St. Antony-Hütte

A story-based augmented reality parcours invites you to an interactive discovery tour at four industrial museums. At the St. Antony ironworks in Oberhausen, the Müller cloth factory in Euskirchen, the Nachtigall colliery in Witten and the Lage brickworks, visitors can explore forward-looking topics in a playful way. Will we soon be growing houses from mushrooms? Will we make our clothes from bacteria in the future? Why do scientists dream of power plants made from algae? Can bricks save the climate? It’s all about the future of energy production, extraordinary materials from the laboratory, sustainable urban planning and innovations from the construction industry. The search for answers leads visitors through the virtually expanded game world, which combines analog places with digital elements and history with the future. The AR-Parcours invites visitors to explore the museum grounds with a new perspective and actively think about visions of future living and working environments.

Embedded in a fictional audio play by dramaturge Anita Augustin and supported by virtual 3D graphics by designer Tobias Raschbacher, visitors roam the grounds in “Playspaces”, collect virtual objects or solve tasks, and experience the industrial museums in an audio-visual new way. Based on these themed worlds, Aachen-based artist Tim Berresheim will be showing impressive augmented reality sculptures that can be freely experienced with a mobile device in a digital exhibition space. They take an artistic look at the contents and open up new associative spaces.

The storyLab kiU of the Dortmund University of Applied Sciences and Arts (FH Dortmund) is transforming the industrial archaeological excavation site of St. Antony-Hütte in Oberhausen into a speculative laboratory in which the past and the future are impressively intertwined. A large-scale projection onto the underside of the shingle roof spanning the remains of the ironworks' former production facilities reveals a view of utopian visions of the future and enters into an open dialogue with the foundations below, which are also animated.

In an immersive way, an inspiring associative space is created before the viewer’s eyes in the field of tension between historical pioneering spirit and the mood of departure into a possible future. As part of the theme week FUTURE_resources, the content focus of the audiovisual experience, which digitally expands the place by space and time, is on important questions about the raw materials of the future. St. Antony-Hütte, considered the birthplace of the Ruhr industry, briefly becomes the starting point for a renewed paradigm shift toward a sustainable and future-oriented approach to resources.

A project of storylab kiU in close cooperation with the Koproduktionslabor Dortmund

storyLab kiU Team
Concept: Nicolas Plancq, Max Walter, Max Schweder, Lennart Oberscheidt
VFX Supervisor: Lennart Oberscheidt
VFX Design: Gerrit Hecht, Martin Kuczera, Timo Sodenkamp, Simon Lütkehaus, Tobias Berghaus
Sound: Max Walter
Project Management: Nicolas Plancq
Artistic direction: Harald Opel

Koproduktionslabor Dortmund Team
VFX Design & Programming: Max Schweder
VFX Design: Laurin Bürmann
Sound: Kai Czerwonka

Voice-Over-Stimme: Sarah Yawa Quarshie