New Media Museum of the Netherlands Institute for Sound & Vision open to the public after renovation
The new Media Museum of Sound & Vision reopened to the public on Saturday 11 February 2023 after 2.5 years of renovations. The new immersive experience is all about placing media culture in perspective. The media determine us and vice versa.
It is the very first museum in the world that continuously adapts to the actions of its visitors. The experience uses facial recognition and the user’s own smartphone. This personalised museum journey makes it a unique experience for everyone. Visitors discover more than 50 interactives and hundreds of hours of audiovisual material. International exhibition designer Tinker imagineers was responsible for the integrated spatial, graphical, and media design.
Upon entering the museum, visitors create their own media profile in the Media Museum app, compete with their picture and personal preferences. Facial recognition is used to identify the visitors at the individual exhibits. This generates a personalised museum journey and results in an über-interactive museum. The space is divided into zones, each focusing on different themes that are about making news, connecting, buying, selling and playing.
Visitors get to play interactives, explore iconic media objects, and rediscover nostalgic footage from their youth. A visit to the experience is an educational and inspiring journey of discovery through the media landscape of the past, present and future.
The all-encompassing Media Reactor
A unique installation of no less than 300 metres of LED screens placed throughout the museum, connects the different zones. Frameworks disappear, while inside and outside, front and back, blend seamlessly. This so-called Media Reactor represents the infinite stream of media that comes our way every day.
Stan Boshouwers, owner of Tinker imagineers, about the new museum: ‘In the experience, you literally step into cyberspace, you enter the online world. We designed it that way because we live in a mediated world these days. If you look at the screen time on your smartphone, your daily screen time starts to approach the time you spend with people in real life. Add to that television and computer screen time, and you can see that we perceive our world largely through intermediate means, in other words media. In contrast to the past, media content is largely created by ourselves. Therefore: the media define us, and we define the media. The museum’s goal is to make the visitors aware of this.’
Tinker imagineers has been working on the experience for almost five years in collaboration with the museum and many other parties from different disciplines.
Other images can be seen in the gallery down below
Client: The Netherlands Institute for Sound & Vision
Location: The Netherlands
Concept: XPEX
Spatial design: Tinker imagineers
AV design: Tinker imagineers
Set construction: Bruns
Interactives: Kiss the Frog
AV content: Redrum
AV hardware: Beamsystems, Mansveld
Design media reactor: Tinker imagineers
Sound media reactor: Danny Weijermans
Showcontrol media reactor: Beamsystems
Hardware media reactor: Mansveld
Light design: ACTLD
Museum app: Elastique
Photographer: Jorrit Lousberg
About Tinker imagineers
Tinker imagineers, founded in 1991, is an award-winning experience design agency in Utrecht, the Netherlands. They design and build narrative spaces. Vibrant story worlds that engage, inspire and even transform visitors of all ages. Tinker brings ideas to life in exhibitions, visitor centres, and multi-media theatres all around the world, especially in northern Europe. Tinker takes on research, project development, design, AV and multimedia, as well as production. In 2018, founders Erik Bär and Stan Boshouwers published a book on immersive experience design, which they see as the art of creating spaces that tell a story. The book, called Worlds of Wonder - experience design for curious people, describes the What, the Why and the How of this exciting way of communication.
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