VISKBOOK by Laursen & Christiansen & Thorlund

 

Virtual sketchbooks, what and why

Viskbook is an invention that makes it possible to exhibit an artists' sketchbooks as an oversized projected book that allows the spectator to browse through it with simple, intuitive gestures. In this way, the entire contents of these sketchbooks becomes accessible for a wider audience, museum visitors, scholars etc.

This video shows the first exhibited version (Video © Mads Folmer 2013).

See also the website of our Italian Drawings project, in which we initially developed Viskbook and experiment with other things as well.

Exhibitions using Viskbook technology

Interested in a Viskbook at your museum, your industrial fair, your school, ... ?

Well, exhibiting sketchbooks at museums represents a single among many application areas, and the possibilities are endless: Showing the newest comics album or cookbook in the book store, creating attention to new products at fairs, etc. etc.

We can help to analyze your needs and design a particular setup for your environment together with our highly qualified developers. The easiest way to proceed is that you buy the necessary equipment (two projectors, a standard laptop and a few other things) according to our advice (50,000 DKK / 7,000 EUR is far more than enough). We prefer that you provide a high quality scanning of the book (to eliminate the risk of damaging the original), and we will integrate the scanning into our software. Some furniture to hide the projectors may be necessary; will cost you from about 1,000 DKK / 150 EUR to infinity depending on your ambitions and architectural requirements. We expect that you hire the carpenter, and we will help with the plans.

We are not a private company but university people with limited time. We need to have our developer's salaries and our own expenses covered, but (so far ;-) we are not interested in making big money out of this.

We maintain all rights to our software and as our rule of thumb, we grant our partners the right to use it for one exhibition at a time (for as long as it runs).

Who are we?

Main partners are Bjørn Laursen, Henning Christiansen and Steffen Thorlund.

Laursen and Christiansen are researchers at Roskilde University, Denmark, with a lot of interests. A strong common interest for us is to develop and use new, innovative ways of presenting information, and art is one very demanding and fascinating form of information.

Steffen Thorlund has a recent master's degree from Roskilde in Computer Science and informatics. He is the chief programmer in the project as well as general problem solver.

We want to apply our inventions in practice: to see our stuff actually being used and creating interest, to give our contribution to making new sides of great art more accessible, and (academics as we are) having a way to test our ideas.

Without our developers, the running Viskbook installations would not have been possible: In addition to Steffen Thorlund we mention also Atez Gürsimek who adapted and adjusted image files so they are shown in the best way.

Our research in interactive installations is associated with the Experience Lab at Roskilde University and recieves support from the Designing Human Technologies program.

 

Bjørn Laursen
Assoc. prof. of Performance Design
home page
blaursen@ruc.dk
                                    Henning Christiansen
Prof. of Computer Science
home page
henning@ruc.dk
                                    Steffen Engler Thorlund
Research and teaching assistant; developer
(home page to be addded)
thorlund@ruc.dk

Last update May 5, 2017, by Henning Christiansen.