About the Chicago 00 Project

    

The CHICAGO 00 project is a collaboration between filmmaker, Geoffrey Alan Rhodes, and the Chicago History Museum, to create a series of new media products that activate the museum's archive. Exceptional examples of historical film, photos, and sound are combined with present-day sites to tell historical stories. Experiences are published and shared for free through Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality apps, 360 VR videos, and Google Streetview panoramas.

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CHICAGO 00 came about through the meeting of two Chicagoans at a museum technologies conference in Korea. In 2013, John Russick, the vice president for interpretation and education at the Chicago History Museum, and Geoffrey Alan Rhodes, filmmaker and Associate Professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, began an ongoing conversation about the promise of augmented and virtual reality for museums and archives. This conversation led to collaboration in a series of prototypes and demonstrations of app-based augmented reality history experiences, that have become an ongoing series of published projects available for free to the community.

The project is named after the corner of State and Madison Streets where the city’s street numbering begins, the site where the first Chicago00 demonstrations were held. For those first projects, a team scoured the Chicago History Museum’s extensive archive for images of the site throughout the past century, digitized images previously available only in print and negative, researched the exact location and perspective of the photographer when these images were captured, and matched them with current street corners and viewpoints to narrate the place from these historical documents; this became the process for every Chicago00 episode.

From the beginning CHICAGO 00 has had three primary goals:

• To activate archives by creating history experiences outside the museum walls,
• To engage new communities by bringing those experiences to the places and communities where the stories occurred,
• To experiment by seeking out synergies between new media technology and old media content and create historical experiences beyond documentary films and coffee table books.

All Chicago00 episodes are free to download and published through multiple platforms, including apps, videos, and Streetview panoramas. Multiple new projects are in development, focusing on sites and stories throughout the city, and exceptional media content from the archive. We are always seeking new partnerships and audiences.

Project Credits