Single Cup Headphones & SoundClips – Greve Museum
“The products from Blackbox-av provided us with a simple yet robust AV solution that enhanced our exhibition’s interactivity and storytelling. Their reliability and ease of use made them an invaluable part of our setup at Greve Museum.”
– Kamilla Hjortkjær, Curator for Greve Museum
The Greve Museum in Denmark consists of a beautiful four-winged farmhouse from 1826 combined with a gorgeous garden. A large focus of the museum is that of Hedebo stitching – a local embroidery tradition dating back to 1780.
Naturally, this is the perfect place for a new exhibition; “Broderist x Greve Museum – F**k bagsiden“, an experimental collaboration between the museum and highly unorthodox Danish embroider Trine Runge Jessen (@Broderist) who became a viral sensation during lockdown and founded a popular Facebook group; “Embroidery without f**king flowers and bunnies”.
For this exhibition, Greve Museum also wanted to step into new territory by making an audiovisual and interactive experience that wasn’t a simple summary of Broderist’s works, but also a showcase of her personality – highlighting the many possibilities and mental health benefits of partaking in embroidery. Mathias Loose Nielsen, Technical staff member at Greve Museum, goes on to explain how our equipment helped bring life to their exhibition;
For the sound stations, we handcrafted five of the same rectangular wooden boxes, all painted white, to be hung on the walls of the exhibition in various locations. Using high-quality velcro on the backside for easy access and service, we installed four SoundClip-12s and a single SoundClip-8L in the five boxes along with all the necessary components and accessories for power, file, and cable management. On the outside of the lids, we installed Tear Drop Mounting Plates and Magnetic Hangers for Single Cup Headphones to rest on and be easily removed for listening by the visitors, providing them with Broderist’s thematically relevant storytelling and/or commentary on the particular object(s) on display.
We initially wanted to use the Single Cup Headphones’ AutoPlay-functionality on all five sound stations, but since we had multiple audio files for some of the sound stations, we ended up only using the AutoPlay-function on two out of five boxes, instead opting for manual buttons installed on top of the other three boxes to manually trigger different audio clips.
For the video station, the screen is connected via HDMI behind the wall to a VideoClip-HD8, which has been installed using the same high-quality Velcro on its backside inside the wooden box to make it easily removable. On the box’s slanted lid, a total of five buttons have been installed, with each button triggering a different video clip of Broderist showcasing a different embroidery technique – a sort of step-by-step guide for the viewer to pick and choose from.
When no clip has been triggered to play, a long looping clip of Broderist automatically plays on the screen, with her sitting in a waiting position embroidering away in the same chair to create continuity in the image. The idea was for Broderist to ‘sit and wait’ for a visitor to end her boredom by pressing a button.
In general, so far, we’re very satisfied with the Blackbox-av products we have used and would not hesitate to recommend them to others for the same purposes. The products are easy to use and their sturdy and reliable build invites one to trust them to withstand the pressures of public use, such as museum exhibitions. Their compact design and utilitarian aesthetics make them easy to fit in most places you’d want to install them, and we have no doubt they’d probably survive most things, having already been dropped a few times by a clumsy technician. Furthermore, the support and repairability options and the availability of replacement parts for most of your products are also major pluses.
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