Bluefin: Square Touchscreens Bring Nordic Photo Archive to Life

Stockholm’s Nordiska Museet has introduced interactive digital photo albums using 22-inch square touchscreens from Bluefin and content management software from Swedish company Pixilab, according to invidis.com. Swedish distributor Visono Media was also involved in the installation.

The displays are part of the museum’s Nordic Moments exhibition, which draws on an archive of about six million photographs documenting everyday life across the Nordic region from the mid-19th century to the present. The exhibition spans seven rooms, and the interactive installation sits in a section called Photo Albums of Nordic Life. The report notes that only a small share of the collection had been publicly accessible and that flooding at a storage facility damaged parts of the photographic archive, after which negatives were frozen and treated by conservators.

Bluefin’s 22-inch screens are set into custom wooden frames designed to resemble traditional photo albums. Visitors can sit and browse curated sets of images covering subjects such as daily routines, changing seasons and Nordic cultural traditions.

The displays are described as having 1920 x 1920-pixel resolution, 500-nit brightness and integrated Intel computing hardware running Pixilab Blocks software. The 1:1 screen format was chosen to accommodate portrait, landscape and square photographs without the look of a conventional widescreen monitor. “We thought to make a room with screens is not a new thing. But how can we make it more interesting?” said Matti Shevchenko Sandin, producer at Nordiska Museet.

The Blocks platform allows museum staff to manage the digital albums, add new collections and schedule content changes without altering the physical installation.