Jeffrey
Shaw and Bernd Lintermann
2004
Immersive Digital Media Installation
The world of cinema is being radically transformed by the new digital
recording and visualisation technologies, and one of its salient features
is the creation of highly immersive audiovisual experiences. The intention
here, as in all forms of art, is to create for the viewer a heightened
sense of physical and emotional engagement in the work. In Jeffrey
Shaw’s media art practice over the last thirty years he has
explored various types of immersive strategies. One milestone was
Heavens Gate (1987), where a projection on the ceiling and a
large mirror on the floor created a state of vertiginous
suspension between the real and reflected image planes. The digital
trompe l'oeil of its video content revealed the awesome contemporary
view from space down onto the planet Earth, inverting the ecstatic Baroque
gaze upwards to the heavens.
The Cupola project, that Jeffrey Shaw created together with Bernd
Lintermann for Lille Cultural Capital 2004, continues this artistic
research into the experiential qualities of immersive pictorial
and auditive cinematic spaces. Projection is undertaken inside a suspended
semi-spherical projection screen, in which the viewers are invited to
stand in or lie under to look up at the imagery. The
thematic focus of this work was the ceiling architecture of buildings
in the city of Lille, ranging from churches,
to municipal sites, factories, shops and houses, and showing
an appreciation of their formal beauty, everyday ordinariness and
decaying structure. Over 200 images present a variety of architectonic
structures of various scales and identities, both historical and
contemporary.
The spatial conjunction and merging of ceiling structures inside
the Cupola dome creates a new aesthetic and spatial experience of
these often-familiar sites. They are extracted from their original
contexts and are now relocated as a narrative experience that explores
their spatial, formal and pictorially associative qualities. There
is also an implicit symbolic dimension evoked as culturally
the architecture of a ceiling often constitutes a correspondence with
cosmological principles. A dome usually represents the vault of
heaven, while other structural geometries including the choice
of materials and colors, also embody meaning related to
natural and spiritual dimensions.
The opportunity to make a new version of this project for the Kyoto
Saga University of Arts - Look up Kyoto - was therefore especially
welcomed by the authors, as the architecture of the city
is so rich in traditional, religious and natural associations, as well
as possessing an exceptional formal elegance. The spectacle of the varied Kyoto ceilings melding together within the vault
of the Cupola dome is offered as a meditative experience where the representational
sequence of spatial and formal conjunctions constitutes an evolving
narrative of psychological and cosmological associations. The classical
dualities of above and below, form and content and material
and immaterial substance are given synchronous expression within
an architectonic epiphany, in which aesthetic formations unfold in an emergent
repertory of ideographic and symbolic allusions. The exhibition
also enabled the artists to develop a new igloo-like projection theater, allowing the visitor to lie on the floor and become enveloped in the artwork’s
immersive virtuality.
Exhibited at:
Cupola, Euralille, Lille, France 2004
Look up Kyoto, Kyoto Saga University of Arts , Kyoto, Japan 2004
Credits:
Directors: Jeffrey Shaw, Bernd Lintermann
Application Software: Bernd Lintermann
Dome Design: Jeffrey Shaw
Dome Engineering: Huib Nelissen
Production: ZKM Karslruhe and UNSW iCinema Centre
Commissioned by Lille2000 and EPIDEMIC
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