The WALL

Vaeggen (The Wall) is a massive but mobile interactive video installation on the streets of Copenhagen that allows citizens and visitors to explore in depth the cultural past, present, and future of the city together with its diverse ethnic and cultural communities. Open and inclusive in its philosophy and operating mode, Vaeggen also provides a vehicle for citizens to contribute their own material to the experience via its innovative street level and web user interfaces. Multi-touch and multi-user, the interface uses a strong graphical idiom understandable by all community groups and encourages them to not only explore the 14,000 cultural assets accumulated to date, but to also create new original contents that enrich, comment on or incorporate the heritage collection. The giant on-screen touch keyboards make it possible to email these assets around the world and insert them into their own social media networks. Based initially on the rich heritage collections of the Museum of Copenhagen, Vaeggen is also a public multimedia repository for new discoveries emerging from the large-scale archaeological excavations being undertaken in the old city centre for the next 7 years. In the first half year of operation, Vaeggen has attracted more than 400,000 users, who viewed more than 2 million cultural media assets, sent more than 60,000 digital postcards, and uploaded 2,500 new contributions of their own. The idea is already being taken up by other cities in Scandinavia and attracting interest around the globe.