CGD

The website of the exhibition Czech Innovation Expo, designed by Jan Drozda, Mikuláš Křen, Vítek Škop and Adam Uchytil, invites to the event with a sentence straightforwardly discouraging the potential visitors: "An exhibition of nothing." What?

But there actually is something in the exhibition space. True, it looks untidy as if the installation team sloppily ripped off the banners from the walls and negligently dropped several wooden transportation boxes in the  middle of the room after the closing. The apocalypse has not arrived yet, but we definitely are in a post-expositional landscape. Our guide of these ruins is – how else – a mobile application which, via photographic camera, offers an image of a real exhibition space where senseless fragments of banners on the walls come to live. The application in this case does not augment real objects (AR), but instead connects to abstract fragments scattered throughout the exhibition space; fragments which turn up to be parts of elegant moving schemes and sketches.

From both graphic and technological point, the Czech Innovation Expo is an inventive, ecological and communicative way of solving the uneasy task to design an educative transportable exhibition. Viewers are exposed to unwinding loops schematically featuring the principles of the famed inventors of Czech origin – Ressl's propeller, Heyrovský's polarograph, Wichterle's first lens machine and others. The display not only introduces to the traditional pioneering discoverers but also to the present- day innovators and draws attention to Czech companies which employ innovative technologies.

The concept of the exhibition as such is innovative enough to keep up with the presented subjects, and we are convinced that it will brilliantly inspire the future use of augmented reality in both applied and free artistic disciplines.

Vít Havránek