The Cornell Hip Hop collection houses over 250,000 primary sources and items that document the early formations of hip hop in the Bronx. These include recorded music, prints and posters, film, and photography. The collection give us an insight as to how a movement and culture grew before the rise of the internet. It also allows us to trace the origin if styles and cultural norms that we participate in today. One is only able to see the whole archive with a research appointment but they do have a digital database accessible. I wanted to create a more engaging way of navigating this data and organize it in a way that allows the viewer to make connections between the network of artists that were involved in this movement.

After the initial home page, a menu page opens up, allowing the viewer to pic the archive they would like to explore. The "event flyers" allows you to scroll through flyers as if you were picking the event to go to for the night. It begins with information about the collection and then opens up with more detail about the event itself when the poster is clicked. There are further links within each poster information from that link location and artists. My AR element would be a map like "live view" on google maps that allows you to scan the area and scan for the locations of these events. However, this would only be useful in the Bronx.

https://www.figma.com/file/NTqtSnmwNhZxU4u5Oq2s4m/Untitled?node-id=25%3A124

[Dav1dyang]

museum of broken relationship

Figma Prototype: https://www.figma.com/proto/b7DSq5GPU94Ikf07cZHbVI/AG---The-Museum-of-Broken-Relationships?node-id=2%3A44285&scaling=scale-down&page-id=0%3A1&starting-point-node-id=2%3A44285

My collection Activation project is about the museum of broken relationship. This museum, despite its physical presence, is largely depending on the online entries people have from their website or partnered research. My goal is to create a platform for collective storytelling by exploring objects with stories. Specifically, one should easily participate in contributing to the platform. The app creates a 2D infinite space for people to place their objects alongside their stories. The key is to create a sense of space in the 2D interface so people can start exploring the moment they start the app. When the user selects an object, they are presented with a short description and a choice to read it or explore the object in 3D space with the audio. Utilized AR's capacity to display things in the 3D space, the object is revealed by having the user walk around to see it in all angles. A pre-recorded audio track with subtitles will be displayed during the AR experience. The experience would be even more enchanted if the audio included detailed descriptions that prompt the user to look at the object at a certain angle or detail. Users are also encouraged to create their viewing experiences as a curation for the items, adding further layers to the pre-existing stories.

[IanPort]

Figma Prototype

I have chosen to work with the exhibition Luz y fuerza by Guadalupe Maravilla, presented in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The exhibition contains multiple sculptures Maravilla refers to as healing musical instruments. The sculptures served as symbols in "addressing addresses trauma, contagion, rehabilitation, and rebirth." Over the year of it exhibiting between the Fall of 2021 and Fall 2022, following the Covid-19 Pandemic and the artist's survival of cancer, the healing musical instruments were used as tools in live sound baths conducted by Maravilla. He extended them to the public in need and has now released these audio files in English and Spanish available through the MoMA website. Also found online are installation and artwork images and writings about and from Maravilla. At the moment I do not have 3d models to use for this mock-up design, but those would ultimately be necessary for an app to be realized.

Guadalupe Maravilla is a practicing healer as well as artist. In both spheres, sound baths and sound healing are conducted. I got to visit the exhibition Luz y fuerza in person, but never had the chance to attend one of the (sound bath) performance events. With Maravilla and his work being overtly connected with healing, I propose integrating the exhibition, but more exclusively the sound baths recordings, into a meditation and well-belling phone application. Maravilla’s sound baths use gongs to cleanse the water in our bodies, which I am trying to further saturate into the world here. Using ‘Insight Timer - Meditation App’ as the platform, I created a mockup with Figma where Maravilla is a registered user. I wanted to seamlessly organize Maravilla into the app so that his audios could be found regardless of the user's relation to the art world where the records presently exist. And he now has the potential to be 'followed,' could host 'live events,' to have his audios saved by thousands of users and shared exponentially!

The application would be used as normal and according to the user's desire. However, Maravilla's sound bath recordings are sorted into a playlist that can be found in the music category within the home page. He can also be found under the ’Teachers’ category within the explore page. This profile had been modified to contain: all of his audios (‘Tracks’ tab), the link to and information about the exhibition at MoMA (‘Exhibition’ tab), how the sound baths can be ideal listened to at home (’Setup’ tab), access to the AR camera function (‘AR’ tab). Maravilla’s profile can be viewed against an actual user on the app (‘California Sound Healing Collective’), which shows how a physical art installation could become a component of this kind of application. The core feature unique to Maravilla’s profile is the AR function allowing viewers to place themselves within one of the artists sculptures from home, while listening to his audios. User cameras would search for rectangular objects (yoga mats or beds) and pin Maravilla’s sculptures to them; users can then recreate the sound bath from MoMA with the artist from anywhere.

Exhibition Site
Exhibition Site: Sound Baths at Home

[vasantsun29]

Here is my app project for Eyebeam https://youtube.com/shorts/jd5DJJnxFOk?feature=share The chat explains a lot of the storyline. I wanted to make a straight forward and comprehensive design that still gives the viewer a moment for clarity and meditation. In such a busy area, the odd architectural design stands alone in the context of the city's layout.

[vasantsun29]

https://www.figma.com/file/KM4k0EONy0mzodw9qdQzdZ?node-id=0:1&comments-enabled=1&viewer=1

My Figma isn't fully equipped with interactions but it has the option to take a picture in a phone's text format. It would be cool if it was just a simple tap to click the pic. First time using both softwares and it's been a steep climb but fun!