CCCB Veus

The CCCB’s online exhibition project receives an honourable mention in Best of the Web

“The City of Horrors”, the interactive web/mural in the CCCB’s exhibition “Barcelona-Valencia-Palma”, received an award in Best of the Web, organized annually in the United States as part of the international conference on museums and new technologies, “Museum and the Web”. The jury gave an honourable mention in the Exhibition category to “The City of Horrors”, as it did to the MOMA’s website, “Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Modern Century”. The complementary nature of the virtual online exhibition, the effective use of multimedia formats and the level of participation of visitors are the criteria taken into account by the jury when evaluating candidates.

Website “The city of horrors”

A total of 108 projects by museums and arts centres round the world took part this year, 26 of them in the Exhibition category. The list of winning museums and centres is available for consultation on the conference website. The CCCB was also nominated in the categories of Social Media for its Kosmopolis Bookcamp wiki and Museum Professional for the CCCB Lab’s blog.

“The City of Horrors”, a project created in 2010 as part of the CCCB’s exhibition “Barcelona-Valencia-Palma”, was organized into two spaces: presential (the exhibition space) and virtual (a website). By means of virtual participation, users of the Internet could send in and vote for photographs of ugly spots in Barcelona, Valencia and Palma. The images to receive most votes on the website were chosen for the physical space, where they were projected as part of a mural that changed every day according to voting. This mural represented “The City of Horrors”, a mixed metropolis, the result of combining the least attractive places in the three Mediterranean cities.

Interactive mural showed in the exhibition

The city of horrors, exhibition space

Thanks to this initiative, an idea of the CCCB’s developed by the designer Ignasi Rifé and the firm Enfasystem, the exhibition included 477 photographs submitted by visitors. It was the visitors themselves—over 3,600 visited the website during the exhibition—who decided, with their votes (a total of 84,704), which images would be projected in the mural at the show. (Read article about the outcome of the participatory project)

The Museums and the Web Conference, which took place last week in Philadelphia, is one of the foremost international meeting places for producers and managers of cultural and museum websites. It has been held since 1997 in various cities around the United States and marks out the principal future trends in the field of museums and technology.