Winners e-Culture and Heritage
http://vaeggen.copenhagen.dk/en/
www.gibson.co.nz/attractions
www.spildaftid.dk
Vaeggen (The Wall) is a massive but mobile interactive video installation on the streets of Copenhagen that allows citizens and visitors to explore in depth the cultural past, present, and future of the city together with its diverse ethnic and cultural communities. Open and inclusive in its philosophy and operating mode, Vaeggen also provides a vehicle for citizens to contribute their own material to the experience via its innovative street level and web user interfaces. Multi-touch and multi-user, the interface uses a strong graphical idiom understandable by all community groups and encourages them to not only explore the 14,000 cultural assets accumulated to date, but to also create new original contents that enrich, comment on or incorporate the heritage collection. The giant on-screen touch keyboards make it possible to email these assets around the world and insert them into their own social media networks. Based initially on the rich heritage collections of the Museum of Copenhagen, Vaeggen is also a public multimedia repository for new discoveries emerging from the large-scale archaeological excavations being undertaken in the old city centre for the next 7 years. In the first half year of operation, Vaeggen has attracted more than 400,000 users, who viewed more than 2 million cultural media assets, sent more than 60,000 digital postcards, and uploaded 2,500 new contributions of their own. The idea is already being taken up by other cities in Scandinavia and attracting interest around the globe.
The website presents 1200 years of German history as the interactive core element in a new and unique approach. Told in 20 feature films, discussed by experts and illustrated with interactive maps – the user can choose to enjoy Germany’s history in a few minutes or for several hours! It combines uniquely different multimedia elements such as implemented videos of the TV series, pictures, interactive maps, downloads and a glossary. It also has a state-of-the-art look and feel, based on a very straightforward, intuitive navigational structure. The complicated subject History is presented in a very easy-to-use and playful manner and skilfully avoids long texts or boring timelines. This is the most elaborate multimedia project in this field on the internet. An added feature, the service called ANIMATION: http://xt.zdf.de/die-deutschen/ stands out for its exceptional navigation and flawless technology. The aesthetics, the rich content and the well-developed storyline makes it a pleasure to watch. “The Germans” has earned many national awards for its outstanding historic and artistic value.
Redress Remix is an award-winning project comprised of a 3-part documentary series and an interactive living documentary. Redress Remix tackles one of the most controversial Canadian government decisions in recent years: the official 2006 apology to the Chinese Canadian community for the Head Tax and Exclusion Act of 1923. The documentary film uses a unique approach that includes animation techniques, newly composed music and testimonial interviews, to reveal to audiences the events that shaped the Redress movement and led to the official Government apology and its influence on a new generation of Chinese Canadians. The interactive web project, developed in conjunction with the film, allows Canadians to contribute to the national dialogue on the issue through a ground-breaking ‘living documentary’ experience. Users are invited to explore 180º panoramas featuring subjects from the film who represent a certain theme related to the Redress movement. The panoramas offer information about the subject, the theme, and a thematic video featuring repurposed documentary footage. Redress Remix invites the user to respond to what they have learned by turning on their webcam and becoming a part of the discussion.
La Maja Desnuda is an ongoing website housing a multimedia archive for poetry, with biographies, images and especially, voices of poets narrating their work. The growing collection concentrates on Venezuela and Latin America, but includes numerous other international artists. La Maja Desnuda has a database with more than 900 poets recorded reading their poetry, among them contemporary poets as well known as Adonis (Lebanon), Fina Marruz Garcia (Cuba), Blanca Varela (Peru), Ledo Ivo (Brazil), Casimiro de Brito (Portugal), Nidaa Khoury (Lebanon), Ide Hintze (Austria) and Luisa Castro (Spain). The portal is complemented by a radio program on poetry, also called La Maja Desnuda, which has been on the air for more than 22 years and currently broadcasts in Venezuela. More than 1144 programs were produced during this time, presenting the most representative voices in world poetry, including: Walt Whitman, Tomas Tranströmer, Adonis, Pär Lagerkvist, Jorge Borges, César Vallejo, Miguel Hernandez, Sophia de Mello, T.S. Eliot and Pier Paolo Pasolini.
The World of the Habsburgs is a virtual exhibition in a multimedia presentation. In addition to the representatives of the dynasty, the virtual exhibition spotlights the political history and the general social developments of the Habsburg era. The website draws a colourful picture of the world of the Habsburgs from the 13th until the early 20th century, going far beyond any similar presentations, whether text or other media, of virtual historical exhibitions. The World of the Habsburgs links the exhibits through topics and key issues, thus assembles storylines, objects and texts like a museum exhibition, accompanied by multimedia presentation of texts, maps, a genealogical table and a navigable timeline opening up completely new contexts and connections. In all, there are more than 500 chapter modules contained within about 100 key topics and over 1,400 images or exhibits, including objects that are never on public view. Despite the enormous archives, The World of the Habsburgs is neither a Wikipedia nor an encyclopaedia. It is a virtual exhibition with an innovative user interface that turns exploration of history per mouse-click into a unique pleasure. Moreover, www.habsburger.net casts light with a critical slant on the current status of research on the history of the Habsburgs and their epoch.
