In October 2016, ARoS Art Museum in Aarhus, Denmark unveiled ARoS Public, a reinvention of the art museum experience as an innovative public forum for learning and interpretation. The ARoS team challenged Local Projects to create interactive installations that would transform an entire floor of the museum into a “mental fitness center,” by engaging visitors’ senses, stimulating their imaginations, and creating new forms of social connection around art.

The result is ARoS Public, a community forum containing new workshops, an artist-in-residence studio, a salon, and three digital interactive exhibits developed by Local Projects: The Art of Creativity, The Art of Commentary, and The Art of Looking.

The Art of Creativity, also called “The Portrait Machine,” asks visitors to play the role of artist or muse, by using existing artworks to make their own. Visitors can assume the role of artist or muse. The muse’s challenge is to match a pose on the screen, which is tracked and scored by a spatial camera in real time. The artist then selects art from the museum’s collection and maps selected art pieces on top of the model’s portrait.

The Art of Commentary, also called “The Commentary Box,” records conversations between two visitors, revealing individual connections to works of art. Each pair chooses an artwork and is presented with a question to provoke humor, conversation, and personal anecdotes. Their comments are recorded while natural language processing pulls out keywords from their discussion. Visitors leave with their own unique GIF combining keywords and photos of their conversation, the perfect shareable memento of their trip to ARoS Public.

The Art of Looking, also known as “The Eye Catcher,” gives visitors the opportunity to challenge their attention spans by focusing deeply on a single work of art, and to discover insights about how people look at art. Using eye-tracking technology over 20 years in the making, this interactive traces the movement of visitor

Traditional museums are not designed to encourage social interactions. ARoS specifically asked Local Projects to change that with Aros Public. Each of the ARoS Public experiences invites visitors to create, share, converse and collaborate through the museum’s collection. It’s especially focused towards showing visitors the hidden ways we look at art, presenting complex and hidden means that viewers use to engage with artworks, and presenting those insights in a fun and engaging way.