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Personal and social recent history in Fragments of Him: defining and exploring ‘Immersion’ in video games.

The Hydra in the Hotshop.

Storytelling as a tool to design museum experiences: the case of the Secret Marquise.

This article describes how the 4 period rooms of the city museum in the Dutch town of Bergen op Zoom were redesigned using storytelling and how this design has been received by visitors. For this redesign, rooms were reframed as sets of the story of Marie Anne van Arenberg, Marquise of Bergen op Zoom, and the objects as props to stage her story, which was full of secrets and of unexpected turning points. The visitor is enticed to discover cues to unlock these secrets in order to get a grip on her story while exploring the museum space. This is however not a treasure hunt, nor simply a game, but an exploration in which visitors are invited to discover and to create meaning and a journey into what matters to them. To this end, they have indeed to resort to their own frame of reference and to their personal life story in order to come to a narrative closure at the end of their visit. We used Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis to understand the visitors’ lived experience, both emotionally and sensorially at different moments and situations during the story-driven experience and to understand how the chosen design helps tell the story and how visitors use their personal context and frame of reference to make sense of it.

Is contemporary art history?

Transcript of a lecture during the conference 'Is contemporary art history', Institute of Fine Arts, New York, 28th february 2014.

Soundverse: een onderzoek naar de rol van VR in gelaagde betekenisconstructie bij de Oudekerkstoren

Nu nieuwe technologieën als virtual en mixed reality steeds toegankelijker worden voor erfgoedinstellingen, rijst de vraag hoe ervaringen met deze technologieën zo ontworpen kunnen worden dat bezoekers de vaak onzichtbare verhalen en context en van stedelijk (im)materieel erfgoed kunnen ervaren. De Hogeschool van Amsterdam, Reinwardt Academie en de Oude Kerk hebben daarom een kleinschalig onderzoek opgezet naar het prototype Soundverse. Soundverse is een virtuele en multi sensorische interpretatie van de Oude kerkstor en die gemaakt is door studenten van de Hogeschool van Amsterdam in samenwerking met de Oude Kerk. In het onderzoek stond de vraag centraal in hoeverre Soundverse (potentiële) bezoekers de mogelijkheid biedt om een verbinding aan te gaan met de stedelijke erfgoedlocatie de Oude Kerk. Daarbij is gebruik gemaakt van de emotienetwerken-methodiek die is ontwikkeld door de Reinwardt Academie en Imagine IC. Uit de gesprekken blijkt dat het levendige en speelse karakter van Soundverse wordt gewaardeerd, maar ook dat een gevoel van vervreemding optreedt doordat de relatie met de Oude Kerk onduidelijk blijft. Verder komt naar voren dat de toegepaste adaptatie op het emotienetwerken-model kansen biedtvoor studenten bij het uitvoeren van hun onderzoek.

Flattening hierarchies of display

Recent collection display practices signal what has been described as a “comeback” for the integration of broad-ranging object categories in which the boundaries between these previously separated objects resolve.Mixing objects from different object categories can take many forms, and occurs not only at the level of the objects themselves, but also at institutional levels. For categories such as painting, drawing, and applied arts, or the subcategories within, such as Renaissance drawings, porcelain, or twentieth-century art, are akin to the divisions in curatorial departments, galleries, or exhibition spaces and the people that work within them. Also, museums that were initially not “disciplined” have been re-staged to reflect the originally mixed display, such as the Bode Museum, Berlin. Moreover, even in homogenous collections, a mixing of value and status becomes possible when chronology, subject matter, style, or school are not the guiding principle. Such display strategies of mixing therefore typically create new connections and enable collections of varying values, periods, and object categories to merge and their individual artifacts to meet in new and meaningful ways