Mediasphere Meetup 2023

How can the digital media of the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin be reused in a creative, sustainable and diverse way? After a pause of three years caused by the pandemic, we invite our network and all interested parties to the Meetup at the museum on May 15, 2023 where we present current results of our collaborations, this time with a focus on educational partnerships.

The Mediasphere Meetup event series is designed to facilitate personal exchange and networking among stakeholders from the creative, media, and education industries, both with each other and with the museum staff who digitize and sustainably discover and develop our collection. We offer our media for a variety of uses via the museum’s data portal , mostly under a free license, and welcome all feedback that illustrates the potential of the digitized material in addition to the actual research interest.

Together with our collaboration partner, the Internationale Filmschule Köln (Cologne International Film School), we developed a production exercise for the first-year students of the international master’s program Digital Narratives in 2022, which used the data portal as a creative engine . After a two-day workshop at the museum that included a visit to the exhibition, keynote speeches, and behind-the-scenes insights into collection development, the students were tasked with using two datasets from the data portal to develop an innovative idea for the exploration of our media at the intersection of science, storytelling, and digital technologies. Representatives of the respective ifs teams will present the resulting multimedia prototypes at the Meetup in person at the museum!

Brita Bredel is pursuing a completely different educational approach, building informational kits on the subject of insect nests for use in elementary and lower secondary schools, using, among other things, insect 3D models from the museum. A transformation of the physical collection object via a digital copy to an analog teaching model thanks to the latest 3D printing technologies. Brita will also present her work at the Meetup and talk about the challenges of working with 3D models.

Another guest at the Meetup is the Virtual Reality Berlin-Brandenburg e.V. , whose networking activities support XR technology media partners in the region. We also welcome the Kompetenzzentrum der Kultur- und Kreativwirtschaft des Bundes and look forward to their announcement of the pop-up summer event at Schiffbauerdamm, in which Mediasphere For Nature will also participate.

For those who would like to experience a transdisciplinary art project and exhibition at the Tieranatomisches Theater after the Meetup, starting at 4pm, there will be a special opportunity for a personal tour led by artist Marlene Bart. Marlene’s work in Theatrum Radix also demonstrates the creative potential of the museum’s collection objects and digitized specimens by, among other things, incorporating 3D models from the data portal into her VR animation. She also contextualizes the greatly enlarged tactile model of a dung beetle (created in cooperation between Mediasphere For Nature and werk5) and many other museum collection objects with her own works of art.

Program

1:40 pm onwards Admission at the guest reception of the museum, portal V (for route plan see registration confirmation)

2:00 pm Welcome by the Mediasphere For Nature team

2:10 pm Presentation by the students of the ifs Köln (in English).

2:40 pm Presentation of insect nest models in 3D, Brita Bredel

2:50 pm Presentation of the VRBB e.V., Marlene Bart

3:00 pm Announcement of the summer event of the Kompetenzzentrum der Kultur- und Kreativwirtschaft des Bundes

until 4:00 pm Coffee and networking

after 4:00 (optional, please register explicitly as the number of participants is limited): Guided tour to the Tieranatomisches Theater to the transdisciplinary exhibition Theatrum Radix about the virtual order of nature between art and science, Marlene Bart.

We look forward to a lively exchange!