Museomix — Pimp my Room

Pimp my Room is an installation that lets any visitor redecorate the Louis Majorelle Art Nouveau room. User scenario. The user enters the Louis Majorelle Art Nouveau room and, intrigued by the imposing piano and staircase, comes closer to the furniture. They approach a touch table showing an image of the room, and are invited to redecorate it with images that appear along the bottom of the screen.

They can choose between “wall decorations” and “wall objects”, dragging and resizing them as they wish, then press “Clear” to restore the room to its original state. Every action on the touch table is immediately projected through interactive mapping onto the wall of the room, so the user sees the result of their choices live. Aims. Pimp my Room began above all as a wish to unsettle the notion of the period room and to dust off the Louis Majorelle Art Nouveau room, while bringing out the riches of that architectural style.

We also wanted to fulfil a fantasy many visitors share: to let them personalise, “customise”, and so take ownership of the museum’s rooms and of the works of art themselves. Our intentions. Pimp my Room, a “Bourdieusian” application, questions notions of taste in art: the visitor is free to mix Art Nouveau furniture with other works from the permanent collection of the Arts Décoratifs, and with posters, wallpapers and even videos from different periods.

Beyond that, it is a matter of opening up the very notion of a collection and of a museum: what may or may not be shown? After all, why should one not “customise”, mix Art Nouveau with the Renaissance, the Bauhaus or Lady Gaga? Where are the limits of art, and where do commercialisation and consumption begin? Tools and techniques. Python and Kivy for the touch-table application.

C++ and the Cinder library for the interactive mapping projected into the room. Source code: Gabriel Pelletier for the touch side, Colin Bouvry for the projection side. Physical hardware: a Tangible Display touch table and an InFocus T146 video projector.