Thursday, December 6th, 2018, 6.30 p.m.
Mindspace, ul. Koszykowa 61, door A

StoryCode Warsaw #16 | Digital Stories

How to use the web and immersive technologies as non-fiction storytelling tools? The meeting will focus on case studies of works that shift boundaries of narrative and visual arts through the use of interaction, immersion or community-based creation of content. From AR and VR to web-based technologies, explore ways to represent the contemporary world with digital tools.

After the presentations join networking drinks brought to you by IDEAL Films.

PLACE (VR experience)

Is it possible to revive a place through virtual reconstruction? A place where people lived and learned and prayed? Can pictures, sounds, and memories create a sense of a visit to ancient Aleppo, to the ancient synagogue? After all, the true purpose of a building doesn’t only lie in brick and mortar, it’s also layers and layers of meaning and memory.

For centuries, Aleppo has been a vibrant merchant city, a buzzing intersection of cultures in the heart of the Middle East. Syria is and was a predominantly Islamic country, but one where Christians, Druze and Jews could live in peace, too. The Jews in Aleppo were an ancient, very tight-knit and proud community. Their Great Synagogue housed the Aleppo Codex, the world’s oldest and most important Bible manuscript, for 600 years. The synagogue was initially built twelve hundred years ago, looted and burned in the riots of 1947, and completely destroyed during the Syrian war in 2015-16. Today, the Great Synagogue is an overgrown ruin and the Aleppo Jews have built their homes elsewhere in the world.

The project takes us back to the synagogue as it was in 1947, in VR. A grainy black and white photograph, a different world, inhabited by different people. Place as a living project that can keep growing as its community of visitors grows and new stories are gathered.

PLACE will be presented by Mike Robbins, a producer at his company High Road Productions in Berlin, focusing on creating work in VR and other immersive platforms. As creative technologist and partner at his company Helios Design Labs in Toronto he worked on award-winning interactive documentaries such as Quipu Project, Digital Me, After The Storm, Highrise, and Offshore.

Moniker

Moniker is an Amsterdam-based interaction and media design studio run by Luna Maurer & Roel Wouters. The studio explores various aspects of technology, its uses and impact on our daily lives. Often, the audience is asked to contribute to the development of the studio‘s projects. These include Click Click Click  – a browser event based game, Radio Garden – a research project exploring live radio worldwide and Paperstorm.it and online leaflet propaganda tool.

Chosen projects created by the studio will be presented by Thomas Boland. Thomas is a creative developer who explores the connection between the digital and physical world. After completing the Interaction Design course at the ArtEZ University of Arts, he worked as a designer and developer at the experimental digital design studio LUSTlab.

8 Friday, December 7th, 2018, 7 p.m.
Warsztat Warszawski, Plac Konstytucji 4

Warsaw #17 | Bots for museums

Museums and cultural institutions are among potential commissioners for artistic storytelling projects online. How do these institutions implement immersive storytelling as a tool of communication and art mediation? Is it possible to talk about art with artists who had died? How can chatbots contribute to culture? And what can be the outcome of a hackathon?

During this StoryCode meeting we will discuss algorithms in art as well as the artistic and communication potential of bots. Two projects intended for cultural institutions will be presented in the course of the meeting; namely the Czech Filla Fulla Chat and an application commissioned by the National Museum in Warsaw.

FILLA FULLA CHAT

FILLA FULLA CHAT is a web application, created by Lab.SNG for the Slovak National Gallery exhibition Filla | Fulla: The Artists’ Fate.
Emil Filla (1882 – 1953) and Ľudovít Fulla (1902 – 1980) are iconic figures of Czech and Slovak modern art. Each of them explored new and radical ways to depict the world and to think about visual arts. Filla Fulla Chat presents the life stories and work of both artists through an interactive conversation. By choosing themes, questions and responses, users can guide the conversation and observe exchanges between Filla and Fulla. The script of the conversation is based on the artists’ memoirs, journals and personal correspondence, artworks, as well as archival photographs.

The exhibition Filla | Fulla: The Artists’ Fate was a part of a collaborative project with Moravian Gallery in Brno, titled Made in Czechoslovakia. The project commemorates the 100th anniversary of founding the First Czechoslovak Republic.

The app will be presented by Philo van Kemenade – a designer, technologist and educator from Amsterdam. He splits his time between the R&D lab of the Slovak National Gallery and the design studio Unfold Collective where he helps cultural organizations and brands tell stories in experiential ways.

HackArt — NMW

HackArt is a hackathon that was held in the National Museum in Warsaw in May 2018. Almost 40 participants in eight teams were working on developing solutions based on Artificial Intelligence, with the aim to make the museum’s resources accessible to the audience. As some of the ideas will be implemented by the Museum, Ewa Drygalska Ewa Drygalska will talk about her experience gained from organizing this event. Ewa will share the pains and gains on working on such projects and implementing them in cultural institutions.

Ewa Drygalska completed an interdisciplinary Ph.D. Program Society-Environment-Technology at Jagiellonian University in Kraków. A faculty member at the Polish-Japanese Academy of Information Technology, she also works for museums and cultural institutions, helping to implement new technologies and innovations in cultural and artistic realms.
https://medium.com/new-technologies-in-museum