Bereichsnavigation
museum4punkt0: The joint project led by the SPK is being extended
Press release from 12/21/2020
The Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media is continuing to fund museum4punkt0 with ten million euros in 2021. Together with ten new partners, cultural institutions across Germany are developing and testing digital offerings for new ways of learning, experiencing and participating in museums.
The digital future project "museum4punkt0", which is led by the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, can be continued. By funding museum4punkt0, the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media is creating a testing ground for outreach programmes in museums that use digital technologies to open up new approaches to cultural heritage. museum4punkt0 is making the results and experiences from its sub-projects comprehensively available, thereby also supporting smaller museums on their way to digitality. The project results range from fully reusable virtual reality applications and modulable mediation offers, such as augmented reality-supported personal tours or apps for personalised object exploration, to operating concepts and experience reports as well as extensive evaluations of user behaviour. From 2021, the number of partner institutions involved in the joint project will increase from six to sixteen. The ten new institutions, already associated with museum4punkt0 as partners, will expand the museum4punkt0 portfolio with their own projects and create additional synergies.
Minister of State for Culture Monika Grütters explains: "It is crucial for the future of museums that they attract new target groups through contemporary digital communication. The museum4punkt0 project, an important part of the federal government's digitalisation offensive, has already produced promising applications and prototypes. The key to their use in practice is good networking. That is why we will now be adding ten more partners to the project network who are already in the starting blocks with innovative ideas for communicating cultural content. To this end, we will be supporting museum4punkt0 in the coming year with an additional ten million euros from the NEUSTART Culture programme. This means that an impressive total of 25 million euros is now available for this important programme for the future."
Foundation President Hermann Parzinger sees the additional funding for museum4punkt0 as a great opportunity:
"I am very grateful to Minister of State Monika Grütters that we can continue this ambitious cross-institutional and cross-disciplinary project in 2021. The SPK is once again proving itself to be a partner to museum institutions in the federal states. With museum4punkt0, we are strengthening the exchange between cultural institutions across Germany. Only by working together can we make cultural heritage accessible to a broad public and thus strengthen people's awareness of the existential importance of culture for our social coexistence."
Monika Hagedorn-Saupe has headed the museum4punkt0 network for the SPK since 2017. She sees the transfer of knowledge into the museum landscape as a clear mission of the network.
"Especially in times of a pandemic, many museums are keen to reach people with suitable digital offerings - before, during and after their museum visit and even when museums are closed. This requires resources that are often not sufficiently available. Thanks to the additional funding from the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media, we are delighted to be able to continue our work and support smaller museums in particular in implementing new educational concepts in a resource-efficient manner. The intensive dialogue within the network has proven to be productive and extremely helpful for all project participants. Our task is to make project results and experience available beyond the network in the best possible way and for the long term: Expert knowledge only unfolds its impact when others share it."
museum4punkt0 promotes dialogue between the museums in the network and passes on its project results and findings to other museums. For example, the virtual reality application developed by the Senckenberg Museum für Naturkunde Görlitz as part of museum4punkt0 is completely reusable. All that is needed is the appropriate hardware to allow visitors to other exhibitions and events to immerse themselves virtually in the hidden habitat of soil animals. The findings on the diverse possibilities of virtual and augmented reality technologies, which are being explored in the glass test laboratory at the Deutsches Museum in Munich, are also freely available. The team at the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin is using AR technology for the first time in personalised guided tours: The modulable app fits variably into the mediation by a personal guide and can be adapted to objects and exhibitions as required. In the Humboldt Forum Foundation's project at the Berlin Palace, users explore museums individually by interacting with the objects in a playful way. The Fastnachtsmuseum Schloss Langenstein uses a personalised dialogue with the objects using algorithms to communicate intangible cultural heritage. Interactive platforms such as the Virtual Carnival Museum or the biographies portal on the history of migration at the German Emigration Centre Bremerhaven also provide individual access to cultural heritage. The Museum Narrenschopf Bad Dürrheim has produced 360-degree films for a year-round carnival experience and pays particular attention to minimising the amount of support required for projection in the museum, which in turn provides important experience for other small museums.
One aim of the next phase of the project is to jointly explore the possibilities of highly complex artificial intelligence for the cultural sector. Against the backdrop of the pandemic experience, applications for use on personal devices (Bring Your Own Device, BYOD) or location-independent services will increasingly be developed in the future. Participatory platforms that involve users as co-curators or focus on educational programmes for a younger target group are further topics for the next funding phase. With now sixteen partners of different sizes and orientations, museum4punkt0 will strengthen cooperation between museums as a network and continue to test new ideas on how digital components can complement the museum experience as a whole.
From 2021, the partners of the museum4punkt0 network at the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation will be the previous associated partners Schleswig-Holstein State Museums Foundation Schloss Gottorf, Klassik Stiftung Weimar, German Historical Museum, Haus der Geschichte der Bundesrepublik Deutschland Foundation, Dresden State Art Collections, Varusschlacht im Osnabrücker Land Museum und Park Kalkriese, Historisches Museum Saar, Stiftung Deutsches Meeresmuseum, Badisches Landesmuseum, Stiftung Deutsche Kinemathek as well as the previous partners Staatliche Museen zu Berlin - Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Stiftung Humboldt Forum im Berliner Schloss, Deutsches Museum, Deutsches Auswandererhaus Bremerhaven, Museen der schwäbisch-alemannischen Fastnacht (Fasnachtsmuseum Schloss Langenstein and Fastnachtmuseum Narrenschopf Bad Dürrheim), Senckenberg Museum für Naturkunde Görlitz.
Funded by:
on the basis of a resolution of the German Bundestag
