Before the invention of photography, painting used to be the best medium for recording visual experience. A painted picture would appear through applaying consecutive layers of paint.

Today, in the era of Photoshop, we paint by photography. Photos from different sources serve us as layers, elements of one digital picture.

In the next part of the Self-service Museum cycle, the audience will be able to show off their creativity by composing multilayer pictures. Photographed objects will be put on six separated planes, with six different colour landscapes.

In the previous edition of Self-service Museum called “Installation for the worlds’ construction” we arranged objects cut out of their contexts on the background of the museum’s architecture. This time we will investigate relation of the objects with natural surroundings. By moving magnetized elements of a collage, we will see how different shapes the same object can get on different backgrounds.

The aim of this creative play is looking for objects’ identity which reveals itself through the diversity of their manifestations. The context of the background gives the objects a specific meaning.

As the theorist and perceptual psychologist Rudolf Arnheim writes: “The changing appearance of a landscape (…) presents an extraordinary richness of sight, and it tests the nature of the object by exposing it to varying conditions.”

The panorama and its components have been designed by Patrycja Mastej, the co-author of ‘Interactive Playground’ (produced by Wro Art Center), presented with a cultural award wARTo by ‘Gazeta Wyborcza’ in 2008.