By Sam Edens, intern Open Design
At the end of October 2012, the Rijksmuseum launched Rijksstudio, an open collection of 125.000 works of the museum. The good thing about this online collection is that all the imagery is available in a high resolution and that you can download these for your own use! We showed people what you can do with this collection at the Bijenkorf stores in Amsterdam and Eindhoven.
You can zoom in at every brush stroke of the famous painting Melkmeisje by Vermeer, download an old print of a geisha to print it as a sticker on your smartphone or use an 17th century broche as inspiration for a new one. At the website you can collect your personal selection of works in a new studio (about 20.000 people already did!), just like with Pinterest, and share these with your friends.
To show people what you can do with the images from the collection, Waag was asked for some help. Four days long, our mobile Rijksstudio visited two stores of the Bijenkorf (in Amsterdam and Eindhoven), where visitors could create their own piece of art. The mobile Fablab, in the form of the Fablab Truck, was present with a lasercutter, and we helped people to convert the chosen images to something that could be made with the lasercutter. Among the shoppers, one could smell the burnt wood and sometimes plastics as well. Their were four computers available for the public to create their own masterpieces based on the Rijksmuseum collection. The results varied between earrings and jewellery based on old prints, to angels to hang in the Xmas tree, hangers in the form of dogs, cows and tap birds and paintings engraved in wood.
The photo shows the work of Frans Huys (1600): mask with beard and curls. On the right the wooden version by Laurens Schuurkamp fixed on a mirror.
