raum.art
An Electronic Museum

2003

A. Benjamin Spaeth (DE)
Erwin Herzberger
Uwe Wössner

“raum.art” immerses the visitor into a totally new type of museum. The virtualization of architecture gives rise to new possibilities of configuring visitors’ encounter with and experience of art.

Since external factors like gravitation, rain and wind are absent, this exhibition platform can concentrate solely on content. Visitors to this virtual museum are confronted by objects that can be experienced. However, they are not arranged according to a prescribed sequence; instead, they follow an “emotional spatial order.” Through the process of immersion into an object, the user arrives at a particular “object space.”

Those visiting “raum.art” in the Ars Electronica Center’s CAVE can explore three such spaces. In “Fractio,” the visitor is to be made aware of the proximity to the electronic object. The object undergoes continual change solely as a result of the visitor’s presence and movements, and never returns to the original state it had occupied prior to the user’s visit.

The point of departure in “Bildraum” is the painting “exploding neutrinos 2001” by Ghyoh Frank. The visitor is immersed into a colorful, dynamic world that invites discovery, and he/she can simply drift about the space and seek its center.

The basis of the “Typo” object space is the dadaist poem “Ursonate” by Kurt Schwitters. This text is intended to repeatedly give rise to new variations by different interpreters; thus, it has no final form and undergoes continual change. During the visitor’s walk about the spatial structure, the individual syllables are compiled into a poem as the outcome of interaction with other visitors.

“raum.art“ is an interactive virtual environment that was developed at the University of Stuttgart’s High-Performance Computing Center in collaboration with Erwin Herzberger and Uwe Wössner.