The Digital Museum

With the relaunch of its website, the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen has reacted to the digital change in the museum sector and the potential associated with this to enable other forms of art experience. As the central communication platform for the two museums K20 and K21 on the Internet, the website is also a platform for multimedia formats: This includes new moving image and podcast series, as well as the development of a multimedia storytelling tool, the “K+ Digital Guide” for current exhibitions. The formats and the website can be viewed online as of March 17, 2020 at: www.kunstsammlung.de

This broad spectrum of digital services is not intended to replace a live museum visit, but it does offer the opportunity to experience the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen from home or on the go on a desktop, tablet, or smartphone in German or English free of charge.

With the “K+ Digital Guide,” the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen presents for the first time a digital booklet on its current exhibitions. Developed as a prototype for Pablo Picasso. The War Years 1939–1945, the virtual guide offers users detailed information about the exhibition. Videos, image magnifiers, timelines, and historical materials, as well as original recordings of contemporary eyewitnesses and personal impressions of exhibition visitors provide a multimedia and in-depth insight into the work of this world-famous artist during the Second World War.

For podcast fans, the Kunstsammlung now offers its own podcast. The first series with four episodes was created on the occasion of the exhibition In order of appearance. Graduates of the Düsseldorf Academy of Art 2019 and can be accessed in the media library.

Highlights from the collection of classical avant-gardes, post-war modernism, and international contemporary art can now be discovered virtually in the newly conceived “Collection online”: artists’ biographies, historical contexts, and histories of individual works provide comprehensive insight into the collecting activities of the state collection since 1961. The specially developed landing pages provide information on the current collection presentations in both K20 and K21, recent acquisitions, and new works, as well as the new image clips.

In light of the museum’s current closure, the new website can also be used to make digital use of a wide range of educational formats. These will be continuously available online on the website and the social media channels of the Kunstsammlung.

The corporate design of the website was developed by the lead agency Boros and, in cooperation with the Hamburg agency Giraffentoast, transferred into digital form and adapted to state-of-the-art digital technology.

The relaunch of the website and the development of the digital formats were made possible by the Ministry of Culture and Science of North Rhine-Westphalia.