Olle, thank you very much for the introduction, although I didn't get any word.
I hope you didn't rise the expectation too high.
I want to speak this morning about the renaissance of space and about new media and how they
both are interrelated.
How is the space interrelated with new media?
And I think you all have observed, over the last five to eight years, a renaissance of
the space, a renaissance of communication in space.
We have an increasing number of new museums which had been opened up in the last five
to eight years.
We had seen yesterday two very good examples from London and from Halle.
We have increasing numbers of visitors.
There are a lot of new blockbuster exhibitions out there.
And it's not only in the cultural world, but also in the corporate world, the big corporations,
they are shifting their money from the traditional media, like the print or the TV or broadcast.
And I also consider the digital media, the internet, as a already traditional medium,
from these traditional mediums into the communication in space.
So there is this shift from the traditional communication, as we know it, into the communication
in space.
And even design organizations like, for instance, the Art Directors Club in Germany, they are
opening up, suddenly they are opening up some kind of departments for communication
in space.
And they are giving awards out for good communication in space.
So we have this shift seen over the last five to eight years.
And the reason why we see this is quite simple to explain.
So after the internet in 1993 had been invented, people were sitting in front of the computer,
very isolated at home, between the mid-90s to the mid of this decade, had been very isolated
looking for information, looking for entertainment.
And now it seems that they have the desire to go out into space, seeing well-curated
physical information, together with other people.
So we have this kind of desire at the moment that people want to go into communication
in space, together with other people.
But there is a big difference compared to the pre-digital time in the perception of
people in museums, because they are now computer-literated, they are aware about the qualities of this
new medium, and they are looking for that also in exhibitions.
It is not that they are looking for computers or for projections or for technology, they
are looking for interactive experience, networked experience, they are looking for collaborative
experience, all the qualities which came with this new digital medium.
And this is what I want to talk about today and the next hour, about the influence of
this new medium into the spatial communication.
Well, I personally, I am working in three different fields of spatial communication.
So on one hand, it is the stage design, it is a very interesting area to make communication
in space with new media, then I am also working in public space, which is also a very interesting
space for communication, because people are not prepared as they are prepared if they
are going in exhibition, they are aware what they want to see, but if you are making exhibits
in public space, they are suddenly standing in front of something, so that is very interesting.
And let's say more of 80% of my work is in exhibitions.
So probably I also switch into the non-exhibition field, it depends on the time, but I want
to focus on exhibitions and communication with new media in exhibitions.
After doing this, I want to shortly go back into history of this so-called new medium,
digital medium and how it had been left the screen and came into space.
So when does all this new media thing start?
It was more or less the invention of the personal computer, that's my very first one
in 1984, but we remember that it was really a revolution, suddenly we had as designers
we had computers on our desktop, but it was not very usual, beforehand we had always to
go to these huge computing centers and ask for computing time, and now suddenly we had
this machine on our desktop and at the very beginning we mainly used it as a tool for
sure, so used it as a tool to make this a publishing, to make imaging, to model things
and mid of the 1980s it became more and more clear that this is not only a tool but a medium
with which you can communicate information and distribute information.
So this paradigm shift was a very important one and I think latest with the outcome of
the visual web in 1993 it became clear that it's not only a medium but it's a mass medium.
So this was the reason for me, together with other designers and hackers and computer nerds
to establish and to found ARCOSCOM, which is a new media design group, a very interdisciplinary
media design group, looking to design an experience in space with new media, I've just seen that
half of the monitor is clipped up, so we have to improvise a little bit, okay this is the
rest and it's important, with a new medium and a new design group it's like with life.
So our life is divided in phases of seven years and also this new medium is divided
into seven years of the last 21 years, so our cells they are renewing themselves after
seven years and very often relationships where you know that breaks up after seven years.
So we have the seven years thing and also in this medium in our group we observed the
seven years, so the first seven years were about prediction, it was about understanding
technology, understanding this new technology.
So we made a lot of experiments with interfaces and we misused technology, we used heavily
expensive computers to predict the future, it was mainly design commissions and also
self-commissioned work.
The next seven years it was the phase of proving this medium, it was about showing technology,
so we got the first commission from museums from outside and there was a lot of showing
technology, so here is the stage design, this is the whiskey museum and so it was really
showing projection, showing the technology and now the last seven years this medium became
mature and it prevailed and I think it's now in the canon of all medias, it's a medium
like the traditional ones, like the print ones and it's now about hiding technology,
you don't want to show technology anymore, so for instance hiding technology into everyday
user interfaces like a microscope or using sensitive surfaces on a sculpture, so it's
not the medium which is in the foreground but the object in the sensitive sculpture
or using it as material, so this is an exhibition about labour and we had a statistic going
on the wall and it's out of metal and suddenly it becomes virtual, it's a projection, it's
interactive.
So I want to start with a project which is going into exactly these directions, how to
hide technology and it's a commission which we got some years ago to redesign the Natural
History Museum in Berlin and it was a very difficult commission because it's in a very
beautiful building and it has extremely beautiful objects and artefacts, so in this kind of
space, although you only see two-thirds of it, there are these extremely beautiful dinosaurs
and you don't want to have any kind of medium in this space, you don't want to have a monitor
there, nevertheless people, they are expecting that, especially the younger people who are
coming into this museum and we achieved at least to have hidden media, at least 25 of
these media stations into this space and one was only this kind of telescope, so hiding
technology into an everyday interface into a telescope, so it's not a kind of a newly
object, everyone knows that, so what you can do with it, you can look around and pan onto
all the bones, so you look through it and if the, if your interface is looking directly
into a dinosaur, it becomes life, so you have a direct correlation between the artefact
or the object in this case and the explanation and you always have this kind of dialogue
between people and the dinosaur, and we made this kind of 20 seconds animation showing
why they are looking at, as they look like, so then they are going back into their position
to be, I mean, the, this all, back into the museum, so we did it for every of these dinosaurs
and we have one raptor in it, there we tuned the story a little bit tougher.
So again, you know, the dialogue, you want to steal his spoon, but he's stronger, so,
and we were really using also this kind of shaking loudspeakers in the floor, so it's
a real intense experience and you see the girl at the right, just, I think you really
can, you really can make tough things for Giles, they are quite okay, they see in television
much more brutal things, okay, but again, this is the usual kind of reaction you get.
Okay, that's a lot of, to say about the museum, please come to the museum, I think it's worth
going there, there's a lot of solution made with media, but in a very invisible way.
And what you have seen here is a very integrative usage of new media, so usually we are sitting
together in this case, we got the commission for the whole renovation and we brought a
xenographer or exhibition architect into the project and we were working very closely together,
so it's a very integrative approach, this is what we are doing in 90% of our projects,
but we are also doing projects where we, by purpose, separate this, so there is the curator,
there is the exhibition architect and here is the media designer, this is what we did
for an exhibition in the Belvedere, it was an exhibition for the 50th anniversary of
the Treaty of Independence of Austria and there was an exhibition in this upper level
of the Belvedere, every space was dedicated for one decade of the last century of Austrian
history and we have some topic spaces here at the end and we decided to split it up,
to split it up into three different trails, so the outer wall had been given to an exhibition
architect, he showcased there on the wall the objects, the documents and artifacts, different
kind of artifacts, the inner wall had been given to an art curator and he curated appropriate
art to every decade and we got the space in between, literally, between art and design
and we decided to make a 260 meter long Austrian flag as a narrator for the Austrian history
and it's full of media, so it's a trail and it's a history which is more or less explained
by the flag of the country, so it starts with the very first space, the first decade of
the last century, so you can listen into the flag, literally, and fire the emperor.
The second one was the First World War, which had been a very brutal war, every war is brutal,
this one because of a paradigm shift in war making, it had been an extremely brutal one,
so we decided to weave small pictures into the flag and allow the people to explore
it very individually with a magnifying glass.
Third space was the pre-war time, and as you probably know, Germany didn't occupy Austria,
so Austria came to Germany and so they lost their flag, so we made, changed this red white
red flag into a brown flag and on this transition we projected marching Wehrmacht soldiers,
you have seen this picture yesterday, also in the Churching Museum, and you have to walk
with them through a staircase and carry them out out to the ground, so it's really, it's
really, it's really, it's really an inspiration from being an independent country to be together
with Germany.
Then it's the post-war time, the occupation time, so I don't show everything, so it's
the first time you can touch the flag.
Then again an audio installation where we brought the sound very low so that people
have to go very close to it, and so it seems as if they're bowing in front of the flag,
so we also try very often to dramatize the audience, to integrate into the story.
This is the space where the Tree of Independence is shown, there's nothing, it goes on and
on and on.
There's a quite interesting space, it's about clichés, so Austria is very full of clichés,
so we decided to make a space dedicated to the clichés, and using the flag in a very
unusual way.
So we made a soup bowl, and we made, we used the flag as noodles, and so we can now steer
into the noodle soup, and then from time to time you can find clichés, which are explained.
So for instance the Zetral Friedhof is a very important cliché, that Beethoven is German
and Hitler is Austrian, and Austria is not the other way around.
Okay, the flag goes on and on and on and on, and it goes also to next spaces, and now they
are dedicated to different topics, so for instance economic history, very obvious transformation,
our social history.
So here we found a very beautiful archive of private movies, and the visit had been able
now to find these movies by filming into the flag.
So the X axis was about topics like weddings, like holidays, and the Y axis was about time,
so we could go down into the 20s, and see weddings from the 20s, privately shot, and
so on and so on.
So this was the most difficult space to find a solution, this was about Austria and Europe,
the relation between Austria and Europe, and between the individual person and Europe,
so we made a table in this form of Europe, there we left out Austria, and we used again
another everyday interface which everyone knows, you hardly can see it.
It's a microscope, and with this microscope and this kind of little knob which you use
for sharpened image, you can fly from above Austria, so we also showed it in a projection,
you can fly from outside of Europe, down to Austria, everything in the microscope, down
to Vienna, to the Belvedere, and then you go through the roof of the Belvedere into
the space where we had a zoom camera on the top, and you can now zoom down on yourself,
so you see yourself in the context of Europe, and probably you understand the story if not
you will see if you have bald hairs or not.
So here we used the flag as a narrator to tell a story with media, but it's not a media
installation, it's a very integrative, the media is very integrative into the flag.
As I go out in public space and show two projects in public space, one is very related to the
dinosaur thing, actually it's the predecessor of the dinosaur telescope, and we did it
in the mid of the 90s because you know in Berlin the wall had been gone, and if you're
visiting now Berlin you don't see anything of the wall anymore, there's no real signature
there, and so we designed this object which afterwards had been used for the Jurassic
times, but this is now for the GDR times, and it's in different spaces in Berlin here
but on our Strasse, so you can look through it and with a little knob you can then go
back into time and see how the wall changed over time, and have again a direct relation
between the place where you're standing and the past, and you're standing more or less
exactly at the point where the photographer had been taking these pictures 20, 30 years
ago.
So this is from our office, we also found beautiful pictures, 59, 35, or here in Hamburg
goes back into the 19th century, okay, the second project in public space where we used
media to create identity for an area is a project we did in Tokyo, there we got a commission
for a public art piece, and if you're getting commissioned for public art pieces we usually
try to think about the space where we're showing it, it's not about making a sculpture
and throw it there, but it's more about thinking about the space and what is necessary for
the space to create identity for the space.
So this is in the center of Tokyo, it's a new construction site or had been a construction
site, and we were able to choose the location in this site and we decided to go to a public
site while coming from the subway going to the office buildings which is a chase into
artificial pond.
And our idea was to make a more poetic piece there which is dealing with light waves and
water waves with materiality, immateriality, and so we designed a 6 by 6 meter LED floor
and you can walk over it and then you create virtual ripples which became then real ripples
if they are going onto the water.
So this kind of situation where you change the space through your presence in a more
poetic way.
I don't want to tell too much about the problems it causes to build it, but for everyone who
is interested in we use white LEDs, a matrix of white LEDs, we use opaque glass with weight
cells which are measuring very exactly where you're walking on, and with this we are creating
then virtual ripples which are then going into real ripples by actuators which are sitting
in the water.
So and this is a very typical way we are dealing with media because actually you don't see
that it's a monitor or that it's an LED screen because we are using this opaque glass so
it becomes a kind of ephemeric light which no one actually associates with media.
And this is always what we try to achieve, so it's a test setup and we are very good
in doing virtual waves, this is a very old project we did for a distillery, but I tell
you it's difficult to make real waves, I don't want to bother you with that.
This is a test setup and test setup with this, you can see it's very precise, probably not
in this projection but it is.
So this is how it looks now.
So the goal here is, and I think that's very important, is what we also try to do in museums
is that we allow people that the space reacts on to them, because as soon as you change
something unintentionally through your presence you get a totally different kind of relation
to the space and probably for everyone who is more in the media field reactivity is something
which is very important, very underestimated, reactivity is the little system of interactivity
so because it's an unintentional activity and very often it's the starting point for
them if you understand the situation for intentional interactivity.
So from public space now, I don't have much time in here, to a project which we just did
two years ago in Munich, it's the BMW Museum, we redesigned it together with the colleagues
in Stuttgart, they are xenographers and in a very integrative process we redesigned the
museum which had been a very difficult task, I can explain later why it was so difficult.
But it's very good to show the three different languages which we are using to translate
information into space, so we are translators, so we are not authors, because you are the
authors, we are translating the story into the space and I was a little bit unsatisfied
yesterday when none of the presenters yesterday mentioned their designers, be nice to them,
they very often do a great job for you, they have a hard time with you, very often.
And if they succeed you can mention them, so we have three different ways how we translate
information or three different languages which we are using to translate information into
spatial experience, this is the metaphoric one which is the most difficult one, the fact
driven one which is the easiest one and the atmospheric one which is okay.
So I start with the fact driven one, as mentioned it's the corporate museum for BMW and for
sure at one place you want to have a synchro-noptic explanation of the history of the company and
you decided to make one space which is dedicated to this kind of timeline thing, yes.
And we made this space with a huge interactive table, this is something with which we are
working since nearly ten years, I go a little bit later on into other projects of them.
So we have this table which starts in 1919 and goes up to now and it shows every single
car ever built by BMW, every single motor, every single airplane they built in the last
hundred or eighty years and you can then experience it in a, let's say not very deep way, deep
level of information but in a, there's a lot of things to explore to find, so it's
only, there you can't see it here, but it's only four levels of depth of information.
So then in our first table in 2001 it was more or less very surprising that this kind
of tables are so successful, but the explanation again is very easy because the table by itself
have the connotation of communication because we're sitting around a table and we're used
to talk to each other, so if people find something here they try to talk with the other ones
and that's what you want to create a dialogue between the people in the museum and so you
can use this kind of already connotated objects like for instance the table.
And you can't break it, that's a big advantage because it's only a wooden table where you
can project on and underneath you have a kind of hidden sensor technology.
Okay, so in this case of the museum we also did a atmospheric space which had been very
often atmospheric objects or dramatizations, they sound not very functional, but they are
extremely functional, so in this case the museum or BMW had a big problem because they
had this old museum here, it's only this ball here and they decided not to go out into
the green fields like for instance Mercedes or Porsche, they built a totally new museum
outside, large ones, but this is a very small one, so they only gave us the former parking
garage because they want to stay in their headquarters, the former parking garage and
it's only 20% of the size of the Mercedes museum, so we had to find a way to extend
the space mentally, not physically, but mentally.
So the whole museum is constructed out of buildings in the building, so it's a little
city and every building is discussing one topic like design, like motors, so it's a
little city with walls, with houses, with pathways and there's also a marketplace, a
central space and we decided to cover the facade of the central space totally with
the dynamic surface because this allows us on one hand through dynamic graphics to extend
the space and also to solve a big problem in car museums because cars are not meant
to be parked, they are meant to drive, but in a museum they are standing, so if you have
a moving environment around, you have this kind of relative movement which in a way seems
to let the cars move a little bit through the reflections.
So again, we used this hidden technology because it was clear from the outside, we don't want
to have a huge projection, we don't want to have an LED screen there.
So we did everything you can do not to make it like a big screen and again we used this
only monochrome white LEDs and covered it with this opaque glass used by purpose, this
kind of facade element, so that people if they are coming in first see that it's a facade
and not a big screen.
So these are the first renderings which we did four years before the opening and fortunately
we could convince BMW to go for this abstract kind of content and not to show any kind of
advertisement in the museum because it's made, this kind of content is made to enlarge the
space.
So these are the last renderings before we really produced it, so it didn't change very
much and again we also introduced the reactivity here, so if the museum is not packed, the
walls switching automatically into a reactive mode and people are changing the space through
their presence.
So long set up time, so you're opening and you see it's only abstract pictures, so close
ups, very close close ups from cars but you can't see the cars, you only feel them.
Or typography or abstract objects, okay because time is short, I'll go quickly through it.
I'm probably very interested in these animations, they are only three to five minutes, so every
time you're coming out of a building there's a totally different space waiting for you,
so again this extenseless space, so the contrast is a little bit high now, in the museum it's
not so obvious, so it's not so high contrast in the museum and the observation afterwards
we did show that people are really using it as an atmospheric moment in the museum, it's
not something where they're standing in front and looking for five or six animations, so
they see it as a kind of moving wallpaper which extends the space.
So coming to the last one, metaphoric translation, this had been a quite challenging discussion
with the curators because in the very first space of the museum they are telling the story
how a car is designed and usually you show them talking heads and monitors or designers
talking about how they did the car and what's the advantage and whatever, and we said no
we can't do it because it's the first space of the museum, so you have to give the people
a kind of high level moment where they see okay that's not an ordinary museum, we try
to explain you our story in a totally different way and so we more or less said to them let's
make a kind of floating surface in space with which we can explain the process of the design
of a car and we did a lot of research how we can make a floating plane in space so with
webs and even with fabric but at the end we decided to go for spheres and then we showed
them the animation and said okay this is the way we want to tell the story of a car design
and they said you are crazy you can't tell the story of our car design with iron bolts
that's impossible, so what we then did was a test it up and this is something which is
always very helpful although it costs a little bit but then we could, this was the risk we
are taking this risk very often but then we were able to show the quality of this kind
of physical object in space which tells you a story so we also could show that it's not
noisy that it's very precise and we also learned a lot about how we can afterwards tell and
create a story with that so the next then they agreed oh yes we do it and then we designed
the storyline about the car how to design a car at very beginning it's chaos it's nothing
in the mind of the designers then the first abstract forms appears and already you see
a little bit which kind of car it will come out and then you have competing forms because
that's the design process especially at BMW they are building three or four cars and finish
them till the end and three are thrown away and one is built afterwards and at the end
you have the car so in that's now the opening it's we made a nine minutes storyline and
explained the design of five different cars out of five different decades and this is
only a two minutes compilation out of it.
All right.
So, I skipped the making off, but I want to show you one thing which shows the difference
between working with pixels, picture elements on a screen, and with voxels, volume elements
in space. If you do one, if you have one bug, it's really, really, really dangerous.
So we had one bug during the test setup times, so usually the computer says to one of the
boards go 50 centimeters down, and we had a flip of the plus and minus, and so it says
let's go 50 centimeter into the ceiling, and this was the outcome. Three weeks before
you open it. So there's no undo function here.
But luckily we could then succeed and make it. And I don't know, I think it just starts
in Denmark this week. It's my first time in my career that a museum's piece is influencing
the communication of a big brand. So the new BMW 5 series is now introduced with this
thing, and you see it in the internet, but also in advertisements all around the world
now. So in cinemas, and also I think it starts off with this thing in Denmark.
I have a lot more, but I think you have now had two and a half quite exciting days, and
I want to sum up my little talk with something which is so obvious that usually you shouldn't
say it. We say it's a no-brainer, but it's really about quality, not about technology.
It's not about which kind of projector, which kind of computer, which kind of touch screen
or which kind of sensitive surface you're using. It's about how to design with new media,
and it's how to design in a reasonable way, money-wise, but also in terms of how experiential
it is. And I think as soon as you believe into this sentence, you only do good stuff
in your museum. Thank you very much.
