Happy Anniversary Mr K

Søren Kierkegaard: Objects of Love, Works of Love

Old philosophy, new digital technologies

Interactive object cases
Low cost hardware
Public contributions to object collection

To celebrate 200 years of the enduring work of Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, the Museum of Copenhagen invited the public to contribute their own objects and stories to a precious collection of ephemera from Kierkegaard’s personal life. Please click here for a video about the exhibition.

Gibson Group in association with Touchtech worked with Jette Sandahl and Jakob Parby of the Copenhagen Museum to develop a custom android tablet application to enable members of the public to register their own collection objects directly into the exhibition database, together with their personal videos and stories about them. A series of public workshops were held to facilitate this radical departure in museum collection praxis.

Objects contributed by the public are displayed in one of nine interactive exhibition cases, and the related descriptions and stories accessed via another custom developed android tablet application. When an object was selected on the tablet, the contributor’s video and text stories about their object came to life on the monitors camouflaged behind a tinted glass backdrop in the case.

The nine interactive object cases each represented a particular theme in Kierkegaard’s writings about love, and were arranged in a circle with the public’s contributions on the outer side of the cases, and the related objects from the Kierkegaard collection on the inside.

The screens on the Kierkegaard side of the cases displayed scrolling quotations from his writings, and another bespoke android tablet application allowed visitors to control the language and speed.

Affordable technology was a feature of the exhibition, with the amazing $50 Raspberry Pi computers powering the exhibition case video display screens and the cost-effective android tablets being housed in stands designed to allow them to be easily removed for object registration sessions and educational programme use.