T-Visionarium Open City: panoramic experience

October 1st 2009

Open as of November 5 2009!

The largest painting of The Netherlands is the Mesdag’s Panorama: 120 meters long and 14 meters high. Not its size has been so impressive for over a century, but its shape: a cylinder. The spectator stands right in the middle of it! At the opening of the Panorama Vincent van Gogh stated: “Never in my life have I seen something so beautiful. The only flaw the Panorama Mesdag has is its lack of flaws”. Viewing art turned into experiencing art.



Now, more than a century later, the VPRO, Sound and Vision, the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) and the International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam (IABR) present T_Visionarium OPEN CITY, a panoramic experience of audiovisual material from the collections of Sound and Vision that have been digitized within Images for the Future. T_Visionarium OPEN CITY is a spectacular installation where visitors can navigate through the audiovisual archive in a three-dimensional space in an interactive manner and make their own temporary montage or remix. The installation makes use of the ground-breaking visualization technology of the Australian research center iCinema and can be seen in Holland for the first time this fall.

T_Visionarium OPEN CITY belongs to a series of activities within the framework ‘Century of the City’, the crossmedial project that the television network VPRO is presenting in collaboration with the Architecture Biennale Rotterdam. Century of the City can be found on various platforms (radio television and internet). This program incorporates the following elements:

• on-site: activities within the framework of the IABR
• on-line: the Open City website
• the T_Visionarium OPEN CITY installation in the Zuiderkerk (South Church) in Amsterdam

The installation can be visited for free as of November 5 2009 and will remain open to the public for 18 days in the Zuiderkerk (South Church) in Amsterdam. There is no entry fee. With the T_Visionarium OPEN CITY the partners have created and installation that will impress the spectators as much now as the Mesdag Panorama did in those days. Ways will be sought to further improve this technology, so that organizations within and outside of Images for the Future can make use of it in the future.

For more information go to:
Itinerary for the South Church in Amsterdam    

Pictures of the launch on November 5th

T_Visionarium OPEN CITY has also been enabled with the financial support of the Mondriaan Foundation, the Amsterdam Art Fund and the Dutch Cultural Broadcasting Fund.