Society is asking for more dialogue with culture.

zooom is an answer to the approachment between art and society today, to make them meet again and have a discussion by means of digital technologies and information. Thanks to them cultural centers and museums can offer to their visitors richer experiences and a more stimulating and creative pedagogy of art. So adults and mainly younger generations can understand and experience closer the work of an artist, an epoch or a collection, using technology that is familiar and indispensable in their lives. Today understand and admire art means interact with it, not only contemplate. This meeting point is like a neutral space where technology plays the role of intermediary.

What is zooom?

zooom zooom is an interactive customizable installation, with the help of which any pedagogical activity in a museum can be made.

We come to a museum. We come to visit an exhibition. We go watching paintings. We observe them, we are moved by one in particular, we interpret them and we are surprised by their techniques. Or, on the contrary, we are disillusioned, disappointed. Perhaps we are accompanied by our small children and they follow us bored waiting for the end of this torture. Perhaps parents are able to encourage them with imagination and patience.

The thing is that at the end of the route we find a wall with interactive magnetic pieces placed on an iron board and a video camera in front. When moving them towards the center, a detail of a previously seen painting immediately appears in a big projection. Somebody approaches another piece to the center and we listen immediately to a music that transfers us to the epoch of the painting. A child comes closer attracted by images and sounds, moves another piece towards the center and begins to turn it like a button to raise volume, thus increasing the size of the photo. He smiles satisfied. We are all absorbed by what is happening: the precious jewel, that is the protagonist of the photo, turns into two abstract brushstrokes.

We change piece “photo” for another one, thus appears a black and white video of the artist creating the painting that has touched us before. Another hand acts and with the piece “show through” mixes the video with the photo below, so that we start experimenting with infinite possibilities of multimedia. Afterwards another piece makes the last brushstroke by making a photo (screen shot) of the result of our interaction, and we can take it home in our pendrive. Music, photos, videos, texts, animations in 2D and 3D, make transparent, colour, saturate, speed up, etc, everything is possible in zooom in order to experiment art. We leave the exhibition and feel richer, we learned, we enjoyed all of us, the big and the younger ones.

zooom is an application created in order that visitors of a museum could not only contemplate the exhibited works, but also interact with them and connect with artist. Based on augmented reality technology, the application is designed in order that any educator or professional of an education department of a museum could easily customize any pedagogical activities.

What is zooom useful for?

+ For educator and group (young or adult) so that they could participate in an active, funny and stimulating way while working a pedagogical activity in a museum. With zooom we achieve better comprehension by experiencing with the proper palette and paintbrushes of an artist.

+ With zooom the education department of a museum can customize its own interactive pedagogical activity about an exhibition or the collection of a gallery. They can add images of a painting in order to discuss details or to show different periods of the painter, they can include videos to support an explanation, they can choose music that makes reference to a time or circumstance, can include texts that support a concept or can work with animations in 2D or 3D. For example if we want to work on the blue and pink periods of Picasso, with zooom we could play-experiment with shades of the painting and add music that seems more appropriate to us. With Mondrian we could be adding part by part the figures of basic colors and thus achieve different geometric compositions. With zooom we could discover that what looks real turns out to be only a brushstroke, by increasing or decreasing a detail of a Monet’s painting. Or by our own interaction we could get an impressionist, expressionist or abstract result.

+ zooom invites, after visiting an exhibition, to experiment individually or in group what we saw and learned. The result of the interaction with zooom can be taken in a pendrive as a screen shot in order to continue working on it in class or at home by editing or framing them.

+ zooom can be used with or without educator

How does zooom work?

zooom is based on the “augmented reality” technology. The user can include/customize, by means of a software, photos, videos, texts, music and animations that are necessary to create an activity. Each multimedia element, photo, music or others, is turned into an icon. Once you print the icon on a piece, it will be recognized by the camera when it is exposed in front of her. Once the video camera detects the icon, it sends a signal to the computer so that it calls to the related image and projects it. Same way with each piece.

There can be all necessary pieces created for “photo”, “video”, “music”, “text” or “animation”, but it is necessary to take into consideration the surface on which we will work with them all. As regards to Hardware, it is required a projector, a video camera and a computer with sufficient memory capacity in order that all multimedia elements could interrelate fluently.

We test zooom

“ZOOOM” PROTOTYPE IN “POU D’ART” GALLERY IN SANT CUGAT.

We are testing zooom in an art gallery in Sant Cugat (Barcelona). Angel Herraiz, member of Utani, is exhibiting his paintings in the gallery; these we will use to work with zooom. Pupils of primary and secondary education, who came to the gallery, will first study the symbols that are presented in the paintings. In this particular case, they will discover that all paintings are still life that will soon return to life when arriving at zooom. Here in zooom each spectator will become a creator with the elements gathered from all paintings of the artist, and will get his/hers own results of the interaction. They can also take away a screen shot of their own creation.

Here are some examples of the results which users of zooom created and taken away in their pendrives:

Vídeos of zooom:

Demo of how it works

workshop with children

Results of interaction with zooom

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