CLIENT: Kultur- und Stadthistorisches Museum Duisburg
MARCH 2013

Duisburg’s Museum of Culture and Local History greets visitors in the newly designed “Mercator treasure room”, and takes them on a voyage of discovery on the trail of cartographer Gerhard Mercator, creator of the world’s first atlas in the 16th century. With the cartography technique he invented, the Mercator projection, he laid the foundation for modern cartography. Even today captains and pilots navigate with maps which are created based on this principle. A variety of media installations ensure modern and fun communication of the facts of Mercator’s life and work.

235 MEDIA designed, developed graphically, programmed and realised two interactive media installations for the Mercator treasure room. The monitor installation “Red Wall” gives information about the intellectual conditions and cultural-historical background of the Renaissance, the era of Mercator. The “Interactive World Atlas” gives visitors the possibility of browsing through Mercator’s magnum opus, the “Atlas sive Cosmograhicae Meditationes de Fabrica Mundi et Fabricati Figura” (“Atlas or cosmographic mediations on the creation of the world and the form of creation”), and to examine it closely via a zoom function.

As well as this, 235 MEDIA installed all the media and control technology in the Mercator treasure room.