Rosemaling Studio
Reopening a dialogue
with a tradition behind glass.
Project details
Digital Rosemåling Studio is an interactive installation where visitors draw on a tablet and watch their strokes become Norwegian rosemaling in real time on the screen beside them. Rosemaling is folk painting: scrollwork and saturated colour on everyday objects through the 18th and 19th centuries, each region with its own hand, passed from master to apprentice along a path almost no one can enter anymore. Built in Tokyo as a master's project at Keio University, and exhibited in Oslo at the Norwegian Museum of Cultural History.
At the same time, we have shifted from making culture to consuming it. Digital Rosemåling Studio tries to turn that around: instead of looking at rosemaling behind glass, you become a co-creator, and you meet a living tradition with your own hands.
- Year
- 2026
- Context
- Master's project, Keio University (KMD)
- Partners
- Norsk Folkemuseum
- Exhibited
- 22-25 April 2026, Oslo
- My role
- Concept, AI model, real-time system, exhibition design
Concept
The exhibition
Illustration of the room, generated with Google Gemini from a photograph of the installation. Select a marker to see the photograph of each zone.
The sourceBowl NF.2023-0908, Norsk Folkemuseum. This one object is the whole training set: photographed and split into twenty square motif crops, mirrored to forty, each paired with a text description. The model runs only locally and is not released openly, because AI rosemaling at scale could erase the regional distinctiveness that is the heritage.
The result
Credits
- Kjersti Valland Therkildsen
- Concept, AI training, real-time system and design
- Norsk Folkemuseum
- Exhibition partner and source material (bowl NF.2023-0908)
- Vest-Telemark Museum
- Collection visit and conversations on regional rosemaling
- Keio University (KMD)
- Embodied Media, academic framework
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