EMDialog is an interactive installation that was commissioned by the Glenbow Museum in Calgary, Canada as part of the Emily Carr: New Perspectives on a Canadian Icon exhibition. It is the result of an interdisciplinary collaboration between Holly Schmidt, a practicing artist, and Uta Hinrichs, an engineer for computational visualistics and PhD student at the University of Calgary.
Responding to Emily Carr's life and work EMDialog invites museum visitors to explore the extensive discourse about Emily Carr in an interactive way. The installation consists of a large interactive display showing two interlinked visualizations that present commentary and imagery about Emily Carr's life and work along temporal and contextual dimensions. Visitors can explore these visualizations through direct touch interaction. The content of the display is cloned and projected on a wall making the visualizations and the interaction with the display visible to a larger audience. Speakers embedded in the display provide ambient forest sounds of birds, water, and wind to convey Emily Carr's experience of painting in-situ.
The project was funded and supported by the University of Calgary, the Glenbow Museum, and SMART Technologies Inc. who designed and provided the interactive tabletop display that was used for the installation.
EMDialog is finalist at the Canadian New Media Awards 2008 in the category Excellence in Culture, Lifestyle, and Arts.
Uta Hinrichs, Holly Schmidt and Sheelagh Carpendale. EMDialog: Bringing Information Visualization into the Museum. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (Proceedings Visualization / Information Visualization 2008), 14(6):1181-1188, November-December, 2008.