DATACITY PARIS & DIGIMUSE SINGAPORE
In 2015 the City of York was designated as a UNESCO City of Media Arts. DATACITY is a three month exhibition at the Centre des Arts, Enghien-les-Bains, Paris, showing works from each of the 9 UNESCO Media Arts Creative Cities around the world.
Part of the remit for the Data Cities exhibition was to showcase ‘digital devices and tools of tomorrow’, a perfect fit for a ColliderCase augmented reality system.
The installation, entitled Of York Minster, weaves a variety of stories and storytelling tools together into a single hologram-like presentation. Our completed artwork combines real fragments of historic stone, metal and glass sourced from the Minster, and shavings of wood and wire collected from craft workshops involved in the current renovations. These fragments form the ‘seed’ from which the digital content unfolds.
This combination of physical objects and virtual content represents a visual metaphor for the solid, built heritage of the city, and the more intangible aspects that breathe life into that architecture, creating and completing the city’s identity. The dramatic yet gentle storytelling effect would not be possible without the amazing ColliderCase technology.
The digital content was conceived as an animated performance piece. As the viewer witnesses a sequential unfolding, or development of the city, an interwoven tapestry of images and text is revealed, with the latter building through the duration of the work to form a poem. On completion, the virtual content ‘folds’ itself back up and disappears, leaving the fragments on display and bringing the attention back to the central seed of the Minster.
The work was also exhibited at the National Museum of Singapore, where it was on display alongside AR and VR installations for the fantastic DigiMuse initiative. Of York Minster will be on display at the Museums and Heritage Show 2018 at Olympia, London.