Out There: Connecting people, places and stories

How can museums employ new media to enhance their visitors' experience and their collections' accessibility? With the Internet moving into the public domain through wireless connections, broadband mobile telephony, and location-aware technology, museums are no longer bound by their physical limits (the building), but can use all relevant spaces, be it the city, the country or the public domain.Technology enables audiences to access, produce, and share media everywhere and at all times, and museums are quite far on in digitizing large parts of their collections. The combination of 24-hour on-line audience availability and rich digitised cultural musem content brings ample opportunities to create new cultural experiences.In this context, Waag Society recently developed a number of projects in which users are guided by mobile technology. The paper gives an overview of these projects and argues that the physical non-institutional environment is a great setting for appreciating cultural content and inducing active user participation.