An augmented-reality app on El Lissitzky’s Abstract Cabinet

demonstrationsraum

An augmented-reality app on El Lissitzky’s Abstract Cabinet

+++Please note: The app has originally been conceived for an exhibition context, and requires special visual markers to operate. Download them for free at www.demonstrationsraum.de/marker+++

demonstrationsraum („demonstration room“) is how El Lissitzky dubbed the exhibition space for Constructivist art he had devised for the Hannover Provinzialmuseum in 1927. The term expresses its twofold function: presenting artworks to an audience, and addressing the conditions of this very presentation.

In line with Lissitzky’s claim, demonstrationsraum is also the title of this interactive exhibition on the history of his ‘Abstract Cabinet’. Taking the photographic imagery on the room as a starting point, it visualizes its various manifestations across time and space.

For the first time, demonstrationsraum assembles a selection of these photographs, making them publically accessible by means of an augmented-reality app. Users can experience the Cabinet in its latest state by navigating through a spherical photograph of the room, currently installed in the Sprengel Museum Hannover. Upon this spherical view, a panorama of historical photographs is superimposed, allowing for comparisons between the different versions, and thus presenting the Cabinet as a space that, due to political, cultural, institutional and technical reasons, underwent numerous transformations in its history.

An exhibition project by the DFG Post-Graduate Program 1843 ‘The Photographic Dispositif’, chaired by Katharina Sykora, at Braunschweig University of Art in collaboration with the Lower Saxony State Chancellery, Berlin, Sprengel Museum, Hannover, and Goethe Institut Novosibirsk.

Nov 30—Dec 13, 2015 Lower Saxony State Chancellery, Berlin

Jun 4—Oct 16, 2016 Sprengel Museum Hannover

Oct 26—Nov 11, 2016 Gallery of the Braunschweig University of Art

May 19—Jun 11, 2017 Art El’ art space, Novosibirsk

Concept/research/project management—Post-Graduate Program ‘The Photographic Dispositif’: Carolin Anda, Yvonne Bialek, Cornelia Durka, Alexander Karpisek, Natascha Pohlmann, Philipp Sack

Programming: Die Etagen GmbH, Osnabrueck

Design: Friederike Kühne