Blue Screen of Bauhaus

An interactive, real time social media action to bring more attention to the female artists of the Bauhaus School.

Introduction

Blue Screen of Bauhaus was an interactive digital media installation shown during the Kollektives Blau Bauhausfest in Dessau. The installation explores the artistic work of often overlooked female artists from the influential Bauhaus and Der Blaue Reiter artistic movements.

During the festival, animations of the selected artists’ works were projected in a distorted form on the side of the Bauhaus School building. By posting on Instagram or Twitter with the artist’s name as a hashtag, festival participants transformed the animation to reveal the work. If no one posted about the artist after some time, then the opportunity passed and a “blue screen” error was shown.

Background

The Bauhaus School operated in Germany from 1919 to 1933 and combined the disciplines of art, crafts, and what we would today term industrial design. Their egalitarian, modernist approach to unifying art, craft, and technology to create architecture, household items, textiles, and artworks had a major impact on 20th century design and their influence continues to be felt today. Today the Bauhaus School in Dessau holds a yearly festival that reflects the Bauhaus interest in the Gesamtkunstwerk, or complete art work, an expression of the philosophy that art and design should pervade all aspects of life, and that different art disciplines can be combined with one another. Unfortunately, despite the high profile of Bauhaus artists such as Wassily Kandinsky or László Moholy-Nagy, many of the female artists who worked at the Bauhaus and were innovators in their field go underrepresented in histories of the era. In the face of the prevailing sexist attitude of the era, the women of the Bauhaus created technically and artistically innovative work - art that today can be seen as a forerunner to algorithmic design - and founded and ran successful business enterprises.

Concept

The concept of Blue Screen was developed by interaction designer Dorothea Brockmann as a final year project for her Bachelor degree in Product Design at Kunsthochschule Berlin-Weißensee. The theme for the Bauhaus Fest was "Kollektives Blau", and Dorothea tied the concept of the blue screen error to the blue theme. The key idea was to engage audience members to prevent the blue screen error, and thereby bring more attention to the female artists of the Bauhaus.

Development

The development process was a team effort with Dorothea and Alan Don Jones undertaking the concept development, research, and accompanying website, and Paul Zubrinich developing the animation. My role was to develop the underlying program that managed the information about the artists and the animation state, all while monitoring Twitter and Instagram for matching hashtags. It was great to have the chance to work in this team. I was a little nervous in the lead-up because it would be the first time I presented to such a large audience.

Presentation

As it turned out, everything ran smoothly for both nights of the festival. The Bauhaus festival team was on hand to set up the projection and the connection to Twitter and Instagram worked well. Most importantly, the audience engaged and many of the artworks were revealed - although we did have some "blue screen errors" as well.

Reflection

Unfortunately a quick search of hashtags on Twitter and Instagram reveals that there is still a lot more cultural attention being paid to the established male artists of the period. Nevertheless, while our project was a drop in the ocean of the artistic and critical responses to the Bauhaus, it is heartening to see that the women of the Bauhaus are finally starting to get more of the attention they deserve.

On the technical side of things, if I work again on an interactive piece using Twitter and Instagram, I would give more thought to the pictures that the audience ideally would be posting - while some of the audience images on Instagram are great, the night time conditions were more challenging for many phone cameras.

Technology

A Processing sketch loaded the artists' information and animated the images of their artworks. Using Java, the sketch also connected to Twitter and Instagram to listen for mentions of the artist's name. If the artist's name was used in a hashtag, the sketch resolved the animation to show the artwork clearly. The sketch was projected onto the side of the Bauhaus School building.

Installation

September 4-5, 2015
Kollektives Blau Bauhausfest
Stiftung Bauhaus
Dessau, Germany

Role

Animation design
Interaction design
Software development

Collaborators

Dorothea Brockmann
Alan Don Jones
Paul Zubrinich

Tools and Technology

Processing
Java