Coding da Vinci: Festive awards ceremony as grand finale in Stuttgart
By Maximilian Westphal
What if we could rebuild the destroyed Troy in a computer game? Does an application at the interface of fashion and augmented reality make modern art more accessible to visitors? How can we search historical newspapers for relevant events as easily as possible?
Over the last few weeks, more than 20 project teams consisting of coders, creatives, students from various disciplines as well as people interested in culture and technology have been working on questions like these. Participants in the Coding da Vinci Baden-Württemberg 2022 cultural hackathon developed prototypes for digital applications using open data from 34 cultural institutions in the southwest. At a festive awards ceremony last Friday, 24 June, at the Landesmuseum (State Museum) Württemberg, the project teams presented their ideas and were then awarded prizes in five categories.
More than 150 participants experienced the event in an open and cordial atmosphere in the Dürnitz Kulturlounge (Cultural Lounge) of the Landesmuseum Baden-Württemberg. "Technology and culture obviously get along very well," Theresia Bauer, Minister for Science, Research and the Arts of Baden-Württemberg, emphasised in her welcoming address: "The free and creative handling of cultural data, as practised at Coding da Vinci, enables a profitable cooperation of established cultural institutions with the coding scene as well as with students and creative people. This is another important step in the digital opening of our institutions.
The teams presented their projects to all those present and the audience via live stream. The projects could be tried out on site: "Hands on" and "Let's Play" were the order of the day in the afternoon in the Reinhold Würth Hall, which became a bustling hackathon marketplace. The result is a wide range of digital applications: from data visualisations, games and 3D modelling to playful applications with the use of augmented reality elements or artificial intelligence. All projects are now available for viewing and open for further use on this website and can be further edited by interested parties in the future. Special attention will be given here to those projects that were awarded prizes by the jury of experts and the audience:
Most Technical
FLECTURE - reflections OF ARTxFASHION
Anna-Saray, Raimund, Marius and Dennis from the Programming School 42 Heilbronn created a "Magic Mirror". The technically complex installation makes it possible to experience fashion generated from artworks in one's own reflection. The model of a piece of clothing with the texture of a selected painting is displayed with the help of a camera, touch display and artificial intelligence. The project brings motifs and colours from 236 works of art from the Staatsgalerie (State Gallery) Stuttgart into the present day in the context of fashion and technology.
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Best Design
Longing for Italy: Mystery of the Fohr
The role-playing game by Erik, Schara, Wessam and Marie-Hélène (University of Tübingen) combines drawing and painting of the Romantic period, retro optics of early video games and specially created illustrations. In the game, you encounter the spirit of the artist Carl Philipp Fohr and follow in the footsteps of a group of artists who met at the Caffè Greco in Rome in the 19th century. The development of the play started with Italian landscape paintings and portraits by the Heidelberg Romantics, which are among the greatest treasures of the Kurpfälzisches Museum Heidelberg (Palatine Museum Heidelberg).
Most FAIR
The project "ansights" makes it possible to automatically evaluate documents in terms of content and link them to the content of historical newspapers. "Ansights" automatically generates keywords from uploaded documents and links them together. The results are recorded visually and processed according to their degree of overlap in content. The application includes records from different sources: Mannheim University Library, Haus der Geschichte Baden-Württemberg, Gemeinsame Normdatei (GND) and Wikidata.
Most Curious Approach
The international project team "ScrapHumor" negotiates the major themes of humour and subjectivity in its card game. Stories by comic author René Schweizer from the collection of HumorCare e.V. meet curious exhibits from the Landesmuseums Württemberg. The analogue card game finds its extension into the virtual space with the help of digital tokens, through which you can receive one of the lovely designed playing cards as a NFT (non-fungible token) after winning a game.
Everybody's Darling (Audience Award)
Jana, Claire-Marie, Stephanie, Dennis and Corvin designed a building game to learn about the different phases and the artefacts found in the city of Troia. With small mini-games, the city destroyed by a catastrophe is rebuilt. The data used, with photographs of original ceramics, archaeological find drawings and maps, come from the MUT - Museum of the University of Tübingen. The game could be made accessible to the public in the museum in the future, and make Troia a playful experience for everyone.
Jugend-Hackathon "Hack to the Future meets Coding da Vinci"
The secret stars of the day were young talents between 12 and 17 years old. For the first time in the history of the Hackathon, young people took part in Coding da Vinci in cooperation with "Hack To The Future" - a programme of the initiative Kindermedienland (Children's Media Land) Baden-Württemberg. "I sacrificed my night for the project," confessed one of the participants on stage, another explained his own project by saying "It's a shooter, but just not only!". "With Scratch and Unity," one of the youngest participants answered laconically when asked how the project was realised. This resulted in an application that uses generative artificial intelligence to continue Japanese transverse scrolls from the Hornmoldhaus city museum in Bietigheim-Bissingen, a jump-and-run game for which a dataset from the University of Tübingen from a Troia research project served as inspiration, and a digital treasure hunt that leads to historical places in Mannheim. The young people were supported in the implementation of their projects by volunteer mentors from the games and IT industry.
Even if this was to be the last Coding da Vinci hackathon for the time being - it opened up promising perspectives on dealing with open cultural data for all participants.
To the Coding da Vinci website
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Funded in the Cultural Digital program of the Kulturstiftung des Bundes (Federal Cultural Foundation)
Funded by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media
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Coding da Vinci - The Culture Hackathon is funded by the Kulturstiftung des Bundes is a joint project of the Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek (German Digital Library), the Forschungs- und Kompetenzzentrum Digitalisierung Berlin (Research and Competence Centre for Digitisation Berlin) (digiS), the Open Knowledge Foundation Deutschland and Wikimedia Deutschland.