Karlsruhe

Posted on by david

We left Slaffhausen quite early this morning, and got a quick picnic breakfast from the supermarket at the station, before getting  a local train to Karlsruhe.  This was a little slower than the Intercity, but much cheaper – we got a Baden-Württemberg Ticket, which was only 36Eur for both of us and gave us unlimited travel (including on the trams). We got our money’s worth.

It was a scenic (though rather long) ride up through the Black Forest.  Lots of tunnels popping out into wooded valleys, before diving into another tunnel.

We went to see the Schloss in the centre; this was closed for rennovations.  It was also the Karlsruhe marathon – by the time we’d arrived it was towards the tail end of this.

Schloss (geschlossn)

We then got the tram out to the ZKM – Zentrum für Kunst and Median.  This is a modern art museum, media and computer game museum.  As the Schloss was closed, some of it’s museum’s (rather more traditional) art was also on display.

We ended up spending a lot longer here than planned. 

The first gallery was all about the idea of Eros in modern art (apparently – it seemed pretty general to me.

This was fun – an avatar copied your movements
Growing algae in a vat
3d printed coral columns. These were used to mount speakers that played the sounds of a healthy reef to an unhealthy one, so the fish stayed.
The robot moved pulling all the pulleys – it was very  hypnotic
The panels were woven from bare copper, mounted on racks, as an artistic representation of core memory
This was fun. You grabbed the handles and it printed out a fortune cookie
Mine was, I think, “You carry a key that doesn’t fit any lock in this world and that is not a mistake”.

The next gallery was all about the difficulties of preserving,e.g. video art and computer driven art.  Several interesting displays of old kit, and about the decisions around whether to repair, emulate, or re-code from scratch.  There were also lots of interesting examples of art they’d preserved/restored.

A very early precursor to Augmented Reality
I did not

Upstairs was the relocated collection from the Schloss.  I didn’t take so many pictures here:

And above that was the computer game museum.  This was really excellent; organised roughly chronologically, with some fun retro games – most (all?) running on original hardware.  There was also a section on innovative input methods, a section on political games, and a section on accessibility. 

A pacman ghost made of keycaps
East German games console
I remember some of these!
This was fun; there were 5 pedals controlling the thruster on the blue  spaceship. You could play solo or coop to land it on the landing pad. It was very difficult
The Tetris shaped seats were a nice touch
A choose your own text adventure, running.  Definite emf and dorkbot vibes
Design your own level with gaffer tape and then play it
Contort yourself to be the perfect woman.  You had to match the pose shown on the screen. 
We weren’t very good at democracy 🙁  I blame my language skills

We had a quick dinner at a local Imbiss near the gallery (which was also close to a hospital, and seemed to have several patients dining there with family + friends), before a quick train journey to Speyer (again on the day ticket)

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