Serendipity

A tool to explore and discover the Archive of digital Art of the Zentrum for Bildwissenschaften, Krems.

Serendipity [ˌsɛ.rɛn.ˈdɪp.ə.ti], the faculty or phenomenon of finding valuable or agreeable things not sought for.

Merriam-Webster dictionary

What is Serendipity?

Serendipity is an immersive application to playfully arrange, (re)combine, and sort image content from the Archive of Digital Art. Its intention is to provide an archival experience based on exploration and active engagement to support the discovery of new connections and meaningful questions in the field of media art. To achieve these goals, we put our focus on making the potential of the ADA thesaurus with its 600+ terms accessible to users. As artists upload their works themselves on ADA the thesaurus serves as a keyword system for semantic tagging of the content. Serendipity allows the users to filter and display all documented artworks by freely selecting and chaining any of the terms available. They also have the possibility to create many different filter chains for diverse thematical interests. Filtered content is then visually presented in an immersive environment with additional information when hovering over the images. Users can move artworks in a “favorites” section to create their individual collections, which can then be exported to the IIIF viewer Mnemosyne for further analysis and research.