Arts and Technology

A well known critical success factor for any institution (including museums) is its outreach. Outreach, in fact, concerns how wholly unknown people can be connected and attracted by a given institution. Hence, a successful communication strategy includes outreach activities, which very often involve the use of digital technologies. In fact, digital literacy is progressively increasing and, hence, providing a universal language that can be utilized to decode any information that comes from very far. Virtual reality applications have flourished in museums, for example, showing in videos how past cultures lived and prospered. Augmented reality techniques are being utilized to help visitors imagine the appearance of ancient landscapes on site (e.g., the Colosseum at the Roman Empire time), mixing archaeological remains with superimposed graphical representations. Much more can be done, however, taking advantage of the multimodal interactions that can be realized with the use of modern technologies. Among the many possible choices, gamification techniques, for example, are emerging as a viable instrument to incentive people to accomplish given tasks. As such, we here describe how we exploited such paradigm to outreach the exterior of a museum. In particular, we here describe the design and implementation of a smartphone app, available on the iPhone App Store since July 2012, whose scope is that of ferrying visitors from the outside to the inside of five of the main cultural attractions of Bologna, Italy. All this has been achieved providing new and additional (also artistic) content, thus departing from any traditional museum guide paradigm.

In this paper we present the most recent technological innovations introduced into the artistic installation we called RF Sounding, keep on maintaining our fundamental goals: creating an artistic installation that can be used for educational purposes as well. Indeed we have been inspired by the impossible human dream of flying that we reasoned on the acoustic dimension. We decided to make the inaudible, audible by a translation in the audio bandwidth of signals coming from cellular networks. We thus want to provide the user, entering the specifically defined area, with awareness of radio frequency signals characterizing the cellular networks band. With respect to the prototype presented in previous papers we finally exploit the information coming from a spectrum analyser, thus taking into account also the whole uplink, and position data acquired from a Microsoft Kinect in order to realize localization inside the equipped area, without the need for the users to wear an active device.

Neuroaesthetic Resonance evolved from a mature body of research investigating ‘Aesthetic Resonance’. Music Making, Digital Painting, Robotic control and Video Game control via movement alone is catalyst of the work where motivated fun through ludic engagement is core. Innovation of apparatus and methods in non-formal rehabilitation via matching digital media plasticity to human performance plasticity are foci. System adaptions according to abilities offer a generic solution. Performance art learning (stage and interactive installations – where solo and multiple ‘actors’ participated) is a thread in the work. A published patent and commercial product resulted alongside intervention models for in-action and on-action reflections, actions, and evaluations. This paper addresses the issues of innate aesthetic value by philosophically and contextually questioning ‘what is art’ and ‘artistic value’.