Ragnarock Museum
Interactive installations and exhibition design
Ragnarock Museum is an ambitious undertaking that tells the story of music history from the 50’s up until today. It’s a tribute to youth, counterculture, rebellion, and rock’n’roll. The building was designed by COBE and MVRDV and is situated in Roskilde’s MUSICON area. Closely linked to Roskilde Festival, this is a post-industrial neighbourhood dedicated to urban experiments and creativity. Formerly a concrete factory, now a focal point and cultural icon. Great care was taken in keeping the history and surroundings intact. The bold riveted exterior and velveted interior is a clash of modern and old, rough and polished. The space functions as a concert hall and event space, as well as a museum.
No Parking won the bid for 12 interactive installations and worked together with creative director Robert Nagy, advisor Jesper Harding and Sebastian Gyrst-Longsig Christensen from White Noise Agency. The overall goal was to create a contemporary museum experience that would resonate with a younger audience, and part of the solution was to let interactive installation do the storytelling. Visitors would learn about music history through tactile play and engagement. The visual language would be amplification. Heavily themed rooms and installations with a bold and bombastic language would ensure an evolving experience as visitors progress through time.
Each installation presented its own unique design and technical challenges. The creative director had scoped out rough visions for the installations and my task was to ensure we created an interactive experience and visual language that fit into the overall style as well as the specific theme being communicated. I worked closely together with Robert Nagy and Jesper Harding, sketching out ideas through brainstorm sessions and meetings. Each installation would tell its own story and approach subjects in different ways. Users would dance, scream, compete and play their way through the exhibition.
We went through several conceptual phases and made sure to constantly align vision and scope with stakeholders. These concepts were delivered in case documents with high def mocks, flow charts and technical specifications. Once things had been approved, we moved on to prototyping. We would build several low fi versions of inputs and sensors using a combination of Unity and Watchout to manage input and output. Installations requiring projection mapping were setup and tested in office with scaled replicas or 1:1 setups. Once we reached a functioning prototype stage, we would take in groups of people for testing. Verifying the communication was on point, and the expected actions were intuitive and executable. Through these findings we were able to iterate and adjust feedback and interfaces.
Installations
One of the first things visitors are greeted with, is a panoramic interactive light installation. It tells the story of three eras of lighting design, liquid lights, lasers and projection mapping. Inspired by the likes of Spids Nøgenhat, Pink Floyd and Dark Matters, each section is unique but connected – playing with one influences the other.
The controls are different for each section. For the liquid lights, visitors paint on a touch screen. For the lasers, visitors move their hands over four tubes with motion sensors and led lights for feedback. And for the mapping part, users simply rotate three knobs to combine different effects.
The general concept and style was mocked out by the creative director at No Parking and my job was to visualise it and make it work. This was done in close collaboration with Robert Nagy and Jesper Harding. Most was done with a combination of After Affects, Unity and Watchout. I worked closely with a developer to get the fluid simulations working in Unity and made all animation and assets with Cinema 4D, After Effects and Photoshop. The whole thing was combined in Watchout with Unity translating inputs from the controllers.
Kinect powered dance simulator with three eras of music. Jitterbug, Electric Boogie and Techno. A digital instructor guides visitors through the moves as the difficulty slowly rises. The colourscheme and background videos change to reflect the era. For the motion capture we hired a professional dancer, and used the Smartsuit Pro from Rokoko. The Kinect detects the movements and matches them with the instructor. If the participants are doing well visual feedback appears on the screen, and flashing lights heighten the intensity.
Audio stations with unique interface. Visitors rotate the aluminium discs at 73rpm, 33rpm or 45rpm to hear short stories about the evolution of the vinyl format. If you spin the record in reverse, you might even hear some satanic verses.
A rotation sensor detects the motion and a compact PC converts the signal which controls the playback speed of the audio and the feedback of the display. The UI features a digital stroboscope mimicking the analogue RPM meters on turntables. The faster you spin, the faster the audio plays. You can scratch, speed up, slow down or listen in reverse, and all this results in a unique audio station that is both playfull and tactile.
Audio stations featuring stories about the history of radio. Here visitors can tune through early broadcasts from American Forces Network and Radio Luxenbourg, all the way up to the popular 90’s programs like Tjecklisten. Selecting a track is like tuning a radio, a small rotation sensor detects motion and feeds the signal into a compact PC. Unity is used to map the rotation out on a linear scale and determine which soundbites to play. Turning the nob will also generate scratching sounds, and causes audio levels to dip, simulating the analogue feedback from old radios.
Giant cassette tape with 6 touchscreens. Every artist has to start somewhere, and often times songs start out sounding way different than the version you end up hearing on the radio. With this installation visitors can browse through a back catalogue of songs and compare the studio version with the demo version, seamlessly swapping back and forth between the two. The white demo tape and white room all symbolise a blank sheet of paper, the starting point of all creative journeys. During the museum opening a young kid approached this and said “wow, is this like a spaceship?!” – only signifying to me that we indeed do need giant cassette tapes in museums, to teach youth something about life before streaming. The touchscreen interface was made with Unity.
Screaming installation. At the heart of all music is fan culture. And what better way to express your devotion than to scream you lungs out. This installation let’s you choose between the Beatles, Guns N’ Roses and Lady Gaga. You have to prove you fandom be getting the highest score. A small audio sensor transmits the data into a compact PC and through Unity the signal is decoded into a linear scale that controls the needle. If you manage to scream loud enough, you might even break the glass.
Up to four-player quiz game made with Unity and Watchout. Can you tell the difference between a CD and an MP3? Most people don’t know that sound quality has been steadily declining for decades, and todays streaming actually represents some of the poorest sounding music any generation has listened to.
With this game, visitors get to listen to different version of the same song and have to choose between three different highlighted devices. In total the installation features a radio, a reel-to-reel tape recorder, a vinyl player, walkman, CD player, Ipod and a smartphone. These devices each represent a special time in music history and emit a distinct sound. Each device is original and mounted to the wall, with projected displays and animated elements added in to tell the story. We wanted to convey the era that each device belongs to by highlighting historic or pop-cultural references like Star Wars, the moonwalk or Apples iconic silhouette commercials. All animations were done with Cinema 4D and After Effects.
This was one of the most challenging and exciting projects i have been involved in, and I consider myself very fortunate to have been a part of it. I definitely learned a lot in terms of technical know-how. My first time setting up very complex compositions in Watchout, and integrating Unity into the setups. I think we bended the rules a bit on what’s possible with Unity and Watchout. This was also a very big challenge visually. I was relatively inexperienced at the time, and had to balance the wishes of my creative director in No Parking with the wishes stakeholders and the lead exhibition designers. Sometimes those wishes were at direct odds with each other, which forced me to cut through the politics and create a clear path where none existed. This was definitely hard, but it was an indispensable learning experience. Looking back there are some stylistic choices I would have made different today, but in terms of the story we wanted to tell and the framework I had to work with, I am incredibly proud of the work I did for this project.
