Norton Museum of Art: Norton Art+

Norton Art+

Norton Museum of Art

An augmented reality app that invites visitors to create and play as they encounter select contemporary pieces in the museum's collection.

Art+ is an augmented reality app for the Norton Museum in West Palm Beach. The app is intended to engage young audiences and their families through art-making and play.

Centered around select contemporary pieces in the museum's collection, Art+ features six bespoke augmented reality activities. Each activity invites visitors to create and install new virtual artworks informed by the original work's form and the artist’s process.

Through puzzles, performance, and virtual art-making, Norton Art+ provides a digital museum experience that's highly creative and participatory.

Art+ was developed in collaboration with Local Projects.

Nick Cave's Soundsuits are wearable costumes meant to obscure identity, freeing the wearer from other people's judgement. In a museum setting, the suits are often exhibited as static sculptures. With Art+, visitors are invited to wear the Soundsuit themselves and experience the costume as a vehicle for performance, expression and empowerment.

Recreating Pae White's Eikón by crinkling a virtual foil tapestry.

Ugo Rondinone's Moonrise sculptures are large scale busts originally derived from masks. For this experience, we used the iPad's front-facing camera and face-tracking technology to translate facial expressions to a virtual sculpture's pose. After locking in their pose, users are asked to texture the virtual artwork using finger swipes and imprints, in a way that mimics the artist's own texturing process. Finally, visitors install their personalized Moonrise piece in the museum's garden as part of an augmented reality gallery that's viewable by other visitors.

Norton Art+: Claes Oldenburg & Coosje van Bruggen’s Typewriter Eraser

Claes Oldenburg & Coosje van Bruggen's Typewriter Eraser, Scale X inspired a virtual driving game in which visitors race a mini-eraser around the museum's main entrance fountain. The game challenges visitors to erase virtual letters scattered around the fountain by driving over them. With each letter erased, a player's eraser grows in scale, eventually matching the original sculpture.

Norton Museum Art+: Danh Vo, We the People

Danh Vō’s We The People is a full-scale replica of the Statue of Liberty, split into 250 individual pieces spread around the globe. We The People invites us to "experience this world famous icon on a human scale, and to reflect on the meaning of liberty from multiple perspectives" (Public Art Fund).

For Vō's piece, we asked visitors to place a virtual version of Lady Liberty in the museum gallery at human scale. We then challenged people to locate the Norton Museum's piece of the sculpture within the larger artwork. Upon solving this puzzle, the statue animates into a deconstructed "exploded" view - encouraging visitors to consider how each individual piece in We The People comes together as part of a conceptual whole.

Promotional video for Art+, courtesy of Local Projects. Select photography also courtesy of Local Projects.

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