Too Fast for the Truth by Robin Coenen

— Making history visible

The documentation of important historical creates famous iconographic artifacts. Almost everybody has seen the images of the first moon landing taken by Neil Armstrong, or the first image of the earth known as »blue marble«.

The engagement with The Met’s open access collection shows that the museum is also in possession of such iconographic documentation, although a lot of it is little known by public .

Around 40 paintings by the Painter Robert Charles Dudley document the laying of the first transatlantic cables in the middle of the 18th century, a huge technological mission with impacts on the interconnected and global society we are today.

— Paintings as diagrams

The goal of the visualization is to let the user enjoy the effects of the beautiful paintings and to augment these paintings with contextual and historical content at the same time. The paintings, grouped thematically, can be navigated as maps; the possibility to zoom gives the user control how to view the artifacts and clickable legends provide more insights about the contents of the paintings.