Èvokâ II: Public Opening during the European Heritage Days

Èvokâ II is a new permanent installation that invites visitors into a radically new form of interaction with the BCU’s cultural and documentary heritage; nearly 70,000 images, 10,000 hours of audio, 2300 hours of video and over a million articles. By forging links between visitors’ own memories and this institutional archive, the installation reveals the connections between individual and collective identity.

The project is the result of four years of research in interaction design, archival science, artificial intelligence and cognitive science, supported by the Swiss Data Science Center. Building on earlier experiments with a mobile version of the installation, Èvokâ II now takes two forms: a permanent installation open to the public, and an ongoing body of research into the possibilities and challenges of applying artificial intelligence to local and historical heritage collections.

The project opens up fundamentally new perspectives for our society by using digital technologies in a way that runs counter to social media: it explores the role of our heritage in preserving a collective identity, our sense of belonging and our commitment to the local area and the places where we live.

During the European Heritage Days, the installation will be unveiled to the public for the first time in the presence of:

• Angélique Boschung, director of BCU Fribourg
• Silvia Zehnder-Jörg, head of the Section Fribourg Collections and Cultural Activities, BCU Fribourg
• Nicolas Henchoz, director of EPFL+ECAL Lab
• Lara Défayes, interaction designer and project manager, EPFL+ECAL Lab
• Sofia Lelis, design researcher, EPFL+ECAL Lab
• Lison Christe, scenographer, EPFL+ECAL Lab
• Dr Alessandro Nesti, principal data scientist, Swiss Data Science Center
• Elena Balzardi, vice-director of the Swiss National Library