Case study: Mozarthaus Vienna - Multimedia Installations

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Design and realization of numerous multimedia installations on 1000m² of floor space in the refurbished "Mozarthaus Vienna"

The audiovisual installations in the Mozarthaus were inspired by the media technology and “Worlds of Wonders” of Mozart’s time: then, decades before the invention of photography and film, optical experiments and illusions, automatons and mechanical tricks were becoming fashionable and causing the people of the time to gasp in astonishment. The new media of our age take up this theme, enabling visitors to the exhibition to gain an insight into Mozart’s life and times using all five senses.


Tasks:

The Mozarthaus is Mozart’s last surviving Viennese residence. The aim of this new multimedia exhibition is to market the brand name “Mozarthaus Vienna” (formerly the “Figarohaus”) internationally and to establish it as an attractive museum. It aspires to offer around 180,000 visitors every year the opportunity to discover and experience the world of Mozart. checkpointmedia’s brief was to recreate this world on limited floor space and with very few original artefacts while respecting the restrictions imposed by work on a protected building and ensuring the exhibition has broad, international appeal.


Solutions:

A video and sound installation (“Overture” and “Making of”) greets visitors as soon as they enter the covered courtyard, preparing them for the tour of Mozart's residence.

This tour, accompanied throughout by multimedia attractions, continues on the top floor where a flight over the Vienna of yesteryear reveals the most important landmarks of Mozart's “golden years” in the city (monitor installation “Flight over Vienna).

Small “peep shows” and a large projected panorama showing the famous “Graben nymphs” present the gallantry of the 18th century as an erotic game of discovery.

A video installation on the theme of “Figaro” combines the principle of old-fashioned puzzle blocks with modern aesthetics and video technology.

The tour culminates in the multimedia tribute to “The Magic Flute”: a stage landscape consisting of sets, projections and lighting effects shows an abridged version of “The Magic Flute” as a “virtual mirrored opera” from 1791 to the present day. Film excerpts of legendary productions of the opera are projected onto the partly real, party virtual stage landscape using reflections. Papageno, the audience’s darling down the centuries, moves through time and space as a projection and presents the most important arias from “The Magic Flute”.