The Expanded Worlds, a free translation of the English technical term Augmented Reality, describe a reality that is expanded with the help of a technical device, a smartphone or a tablet. The Expanded Worlds are an interdisciplinary media art project and a creative experiment in conveying museum content through the use of contemporary technologies. In this project, the large advertising posters placed at central locations throughout cities are recognized by a specially developed app and replaced with new content on the display: All you have to do this, you hold a smartphone in the direction of the poster and a work of art appears on the screen instead of the advertisement.

The Expanded Worlds consist of two parts, with the first part being location-based and only available to experience in Marl starting August 12th. This urban media art exhibition follows a route in Marl-Hüls, which starts at the new location of the museum at the Martin Luther King School. Students from the Folkwang University of the Arts in Essen and other young artists from North Rhine-Westphalia have created ten new media art works for this project - videos, animations or acoustic-visual experiments - which are assigned to specific advertising posters and take part in a walk of about an hour. This format is similar to a classic outdoor exhibition, where the works of art are communicated using small technical devices that have become indispensable in our everyday lives: this art is virtual, it does not need picture frames or concrete bases.

In the second part, those interested from all over North Rhine-Westphalia can experience the advertising posters in their neighborhood as exhibition areas of an augmented reality. The Skulpturenmuseum Marl owns around 700 works on canvas as well as drawings and graphics on paper, which have not been on view for a long time because the museum focuses mainly on sculpture, video and sound art. A selection of around 200 works of art is now being made accessible in this technically advanced form. They are landscape paintings, still lifes or depictions of people that were bought by the city of Marl in the late 1960s as decoration for representative locations in the then new town hall, long before the museum existed.

The Extended Worlds are a joint project by Anastasija Delidova and Philip Popien of the Essen media art duo Kollektiv 42, Robin Römer and the programmers from cityscaper GmbH from Aachen and the Skulpturenmuseum Marl.

Expanded worlds - urban media art in Marl opens on Friday, August 12, 2022 at 6 p.m. at Georg-Herwegh-Straße 67. Museum director Georg Elben and the head of the cultural department of the city of Marl, Claudia Schwidrik-Grebe, will speak.

Participating artists:

Lotta Bauer, Thiemo Frömberg, Hamidreza Ghasemi, Huong Huynh, Elena Kruglova, Donja Nasseri, Jana Kerima Stolzer & Lex Rütten, Julia Unkel

The texts for the media art works were written by students at the Ruhr University Bochum within the seminar "Artistic Interventions in the Smart City" by Professor Dr. Annette Urban.

The project is funded by Medienwerk NRW and the Ministry of Culture and Education NRW.