Who writes history?
- Museum aan de A ↗
- Groningen, The Netherlands
- 2025
Who writes history?
What does history look like when it's still being written? That's the question Museum aan de A posed in Who Writes History?, a pop-up exhibition at the Groninger Museum. Together with Museum aan de A and its partners, Tapart built the MadAtahub: a shared data foundation that connects historical archives, museum collections, and live data streams from across the city and province to power data-driven stories.
Challenge
Groningen's history lives in archives, museum collections, government databases, and real-time data streams from the city and province. The challenge was to bring all of this together into stories that enrich the physical exhibition, and to use live data like water levels and traffic flows to show that history isn't fixed. It's constantly being made.
We created
The MadAtahub
From data to meaning
To bring Groningen's stories to life, Tapart built the MadAtahub: a shared data foundation drawing from historical archives, museum collections, geodata, and live data feeds. From this foundation, three experiences took shape: an interactive historical atlas, a robotic installation that writes and rewrites history in real time, and a portal connecting visitors to cultural heritage across the province.
- Concepting
- UX/UI Design
- Motion Design
- Front-end Development
- Hardware
Historical atlas
The station works as a historical atlas, revealing the development of Groningen across different time periods and themes. Data from the MadAtahub brings together a wide range of sources, translated into clear, consistent visualisations on the map. The formats are reusable, forming a flexible foundation for the future museum.
Writing history
Writing History is an art installation by Paul&Albert in which an industrial robotic arm writes and erases history on a glass vitrine, combining historical facts from the Groninger Archives with live data such as water levels, traffic flows, and weather conditions. The result is an installation that is always changing, always alive. Tapart developed the data feed and management system that keeps it running.
Portal to heritage
A touchscreen portal invites visitors to explore cultural heritage across the province of Groningen through a thematic map. On the adjacent wall, a projected map of the province highlights different locations and themes in turn. Museum aan de A serves as the starting point, a role the portal will continue to fulfil in the permanent museum.
The collaboration with Tapart is defined by technical expertise and mutual trust in each other’s knowledge. Together, we developed a museum application that is both conceptually strong and thoughtfully designed in practice.