Weltkulturen Museum, Frankfurt a. M, Germany
09 Aug 2013
WELTKULTUREN OPEN LAB seeks artists, writers, anthropologists, filmmakers and creative producers from all backgrounds in order to share their work online and reinterpret the Weltkulturen Museum’s collection of over 67.000 artefacts.
The Weltkulturen Museum initiated the interactive online platform OPEN LAB as a digital extension of the Museum’s research and lab activities in Frankfurt am Main.
The innovative online tools are based on currently available Web 2.0 technologies and provide access to objects of the Museum’s collection in virtual space. Here, the working processes involved in creating a new work or a concept can be documented and shared with a global public. Visitors can follow these processes live, comment on them, or become producers themselves. It is a living archive and a production tool, where not only the knowledge of the museum staff is made available, but where the visitor can also contribute his or her own knowledge and expertise, in the sense of crowd sourcing.
With the V+ button, which can be found at each stage of development in the project tree, each user can upload their own texts, audio files and photos. Ideas can be exchanged and new projects can be co-created from opposite sides of the world. In this way OPEN LAB finds, for example, answers to unresolved questions on the origins, functions, and meanings of individual artefacts and produce new findings and works that can be made available to the broader public.
Visit, browse, log in and upload your contributions to OPEN LAB. You are invited to either contribute your thoughts and outcomes to already existing research initiatives or apply to the Museum’s staff with your own investigation.
