CULTURE-SPAIN: Books, Art Come Alive in Interactive Museum

By Tito Drago Reprint | | Print |

Tito Drago

MADRID, Oct 10 1995 (IPS) - Rare and valuable books and paintings by Spanish masters come alive for visitors to a new interactive museum opening in Madrid this week (Oct. 17).

The museum, housed in the National Library, uses holographics to display some 500 valuable texts previously accesible only to specialist scholars due to their fragility.

Visitors enter a holographic booth where they can recreate scenes from the ancient books and can see and hear the characters in virtual reality. By sitting in front of a computer screen the visitor can “turn” the pages of the book and listen to the text in Spanish or other languages.

Information on the writing and the history of the book in question will also be available, as well as studies and commentaries.

Ruth Zauner, a consultant in the installation of the museum, said some of the rarest jewels in the National Library can be displayed – a fragment of a fourth century Greek bible, and the Beato containing the Commentary on the Revelations written by San Beato de Liebana.

Children can also enter the world of fantasy by, for example, looking at ‘Alice in Wonderland’ – the novel by Lewis Carroll.

Visitors can learn printing techniques such as wood engraving or silkscreen printing by visiting artisanal workshops in interactive videos.

The museum occupies seven rooms in the National Library, with 20 interactive multi-media systems. Five are dedicated to holographic simulation, and there are six interactive panels – users can select what they want to see and hear – four systems that combine digital video and video discs, two multimedia slide shows and a CD-Rom stand.

In the CD-Rom section, paintings by famous artists such as Velazquez, Goya, Durero, Rembrandt and Murillo will be on display and the voices of poets, artists and writers like Pio Baroja, Miguel de Unamuno, Leon Felipe, Vicente Aleixandre and Pablo Picasso can be heard.

To install all this took nearly five years at a cost of five million dollars, Zauner said.