Hidden Pasts, Digital Futures exhibit takes you across the earth and into a lost world in realistic 3-D

    1 of 2 2 of 2

      Here's a challenge: trying to describe and finding references for an exhibit that defies anything you've probably ever experienced in 3-D before.

      The interactive displays at the Goldcorp Centre for the Arts at SFU Woodward's new Hidden Pasts, Digital Futures festival are on the cusp of new virtual experiences, making for a journey that is part museum visit, part gallery tour, and part travelogue. (The display is being presented with the NFB and Vancouver International Film Festival.)

      One of the most fascinating installations is Pure Land: Inside the Mogao Grottoes at Dunhuang, inspired by a UNESCO World Heritage site. Visitors to SFU's expansive lower-floor theatres enter a big "room" wearing 3-D glasses, and suddenly it transforms into the caves. Intricate murals, spanning 1,000 years of Buddhist art and originating in hundreds of hard-to-reach, hand-carved sanctuaries can be projected around you, with a docent able to "zoom in" on certain features or pull out images and animate them. Everything around you is at scale, as if you were there.

      Highlights include seeing a pair of normally hard-to-discern classical dancers start to twirl realistically in front of you, or watching several figures "pull out" from the wall in the original rich colours they would have been painted in, instead of the faded, 2,000-year-old hues that remain today.

      The creation, conceived and directed by Dr. Sarah Kenderdine and Prof. Jeffrey Shaw of CityU in close assoiation with the Dunhuang Academy, raises fascinating questions about the future of tourism. Heavy numbers of visitors have taken a toll on the caves, leading to the closure of at least one (on view here); this seems, for the first time, to offer a viable "you-are-there" solution that goes far beyond the kind of interactive, digital exhibits we've seen in the past. In fact, you could argue it even heightens aspects of the experience. And let's not even talk about the possibilities in my or your lifetime of actually making it to the remote caves at the eastern foot of Mount Mingsha in Gansu Province.

      A much different experience awaits at the thoroughly disturbing UNMAKEABLELOVE, a digital installation where you wear your 3-D glasses and walk outside the "room" this time instead of into it. VIsitors circulate around a dim, screened hexagon, where you can perceive, from different angles, the naked, bald, and often emaciated humans walking within, in eerily realistic dimensions and depth of field. At certain points you can pick up flashlights to illuminate these lost souls—figures that speak evocatively to everything from today's Syrian refugee crisis to concentration camps to a post-apocalyptic world. Its actual direct inspiration comes from Samuel Beckett's The Lost Ones, which takes place in a flattened cyllinder "where lost bodies roam each searching for its lost one". 

      The piece, also directed by Kenderdine and Shaw, explains in program notes that the voyeuristic shining of the flashlight beams illuminates the "perceptual and psychological tensions between the 'self' and 'other'." No kidding. Expect to feel more than a little discomfort shining a glare on these figures. (It's actually achieved using infra-red cameras and video images rendered in real time.) The groundbreaking work has been exhibited at Le Volcan in Le Havre, the Shanghai Museum of Science and Technology, and the Hong Kong International Art Fair.

      There is more, much more, to immerse yourself in at the fest—including Place-Hampi, stereographic panoramas that transport you to transcendent Vijayanagara in India, and Stan Douglas's Circa 1948, which is out in the atrium. Remarkably, all of this is free; you just have to book a tour with docents here till October 16. 

       

      Comments