SEARCHER STUDIO SEARCHER X DMG

SEARCHER Studio is a collective of art, design, and data experts exploring creative ways for people to engage with digital heritage collections. The team leads a European co-funded project that experiments with the complete collection data of three European museums to develop new methods for fostering participatory curation in museum galleries. The studio includes data scientist Valentin Vogelmann (Wereldmuseum, NL), artistic researcher Jon Stam (LUCA School of Arts/KU Leuven, BE), media artist Boris Smeenk (Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences, NL), designer Maja Kolar (Oaza Collective, HR), and design engineer Thomas Hügin (Studio Platypus, DE).

SEARCHER x DMG showcases an interactive prototype inviting people to search for relationships within the collections of the Design Museum Ghent. Inspired by the image atlases of Aby Warburg (1866–1929), SEARCHER reimagines the atlas as a dynamic co-curatorial 'thinking space', where searching and finding become spatial and social acts.

The project embraces the intuitive ability of people to highlight what is meaningful and utilizes machine-learning techniques to analyze the complex interrelations between chosen artifactsand the rest of the collection, aiding users in creating new stories.