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Copenhagen, El Paso, Cairo: Sharing cultural landscapes for International Museum Day

18/05/2016

Every year on May 18 the International Council of Museums hosts events at more than 35,000 museums in more than 145 countries to celebrate museums as "an important means of cultural exchange, enrichment of cultures and development of mutual understanding, cooperation and peace among peoples.”

 This year the theme is Museums and Cultural Landscapes. And this year marks the addition of Cairo to the growing international community of interactive cultural landscape walls pioneered by the Museum of Copenhagen in 2009, and taken to an even larger and bolder scale by the City of El Paso's "DIGIE" wall, which opened at the El Paso Museum of History in February 2015.

 All three of these interactive walls adopt the "psycho-geography" approach to cultural landscapes popularised by the original Copenhagen Wall, which 6 years later is still operating 14 hours a day every day on the streets of Copenhagen, and has to date attracted over 12 million image views.

 To mark International Museum Day and to celebrate its theme of cultural landscapes, each participating city will host the cultural landscape touch interface of the others: the people of El Paso can explore the vastly different cultural landscapes of Copenhagen and Cairo, Copenhageners can explore the incarnations of their wall in Texas and Egypt.

 It's a day of cultural tourism, and as well as exploring the culture, history and contemporary life of the guest city walls, visitors will be able to trigger short videos showing those walls in operation with excepts from the thousands of guestbook videos and comments recorded to date on each wall.

 The guest walls will each occupy their own touch screen segment of the host wall, so that visitors can interact with all three city walls. The advanced software running these interactive cultural landscapes enables each wall to switch automatically to hosting mode at the start of May 18 local time in each city.

 

More information:

International Museum Day - http://icom.museum/activities/international-museum-day/

The Copenhagen Wall  - http://cphmuseum.kk.dk/en/artikel/wall

DIGIE - Digital Gateway in El Paso  - http://digie.org/about

Makers of the walls - http://gibson.co.nz/ and http://www.spildaftid.dk/