Title: The museum in 25 years

Client: Austrian Museums Association

Medium: Magazine

 

 

Starting point for the illustrations were archetypal museum objects: Leonardo da Vinci`s painting of the Mona Lisa as the artwork; the "Venus of Willendorf" as the historic artefact; herbarium sheets, butterfly and the skull of a Triceratops stand for the extensive collections of natural history museums; the lightbulb represents technical collections and the ancient coin showing the image of Hadrian refers historic museums.

To generate the visualizations, scripts were written in Processing. The purpose of the scripts was generate the illustrations by treating the images of the museum objects algorithmically based on narrowly defined rules. This task combines different steps: first significant pixels of the visual structure were analyzed through algorithms that compared values of colors and contrast for each pixel.

 

The resulting significant points of each object are material for the next step. Here the object is reconstructed visually by aplying formalized systems of rules. By constantly altering these rules by applying stochastic variation to their parameters, each run of the script generates a new and different visual instance of the object. For each topic an individual algorithm was developed and different material was used. For the text of Mark Taylor a special variation was conceived: the image of the coin is generated by using the words of the text as visual elements.

 

These generated images of the museal exhibits are abstract and necessarily fuzzy. They resemble the title of the issue of the magzine and the uncertain image of the museum in 25 years. In this way, they add an artistic comment to the scientific essays that look into a future that is vaguely perceptible at best.

 

For the prints Pantone Silver was used.