Nina takes part of the “Sound & Vision” exhibition by EPFL+ECAL Lab and ECAL

8-14.04.2019   The wonderful legacy of the Montreux Jazz Festival hits the road with Nina. Nina is a design research journey. It started with the ambition to find out how to revive the millions of hours of audiovisual content that have been digitized around the world. It eventually shows how travelling can become a moment of cultural immersion. It also defines how these once-in-a-lifetime experiences can be relived and travel to reach new audiences. 

   

   

In recent decades millions of hours of audiovisual content have been digitized like the archives of the Montreux Jazz Festival listed in the UNESCO “Memory of the World” Register. How can one truly bring this digitized heritage back to life?

Fifty years of concert recordings digitized under the leadership of the EPFL Metamedia Center have provided an ideal framework for experimentation. The research conducted by the EPFL+ECAL Lab in close cooperation with the space conception laboratory ALICE seeks to take our digital heritage to a new level. It aimed to offer a social and immersive experience to the audience and strengthen its relationship with the original concert and artist.

   

   

Six years of research in design, architecture, engineering and user experience psychology have produced three operational installations and extensive user observations. The results, embracing principles of immersion, augmentation, physicality, acoustics and interaction set principles to revive audiovisual heritage, have been published by Leonardo/MIT Press.

   

   
Nina integrates these findings in a nomadic and compact installation that brings this cultural legacy to remote audiences. Unexpectedly, this has given birth to a new vision of mobility as an emotional, social and cultural experience. Enriching the experience, the Virtual Reality installation Scene-o-scope presents the cultural and human context which forged this unique festival: its lively atmosphere and contributions by artists such as Max Bill, Andy Warhol or Keith Haring.

It also shows the places which have woven unique connections between world-famous musicians, or the genesis of the song Smoke on the Water, inspired by the concert hall burning down on Lake Geneva.

   

   

CREDITS :

ALICE team : Dieter Dietz, Architecture Curator, Ruben Valdez Juarez, Senior Research Architect, Rudi Nieveen, Senior Research Architect, Manon Fantini, Architect, Tobias Cebulla, Architect, Quentin Andreotti, Architect

EPFL+ECAL Lab : Nicolas Henchoz, Project Curator, Cédric Duchêne, Project Manager, Senior Engineer, Tommaso Colombo, Senior Interaction Designer, Allison Crank, Interaction Designer, Delphine Ribes, Senior Computer Scientist, Yves Kalberer, Software Engineer, Béatrice Durandard, Product Designer, Scenographer

Metamedia Center : Alain Dufaux, Operations and Development Manager, Igor Ristic, IT Manager, Project Coordinator, Digitization, Olivier Bruchez, Senior Developer, Database, Gregory Marti, Senior Developer, Media File Manager, Sarah Artacho, Documentalist, song indexing, Caryl Jones, Technology Watcher, Quality Control, Julien A. Raemy, Archivist, Picture Digitization & Anecdote Creation, Céline Racine, Archivist, Picture Digitization & Tagging

Partners : Montreux Jazz Festival, Fondation Claude Nobs, Audemars Piguet

Suppliers : La Porch Sàrl, Illusonic GmBH, Anthony Gallo Acoustics ltd.

Photos credits : Daniela & Tonatiuh / Epfl+Ecal Lab

Video credits : Geoffroy Dubreuil / Epfl+Ecal Lab

Liens presse :

http://www.epfl-ecal-lab.ch/work/nina/

http://www.epfl-ecal-lab.ch/work/hands-on-vision-at-milan-design-week-next/