DIGITAL ART MEDIATION TWO MUSEUMS · GERMANY

Works of art, in their digital form.

In the programme „Vom Werk zum Display", Kunsthalle Mannheim and Kunstmuseum Stuttgart translate works from their collections into interactive digital episodes. The concept and the design are theirs, and the development was ours: we built eleven episodes and the meta navigation, twelve applications2 that run both as a public website and as touch kiosks in the galleries, in German and in English.

Live · werk-zum-display.art Our role: development partner In the galleries since June 20244
Germany Commissioned by Kunsthalle Mannheim and Kunstmuseum Stuttgart, with support from the German Federal Cultural Foundation3
01THE NEED

The design was ready. It had to become twelve products.

The two museums devised the programme together. Instead of one „digital collection" they planned 24 episodes: one application per work, built around what that work actually is. In the first phase the museums and a concept agency wrote a 135-page concept1 and one screenflow board per episode, explicitly „between a wireframe and pixel-perfect".

The second phase was to build all of it. Every episode in the concept ends with an explicit split of who delivers what: the museum supplies the images, the texts and the curatorial input, and the other side carries the design to the end, builds the application and produces the media in both languages. That development half was ours, for eleven episodes and the meta navigation the programme is entered through.

The hard part was not the volume but the variety: no two episodes are alike. A collage studio, a virtual lighting laboratory, a generative painting from 1973, a walk through a room lined with wax, a webshop that shatters. And all of it has to be one platform: bilingual, touch and non-touch, public web and a locked-down kiosk in the gallery.

The concept and the design are not ours, and that goes first: the museums devised the episodes, and the spatial installations in the galleries are studio zwo/elf's. On this project we were the developers, and our job was to turn the boards into products that work in front of an audience every day.

TWO HOUSES, ONE PROGRAMME7
The Kunsthalle Mannheim museum building
Kunsthalle Mannheim Brâncuși, Friedrich, Leibl, Long
The glass cube of Kunstmuseum Stuttgart
Kunstmuseum Stuttgart Ardeleanu, Brenken, Horn, Itten, Laib, Meckseper, Wellmann
02FEATURES

One entrance, then seven different episodes.

00 / 08 A way into the whole programme

01 / 08 Make your own Ardeleanu

02 / 08 A 1973 painting as a live system

03 / 08 A sculpture with no 3D model at all

04 / 08 A page that shatters

05 / 08 A quiz calibrated by everyone before you

06 / 08 A room you enter through a screen

/ 08 Show the museum your hand

werk-zum-display.art/Meta/artists · Wall of episodes
AXIS · ARTIST By artist
AXIS · MUSEUM By house
AXIS · PERIOD By period
werk-zum-display.art · Make your own Ardeleanu
THE CANVAS · COLLAGE The editor
THE COMPOSITION Composing
THE FINISHED WORK Submitting
werk-zum-display.art · Brenken · Signale
THE WORK · 1973 The original
THE RULES · IN CODE The generator
THE DISPLAY · THE REWARD The match
werk-zum-display.art · Brâncuși · Black Cube
THE TURN · 0° In the hall
THE TURN · 300° Another angle
BLACK CUBE Lighting it
werk-zum-display.art · Meckseper · Selling Out
THE SHOP · AD TONE The product
THE SCROLL Cracking
THE END Shattered
werk-zum-display.art · Wellmann · Phonetische Versuchsanordnung
A SOUND POEM The question
THE PICK The answer
THE END OF THE QUIZ The confirmation
werk-zum-display.art · Laib · Wachsraum
A STATION · 360° In the hall
THE WALK A step forward
THE THRESHOLD Going in
werk-zum-display.art · Leibl · Hand-O-Mat
SIX GESTURES The choice
THE KIOSK CAMERA The capture
THE COLLECTION What answers
NEED

Some twenty episodes across two houses, each with a world of its own. Without a shared entrance that is a list of links, not a programme.

SOLUTION

The meta navigation: a tilted wall of tiles carrying the signature of the programme, the whole thing rotated by 29°. Four browse axes, by artist, theme, period and museum, plus a page per episode with the full curatorial text, the credits and the German legal notice.

BENEFIT

Independently developed applications read as one product. The wall carries episodes that are not ours too, because it was built for the whole programme rather than for our delivery.

NEED

The museum wanted the visitor to feel the painter’s compositional decisions from the inside rather than read about them.

SOLUTION

Mona Ardeleanu’s paintings are taken apart into collage elements: a canvas editor with a circular touch selector built for museum screens. A finished work goes into the shared gallery, but only after an antivirus scan and human moderation.

BENEFIT

The visitor’s own work ends up on the museum’s screens, and the museum does not have to fear what will appear on them.

NEED

Brenken’s „Signale" holds to rules rather than to brushwork: a hard-edge composition in three reds, perfectly symmetrical. A wall label can describe those rules but it cannot let anyone feel them.

SOLUTION

The painting was reimplemented as a live system: four points to drag, four parameters, and a composition recomputed in real time. The original stands beside it as the reference, always within reach, and when all four parameters line up the painting rewards it with an animation.

BENEFIT

The visitor arrives at the compositional rules by guessing them rather than by reading about them. And the whole episode is essentially pure code.

NEED

Brâncuși’s polished bronze lives on light and viewing angle. A cheap 3D model would have killed it.

SOLUTION

All of it is real photography: a circuit around the sculpture through 12 angles and three camera heights, then the „Black Cube": three studio lamps and an exposure wheel, 96 mapped states, each resolving to an actual frame shot in the museum.

BENEFIT

The visitor turns the sculpture and lights it themselves, and the fidelity stays museum-grade: a camera, not a shader.

NEED

Meckseper’s vitrine is a critique of consumption arranged as a shop window. How do you translate it into an online shop without losing the message?

SOLUTION

A fake webshop with products in a tidy advertising tone. Scrolling advances a video of breaking glass frame by frame; at the end the shop redraws itself, permanently turned to the backs of its cardboard displays.

BENEFIT

The visitor’s own consumption, the scroll, is what shatters the vitrine: the medium performs the argument of the work instead of retelling it.

NEED

Wellmann’s prints are instructions for making sounds with your own body. The museum wanted the visitor to try, not to read.

SOLUTION

A quiz through ten sound poems. The backend records only the question and whether the answer was right, with no identifier of any kind, and the feedback message is computed live from the answers of every visitor so far.

BENEFIT

A solitary kiosk becomes a collective experience, the museum gets live evidence of what lands with its audience, and privacy is never touched.

NEED

Laib’s Wachsraum lives on presence: the smell of wax, muffled sound, half-darkness. How do you give that to someone who cannot go in?

SOLUTION

Fourteen real 360° stations shot inside the chamber itself, a step-by-step walk with an on-screen joystick for the kiosk, and sound as the core: two atmospheres that cross-fade at the threshold, plus a produced guided meditation in two languages.

BENEFIT

A work that only a few people fit into at once gets an entrance for everyone, on the web and in the gallery alike.

NEED

Leibl’s painting is a single painted hand, a fragment of a destroyed portrait. How do you pull a visitor into a work that is only part of a whole?

SOLUTION

The Hand-O-Mat: the kiosk camera photographs the visitor’s hand, gesture recognition runs in the browser itself, and the collection answers with every hand from two collections making the same gesture, out of a cloud of 154 hands across 112 works. The photograph never leaves the device.

BENEFIT

You show the museum your hand and the collection answers with its own. A mechanic people retell, with not one piece of data sent to a server.

The screens come from the applications in production, captured through real flows. The wall of episodes is a capture of the live meta navigation on werk-zum-display.art.6 The counts the episodes quote, lighting states, hands in the cloud and gallery moderation, were checked against the source.5

03IN USE

In the galleries, in front of an audience.

The platform is live at werk-zum-display.art, and the same applications run as touch kiosks in the galleries of both museums. The exhibition „Vom Werk zum Display" opened on 20 June 20244, and since then a visitor has the original and its digital translation side by side in the same hall.

FROM THE OPENING8

An exhibition kiosk in a hall of Kunsthalle Mannheim, beside Richard Long’s stone circle.
Brenken’s original from 1973 and the kiosk with its episode, the same hall.
The opening, 20 June 2024: your own Ardeleanu being composed on a tablet.
Part of the team beside an exhibition kiosk, the day after the opening.

ABOUT THE PROJECT, PUBLICLY

One workspace, twelve products, two audiences per build.

Every application is a public website and a museum kiosk at the same time: the routes are mirrored under /kiosk, a guard keeps the gallery screen locked down, and one tap returns the episode to its start for the next visitor. We built a backend only where the content asked for one: for the visitor gallery and for the quiz statistics.

Angular ONE WORKSPACE
.NET THE GALLERY AND QUIZ API
Kiosk and tablet IN THE HALL AND ON THE WEB
Hosting AT THE MUSEUM
MediaPipe ML IN THE BROWSER
12 APPLICATIONS IN PRODUCTION
2 MUSEUMS, ONE PLATFORM
DE · EN EVERY EPISODE IN BOTH LANGUAGES
2024 IN THE GALLERIES SINCE
SOURCES Where everything on this page comes from

1 ROLE AND SCOPE

Development of eleven episodes and the meta navigation, the split of who delivers what, and the boards „between a wireframe and pixel-perfect": the client’s 135-page concept package, finalised on 7 March 2022 and archived in the repository with the code.

2 TWELVE APPLICATIONS

The delivery repository: eleven episodes plus the meta navigation.

3 PROGRAMME AND FUNDING

Fonds Digital: the public project record on kulturstiftung-des-bundes.de.

4 THE EXHIBITION

Opened 20 June 2024, 22 episodes: kunstmuseum-stuttgart.de, the exhibition page.

5 TECHNICAL DETAIL

96 lighting states, 154 hands across 112 works, gesture recognition in the browser, the antivirus scan and the moderation of the gallery: the source code, verified in an analysis of the repository.

6 THE SCREENS

The applications in production, captured through real flows; the wall of episodes is a capture of the live meta navigation on werk-zum-display.art.

7 THE BUILDING PHOTOGRAPHS

Wikimedia Commons: Kunsthalle Mannheim by Immanuel Giel and Kunstmuseum Stuttgart by Choinowski, both under CC BY-SA 4.0.

8 FROM THE OPENING

The photographs and the video from the opening: internal archive, 20 and 21 June 2024.

WHAT WE DO NOT CLAIM

The concept and the design are not ours: the museums devised the episodes with an agency in the first phase of the programme, and the spatial installations in the galleries are studio zwo/elf's. The Long and Itten episodes were developed in a separate workspace and reached the platform finished, so we do not show them here as screens of our own. The capture of the meta navigation also shows tiles for episodes that are not ours: the hub was built to carry the whole programme of both houses, not just our delivery. We state no visitor numbers and no audience reaction: we have not measured any. And the programme is wider than us: 24 episodes were conceived, and our delivery is eleven of them plus the shared navigation.

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