Skulpturenmuseum Glaskasten Marl | Kollektiv 42 | cityscaper | Folkwang Universität der Künste: “Augmented Art Advertising”
Skulpturenmuseum Glaskasten Marl | cityscaper | Folkwang Universität der Künste
Duration: July and August 2022
adARt – Augmented Art Advertising is an interdisciplinary media art project and a design experiment to communicate cultural content using contemporary technologies. The Skulpturenmuseum Glaskasten Marl, the Essen-based media art duo Kollektiv 42, the Aachen-based cityscaper GmbH and the Folkwang University of the Arts are planning an innovative augmented reality project to virtually extend the museum space to the exhibition architecture of advertising in public spaces. The interest here is not only in the critical examination of the structural omnipresence of product marketing. Equally decisive is the intensive, cross-sector discourse on the technical possibilities and medial difficulties of mixed reality systems.
With a freely available app, interested people all over NRW will be able to experience the advertising posters in their neighbourhood as exhibition spaces of an augmented reality, create collections of their favourite artworks and learn more about the artists. In August 2022, the Skulpturenmuseum Glaskasten Marl will then invite visitors to a special highlight: the virtualised collection and the temporary adARt exhibition with artworks specially developed for the AR space. Visitors can explore the exhibition on their own with the app or take part in curated guided tours in the city centre equipped with tablets.
With a symposium in the SANAA building at the Zollverein World Heritage Site, Kollektiv 42 and Folkwang University of the Arts will offer a platform for cross-sector discourse on mixed reality systems on November 11, 2022 in Essen. Project results will be presented publicly and reflected in various contexts through exhibition elements, guest lectures and a panel discussion.
Participating artists: Lotta Bauer, Thiemo Frömberg, Hamidreza Ghasemi, Huong Huynh, Elena Kruglova, Donja Nasseri, Jana Kerima Stolzer & Lex Rütten, Julia Unkel. The texts for the media art works were written by students at the Ruhr University Bochum within the seminar “Artistic Interventions in the Smart City” by Professor Dr. Annette Urban.
In the podcast, Olga Felker talks to Georg Elben, Anastasija Delidova and Fionnuala Maher-Riek about the concept
EVENTS FOR THE PROJECT
AUGMENTED ART ADVERTISING
EXPANDED WORLDS – URBAN MEDIA ART IN MARL
12th – 28th August 2022
Opening on Friday, August 12th at 6 pm
Museum director Georg Elben and the head of the cultural department of the city of Marl, Claudia Schwidrik-Grebe, will speak.
The Expanded Worlds, a free translation of the English technical term Augmented Reality, describe a reality that is expanded with the help of a technical device, a smartphone or a tablet. The Expanded Worlds are an interdisciplinary media art project and a creative experiment in conveying museum content through the use of contemporary technologies. In this project, the large advertising posters placed at central locations throughout cities are recognized by a specially developed app and replaced with new content on the display: All you have to do is hold a smartphone in the direction of the poster and a work of art appears on the screen instead of the advertisement.
The Expanded Worlds consists of two parts, with the first part being location-based and only available to experience in Marl starting August 12th. This urban media art exhibition follows a route in Marl-Hüls, which starts at the new location of the museum at the Martin Luther King School. Students from the Folkwang University of the Arts in Essen and other young artists from North Rhine-Westphalia have created ten new media art works for this project – videos, animations or acoustic-visual experiments – which are assigned to specific advertising posters and take part in a walk of about an hour. This format is similar to a classic outdoor exhibition, where the works of art are communicated using small technical devices that have become indispensable in our everyday lives: this art is virtual, it does not need picture frames or concrete bases.
In the second part, those interested from all over North Rhine-Westphalia can experience the advertising posters in their neighborhood as exhibition areas of an augmented reality. The Skulpturenmuseum Marl owns around 700 works on canvas as well as drawings and graphics on paper, which have not been on display for a long time because the museum concentrates on its main areas: sculpture, video and sound art. Now a selection of around 200 works of art are being made accessible in this technically advanced form. They include landscapes, still lifes and depictions of people, which were purchased by the city of Marl at the end of the 1960s to decorate prestigious locations in the then new town hall, long before the museum existed.
The Extended Worlds are a joint project by Anastasija Delidova and Philip Popien of the Essen media art duo Kollektiv 42, Robin Römer and the programmers from cityscaper GmbH from Aachen and the Skulpturenmuseum Marl.
During the exhibition period of the exhibition “Erweiterte Welten – urbane Medienkunst” in Marl from 12 August to 28 August 2022, the Sculpture Museum offers two additional special guided tours of the outdoor exhibition every week in addition to the usual neighbourhood tours (always Sundays 11h30, start at Creiler Platz, with registration // 15h30, start at the museum, without registration). Together with an art mediator, the tour explores the district of Marl-Hüls and discovers a total of 10 media artworks, some of which were created site-specifically for the exhibition in Marl.
For the tour, visitors can bring their own mobile device with a stable internet connection on which the app adARt is installed. This is available free of charge from the Google Play Store and the AppStore. Alternatively, a device can be borrowed for the tour of the museum. The tour is free of charge and will be offered every Wednesday at 5 pm for the next two weeks. The tour starts at the Sculpture Museum and ends there again. It lasts about 90 minutes and is free of charge.
Image.: © Stephan Wolters