[ISEA2011] Workshop: Hein Wils & Margriet Schavemaker – Augmented Istanbul: Create the Bosphorus AR tour

Workshop Statement

We all know classic audioguides. We have seen them in museums, on citywalks; the offer us no surprises. Only few of us have seen augemented reality tours. Imagine walking through a city or a gallery with your smartphone working as a mobile guide. A guide that not only adds audio to the experience but let you browse through images, in 2D and 3D, that gives extra layers of information and connects the real world with the virtual world. The newest AR technology on your smartphone (for example: Layar) makes it possible to take your museum collection out of the digital database and reposition it on all possible locations in the urban realm. The dialogue between the virtual artifact and the real place poses new demands on our storytelling: what kind of experiences do the small screens of the deployed mobile phones offer us? What is the surplus value of this combination of the real and the virtual? What new ‘layered’ stories can we share by means of this new technique? In this workshop we will kick off with a short introduction and presentation of several best practices. After that the participants will work on the stories of the virtual objects that they have brought with them from their own collection. We will ask the participants to connect their object to the city of Istanbul, to a physical geo-located point, thus creating the Bosphorus tour. The workshop ends with the entering of these stories and objects into ARtours (the Layar based CMS of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam and Fabrique). The results will be immediately visible outside, not only to the participants but to all visitors to the conference and all inhabitants of Istanbul. So for everybody with a smartphone with GPS and downloaded Layar app: please join us afterwards on the streets of Istanbul and share our augmented stories!  The Stedelijk Museum is proud to present Pera pARkours, a work in progress that uses Augmented Reality (Layar) to re/dis/locate fragments from the archive of Coffee Deposits:::Topologies of Chance, an interactive cross-media project by Tina Bastajian (US/NL) and Seda Manavoglu (NL/TR). Tina Bastajian will introduce Pera pARkours during the workshop Augmented Istanbul. coffeedeposits.nl

coffee-deposits.blogspot.com
Pera (also known as Galata) was a district in Constantinople (established circa 13th century as a Genoese trading colony) north of the Golden Horn, which now encompasses parts of Beyoglu, Karaköy, Tophane, Tarlabasi, Cihangir etc. Pera originates from Greek, meaning “beyond or across” and the district was particularly known for its presence of Greek, Armenian, Italian, and Jewish residents and businesses.
Coffee Deposits:::Topologies of Chance was funded by the European Cultural Foundation

  • Hein Wils is an old school new media professional operating in the field of immersive and innovative media. He is currently the project leader of ARtours, in which the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, NL, explores the possibilities of augmented reality on mobile devices with AR browsers like the LAYAR browser. Hein used to work as a project leader for LostBoys Interactive creating the very first ‘Big Brother’ web/tv experience in 1999 and the milia d’or award winner Anne Frank House CD-Rom. With his own company he organized cutting edge new media interventions at cultural festivals in the Netherlands. For Waag Society medialab he set up and researched projects involving broadband streaming media and locative mobile learning enviroments. In the ARtours project Hein is the team captain and takes care of all daily practicalities that comes with running an innovative project.
  • Margriet Schavemaker is art historian, philosopher and media specialist. After a career as assistant professor at the art history and media studies departments at the University of Amsterdam, NL, she currently holds the position of head of collections and research at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. Schavemaker has written extensively on contemporary art and theory, (co)edited several edited volumes (for example Now is the Time: Art and Theory in the 21st Century (2009), Vincent Everywhere: Van Gogh’s (Inter) National Identities (2010) and Monumentalism:  History and National Identity in Contemporary Art (2010)) and is an acclaimed curator of discursive events and public programs. The past years new media have been high on Schavemakers agenda resulting in a.o. the ARtours project; the creation of an augmented reality platform for smartphones which can be used by museums to present their collection in innovative and interactive ways both inside and outside the museum.