When RFIDs meet artist's painting

This work challenges the conventional art experience. It brings together the fields of art, science, and software integration. The goal was to create a new kind of painting based on embedded technology, experimenting with a new media: paintings augmented with RFIDs. The aim was to achieve interaction between the artist's paintings and art gallery visitors: RFIDs deliver the living voice and words of the artist. They are artist's prompts for visitors. Tags can be read or written through an NFC enabled mobile handset. RFIDs are easy to use. They can provide audio and text-rich information. They can also carry references to web sites allowing downloads of content. The user receives a rich level of information delivered on their NFC mobile phone. RFID tags and NFC mobile phones are a new flexible communication tool closing the gap between artists and the public. A painting by Olivier Haberman has been used to demonstrate our proposal. The effects of this new kind of painting have been evaluated with a diverse group of people.