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Rijksstudio Breeding Show

Tom van der Heiden, minor Open Design

What if anyone could use, re-use and remix images of the Dutch Masters? 
This year the first project in the Open Design minor was a collaboration with the Rijksmuseum. The museum is currently digitalizing her entire collection and sharing the high-res images, free of license, via an online platform called Rijksstudio. The Rijks encourages anyone to work with the materials and (re)create new products, images and other applications based on their collection. 
As Willem de Kooning students we were challenged to look at the Rijksstudio project from an Open Design perspective. We explored what kind of new creations already arose from the shared images, and how Rijksstudio could further facilitate her audience to work with the collection. My research led to a project called Rijksstudio Breeding Show. The Breeding Show is a tool to manipulate images from the collection. I have made an action, a plugin for Photoshop that people can download for free. It allows you to manipulate images in a number of pre-defined steps. First the user is asked to select two images from the Rijksstudio collection online. Once the action script starts it begins to merge the images into some new kind of ‘breed’. The two works are scattered into pieces of various shapes and they start flying across the screen, mixing up into a new form. The work changes step by step, allowing the user to stop the manipulation anytime. The user can also interfere in the process by manually adding other operations if they feel the need. The final iterations are collected in an alternative online archive with a completely different look and feel. I only attribute the name of the re-maker, as the work is now theirs. How nice is this, if you have just re-mixed images of Van Gogh en Vermeer!?!