Circa 1948 summons Vancouver’s past in intense detail

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      Vancouver is a difficult city for ghosts. Because of its restlessness, there are few stable places here for the dead to inhabit. The buildings at any intersection, the features of any block, may undergo more than one full transformation in the span of an average human lifetime.

      And so in Vancouver, the standard ghost story—in which places are haunted by vanished people—is turned inside out. Here, people are haunted by vanished places, half-remembered streetscapes, erased patterns of light and shade.

      This is what makes the stunning digital re-creations of Circa 1948 so uncanny. Devised by internationally renowned local artist Stan Douglas in collaboration with the National Film Board Digital Studio, the immersive piece is a hyper-detailed, interactive simulation of two long-gone Vancouver locales as they appeared just after the Second World War. The first is the ornate interior of that era’s Hotel Vancouver, which stood at the corner of Granville and West Georgia until it was demolished in 1949. The second, not far to the east but a world apart, encompasses the lanes and clapboard houses of Hogan’s Alley, the raucous neighbourhood near Main and Prior that was bulldozed in the late ’60s to make way for expansion of the Georgia Viaduct.

      The paired settings, which Douglas also explored last year in his high-tech play Helen Lawrence, are charged with meaning about a turning point in the city’s history.

      “I took these two things as foils for that transitional moment in the postwar period,” he explains to the Straight at the NFB offices in SFU Woodward’s, alongside Circa 1948’s executive producer and creative technologist, Loc Dao. “The key thing for me in this work is that 1948 is in between the wartime—and we have an image, very clearly, of what the war was like both abroad and at home—and the ’50s, which, even though it may be totally ideological, was the idea of 2.5 kids, nuclear family, and so on. It’s the midpoint in the transition from one condition to the other.”

      This is Vancouver as it was just before the wave of slum clearances and urban “renewal” swept over North America—a city beset by official corruption, the deep traumas of recent combat, and the pressures of rationing. In a blend of film-noir storytelling and what might best be described as architectural documentary, Circa 1948 resurrects this period down to the last plaster moulding, wall calendar, electrical socket, and ashtray.

      “We were pretty fussy, actually,” Douglas says with understatement, describing a process that involved not only exhaustive research—through thousands of archival documents and accounts, ranging from aerial photographs to fire-department maps—but also exacting methods of digital image-making that mimicked real-world carpentry.

      “If you looked closely,” he recalls of early modelling attempts with the NFB team, “you realized that no one would build a building that way—there’s nothing to hold up the soffit, the roofline is too thin or some planks are too thick and just don’t make sense in terms of construction.”

      The painstaking solution, he says, was to build many of the edifices “the way you would build things”—piece by piece, out of a digital version of “dimensional lumber”.

      As a result, the cracked and worn houses of Hogan’s Alley, for example, “don’t necessarily have the interior structure, unless in a few cases where you can see through windows,” he notes. “But the walls have the correct thicknesses, the window frames and doorjambs are all moulded properly and according to the lumber of the time.”

      You may have experienced this intense detail already by downloading the iPad-app version of Circa 1948 (available free here). But that, although dazzling and engrossing in its own right, only hints at the impact of the 360-degree, virtual-reality installation that will make its Vancouver debut as part of Hidden Pasts, Digital Futures: A Festival of Immersive Arts, running from Friday (September 18) to October 16 in honour of Simon Fraser University’s 50th anniversary.

      Set up in the SFU Woodward’s Atrium (by coincidence, directly beneath the huge photo mural Abbott & Cordova, 7 August 1971, another of Douglas’s obsessively period-accurate invocations of local history), the light-tight, 3.6-metre-square enclosure will allow you to stand alone at its centre while Circa 1948’s environments are projected on the surrounding four-metre-high walls. Enveloped by these images as well as the piece’s 3-D sound design, you’ll then navigate the hotel’s elegantly tattered hallways or the East Side neighbourhood’s twilit yards and gambling dens with simple body motions, detected by sensors: a step forward sends you gliding toward the doorway or desk in front of you, sidling to the left or right arcs you around the corner of a street or corridor.

      Circa 1948 takes users through Hogan's Alley and beyond.

      The scenery slides past, distorted ingeniously so that the enclosure’s squareness dissolves into a startling simulation of the natural, “spherical” sense that we have of the real world as we move through it. It’s as if you’re floating silently through the past, stopping occasionally, if you like, to eavesdrop on the conversations of its residents, who drift through as eerie, phantomlike columns of smoke.

      “The ideal is to have as minimal an interface as possible, to take away anything that would distract from your experience of the environment,” Douglas says. “So in the installation, there’s no iPad anymore. It’s just your body, and you become the joystick that guides you around.”

      Artist Stan Douglas.
      Evaan Kheraj

      This decision to avoid wearable virtual-reality technology—such as the headgear developed by companies like Oculus—was one of the earliest made in the work of turning Circa 1948 into an installation. And it gave Dao and his NFB team a crucial goal.

      “We agreed that we didn’t want any technology on your body,” Dao says, “and also to see what we could do in the VR [virtual-reality] space beyond Oculus. Where could we get to?

      “This was the next evolution for us, with our mandate of experimenting with story and form,” he adds, referring to the work’s place next to previous interactive Digital Studio projects such as Welcome to Pine Point and Bear 71. “With this, we were able to really think about what we wanted to do with VR, where VR was heading—for us to leapfrog past where VR was. It was a really important step.”

      Five minutes inside the drifting, echoing chamber is enough to play tricks not only on your immediate perception of it, but—stranger still—on your memory, suggesting to you afterward that you’ve returned from a very particular somewhere. This fact is evident in the ease with which both Douglas and Dao can name their favourite spots in Circa 1948. (For Douglas, it’s an out-of-the-way vacant lot near the eastern end of the alley, overlooking a scrap-metal yard; for Dao, it’s the hotel’s dilapidated 10th floor, reached by a creaking elevator.)

      “That’s something that we’ve been hearing with successful VR experiences,” Dao notes. “You talk about how you actually came back from that place—‘I was there earlier today’ as opposed to ‘I looked at something.’ Which is really interesting. And that’s what we’re learning right now—does it become embedded in your memory as an actual thing you did?”

      You may be able to answer this for yourself when, after emerging from Circa 1948, you happen to cross an intersection near Main and Prior, and sense for an instant that what disappeared decades ago from this unsettled city is still somehow here.

      Circa 1948 runs at the SFU Woodward's Atrium from Friday (September 18) to October 16. Admission must be booked in advance at the SFU Woodward's website.

      Follow Brian Lynch on Twitter @brianlynchbooks.

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