Posts Tagged ‘valència’

“The City of Horrors” receives an award at the Museums and the Web Conference

April 12th, 2011 1 Comment

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.

The City of Horrors: taking stock of a participatory project

September 16th, 2010 6 Comments

On 12 September, the exhibition “Barcelona-Valencia-Palma. A Story of Confluences” closed, and we won’t be able to visit it again until next year in Palma de Mallorca. Until then, one element of the exhibition we can carry on visiting on the Internet is the participatory project “The City of Horrors”.

“The City of Horrors” occupied two spaces: one physical (the exhibition) and one virtual (a website). Via the virtual space, internauts could submit and vote for photographs of ugly places in Barcelona, Valencia and Palma. The most voted images on the website then went on to the physical space, where they were projected in a mural that changed every day according to the voting. This mural represented “The City of Horrors”, a mixed metropolis produced by combining the least attractive places in the three Mediterranean cities.

I think “The City of Horrors” is one of the most complete participatory initiatives conducted to date at the CCCB, partly because the contents contributed by users became part of the exhibition project, partly because it was the internauts rather than the exhibition curator or coordinator who decided, with their votes, which images should be projected in the mural.

The response of participants was quite good, in view of the results. From the day “BVP” opened in late May until the end of September, 477 photographs were published, all together receiving 84,704 votes. More than 3,600 users visited the website during the four months the show ran.

Some other interesting figures produced by “The City of Horrors”: according to the users, Barcelona is the city with most ugly places, followed by Valencia and Palma, with most of the photos submitted (406) being of public space in Barcelona.

Many participants sent in images of specific objects (puddles, rubble, piles of rubbish, abandoned bicycles, etc.) as though what really bothers us about the city is not so much the urban space itself as the way people treat it.

Below are the top five images of the ugliest places in terms of votes received. Many thanks to everyone who took part in this initiative (some of whom we have since followed on twitter or Facebook).

1. Dirty water in Maremàgnum (Barcelona) by Sonia Hita

Total votes: 195 | votes in favour: 190 | 97%

2. Rubbish in Poblenou (Barcelona) by Isaac Gràcia

Total votes: 231 | votes in favour: 220 | 95%

3. Saturday market (Palma de Mallorca) by Martín

Total votes: 232 | votes in favour: 219 | 94%

4. Carrer Banys Nous (Barcelona) by Albert Salamé

Total votes: 284 | votes in favour: 265 | 93%

5. Carrer Gramàtic Carles Ros, El Cabanyal (Valencia) by Eduardo Martín García

Total votes: 273 | votes in favour: 255 | 93%

(Català) “Barcelona-València-Palma”, en construcció

May 21st, 2010 Comments Closed

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