Rembrandt & His Pupils
For hundreds of years, people have struggled to tell the difference between the works of the master and those of his students.
Meet the Project
In 2010 the Getty Center in Los Angeles asked Bluecadet to build an interactive kiosk experience to complement a special exhibition of work by Rembrandt and his students.
The exhibit featured work by Rembrandt's students Ferdinand Bol, Gerbrand van den Eeckhout, Samuel van Hoogstraten and others displayed alongside the master's own drawings and etchings.
What We Did
Our strategy was for people to experience first-hand the centuries-old problem of telling the difference between drawings by Rembrandt and his pupils.
We created an interactive experience that presented similar works from the master and his students alongside each other, giving users the ability to explore and dive into the works themselves.
How We Did It
The project succeeded because it seamlessly combined a familiar interaction design pattern with a new one through the creative use of technology.
The fundamental interaction was simple: people browsed a fixed series of images arranged in pairs. The sizzle came from repurposing mapping software to deliver high-resolution images of the works on display that people manipulated with gestures - at the time still a new thing.
Curators added annotation and commentaries. This extra layer of meaning was one thing to experience digitally, but it was something else entirely when experienced in the same space where the works themselves were on display.