Museum Sound and Vision reopened after more than two years

After a two-year refurbishment, the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision in Hilversum is open again. Since this morning, visitors can once again visit the museum that houses the institute. According to manager Karen Drost, it has been adapted to modern times.

“The old museum came from 2006,” says Drost NH News. “After that, YouTube and the smartphone took off and we now consume media in a completely different way than then. It is no longer just about taking in news, but much more about sharing.”

Everyone in the Netherlands knows the institute in Hilversum. As the location of the Top 2000-Café. Or as an action center of Giro555, such as next Wednesday when radio and television stations will once again collect money together, this time for the victims of the earthquake in Turkey and Syria. But Sound and Vision is also the archive of Dutch radio, television, film and photo, including the old Polygoon newsreels.

And it is therefore a museum, although the institute itself prefers to speak of an interactive one experience. With a hypermodern ‘media reactor’ as the new centre: elongated screens show continuously changing images. Visitors can upload and watch their own videos there.

Other new elements include an illuminated interactive floor where people can play games and a ‘fake news machine’. In the latter part, people can try to recognize fake news, says Drost. “That’s how you learn to distinguish news from nonsense.”

In the midst of all that audiovisual violence, you would almost forget that Sound and Vision is also an ordinary museum. For example, there is a Nokia 3210, the mobile phone that came on the market in 1999.

There is also a birth announcement in a display case. Guus Job, born August 20, 2007. For those in the know: that was the first Farmer seeks wife-baby. It is standing according to Drost “for the role of reality TV in our lives”.