The Close-up Cloud: Gaining a sense of overview from many details by UCLAB / FH Potsdam

The Close-up Cloud visualizes a selection of 144 negatives from a collection of around 1700 glass negatives by early photographer and previous draftsman Wilhelm Weimar (1857-1917) that has been preserved at the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg (MKG). On negative plates measuring up to 18×24 cm, Weimar photographed over 17 years of art and craft objects from the rapidly growing collection. The range of motifs in these reproduction photographs stretches from massive chests to elegant porcelain.

Designed to support the visual exploration of this collection, the Close-up Cloud invites you to familiarize yourself with the glass negatives and explore its richness in visual details. The sizes of the images in the overview represent the quantitative distribution of the respective iconographic details in the collection. The close-ups become visual navigation elements for exploring the collection, making it possible to experience the glass negatives in a way that would not be possible with the physical objects. Inspired by a light table revealing the wealth of details of individual glass negatives, the Close-up Cloud extends the access to an overview of all keywords assigned in the collection and invites viewers to engage in interactive exploration of these keywords localized/located in the respective pictures.

The Close-up Cloud was a student research project carried out at the University of Applied Sciences Potsdam in cooperation with the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg and with financial support from the Brandenburg Center for Media Studies (ZeM).

Work samples:
https://uclab.fh-potsdam.de/closeupcloud/screencapture.mov
https://uclab.fh-potsdam.de/closeupcloud/assets/video/sequenz2_2311_720_2.mov