A Visual Exploration of Two Museum Collections
Two Berlin museum collections in one shared space, arranged by visual and textual similarity so that resonances emerge across catalog boundaries.
A museum that stops sorting and starts associating: this interface places two collections of the Berlin State Museums (SMB/SPK) — fine art paintings and everyday artifacts — in one shared space, arranged not by catalog logic but by similarity, so that resonances across collection boundaries become visible.
The ambition was to move away from object-centeredness: instead of treating a collection as a list of records to query, the interface offers evocative arrangements that invite associative, curiosity-driven exploration — and a more honest picture of the breadth of the holdings than any search result could give.
Under the hood, every object is encoded twice: Google’s BiT-M model extracts a feature vector from the image, and the Multilingual Universal Sentence Encoder one from the description. Concatenated, they form an imprint of how an object looks and what it is about; UMAP reduces these vectors to two dimensions to position every object on the canvas. Hand-drawn keywords — inspired by Moritz Stefaner’s Multiplicity and developed closely with collection experts — float over the machine-generated arrangement to support orientation. Selecting an object opens the path view: details and context on one side, and a trail of the most similar objects by image and title on the other, ready to be followed across both collections.
The visualization is built with Svelte, D3, and PixiJS, continuing the lineage of Past Visions and VIKUS Viewer; early feasibility prototypes ran as Observable notebooks, and everything is published as open source.
Developed with the UCLAB: Mark-Jan Bludau, Viktoria Brüggemann, and Marian Dörk.
