Brief overview of visualisation and other dramatisation of historical information research and projects
by Tjebbe van Tijen/Imaginary Museum Projects
The AVIE is a circular projection system with a diameter of 8 meter that is used for digital art projects, instruction and education.
There are several of these systems in the world at the ZKM in Karlsruhe, the iCinema Centre of the UNSW in Sydney, and the School of New media/City University Hong Kong. During my stay as a senior fellow at the School of New Media Hong Kong in 2011 I was able to also do some research on the educational use of this 'immersive audio-visual environment'. In the past decades I have made many visual scrolls using different media, from hand-scrolls to virtual scrolls. Scrolls for visual lectures, on the internet, also for happenings and events. Museum installations as well, with 'tactile interfaces' like a big drum with sensative spots, that functioned also as projection surface. This was for a collaborative project on new forms of shamanism with Fred Gales and Rolf Pixley, made for the Royal Tropical Museum in Amsterdam and the InterCultural Center in Tokyo.
Latest usage of the scroll-principle has been architectural, a combinations of the tactile and virtual, an educational mural project of 30 meter long in the entrance hall of the new premisies of the School of New Media in Hong Kong.This is a scroll printed on 'high pressure laminate' along the entrance corridor/hall. This fixed mural display will be extended by an interface for portable devices (mobile phones and tablets). The 30 meter long visual narrativeon the wall also functions as a visual bibliography, that can trigger over 150 references to library books and on-line information sources. The juxtaposed imagery of the wall with it's multiple associations thus functions as an associative curriculum, whereby each image part, or cluster, leads to a range of information items and direct internet links how to to acquire them. A set of 'dot matrix-codes' (QR-codes) on the wall introduces the mobile users to a free 'app.' that works as an interface bwteen the physical mural and on-line information sources.
Visual narrative in the form of scrolls both 'low tech' and 'high tech', from screens and projection to murals (click picture below for exmaple of a mural for the School of Creative Media of the City University of Hong Kong (2011).