Re-imagine your Quarantine Space as a 3D Visual Arts Project
June 10, 2020
Carlow Arts Festival and Cork Midsummer Festival invite the people of Ireland to share their lockdown environments for an exciting 3D digital visual arts project ‘Shelter & Place’ which aims to build a digital monument to our unseen stories and quarantine spaces.
‘Shelter & Place’sees artists Peter Power and Leon Butler re-imagine quarantine space by developing a project that uses 3D imagery to enable people to share their lockdown environments with others.
Today, they have launched an exciting video HERE showcasing their research to date, giving a sneak preview of the finished project which will continue throughout the year
Carlow Arts Festival and Cork Midsummer Festival, who have co-commissioned the project, welcome expressions of interest from the people of Ireland who would like to be part of this project, in sharing the experience of your shelter and your place in this world changing quarantine. Members of the public can become involved this project by expressing their interest via this short form. HERE. You will be guided you through what is required to help join artists Peter Power and Leon Butler build this digital monument.
‘Shelter and Place’ is an interactive experience that mixes location mapping, spatial audio and dream-like vignettes
into an open source exploration of our private environments.
Artists Leon Butler and Peter Power have been researching ways to allow the audience to upload 3D imagery using freely available software from their own place of lockdown and share it with the public. This in-development stage of the work describes the journey towards capturing and sharing personal isolated stories of place and space the pandemic has foregrounded.
This beautifully political project allows us a glimpse of the lock-down rooms others have inhabited during this time – abstracted but recognisable. Examining isolation, survival, connection and quiet inequalities, Shelter and Place is a mutual world built from
our hidden moments, collected in virtual space in the absence of the real.
Carlow Arts Festival continue their exciting 2020 #SLICES programme with Slice3 ‘Shelter and Place’. The festival is creating novel ways to share experiences over the coming months.The special online and digital festival edition will include Slices of projects and events that they believe will connect audiences and artists… from a distance, and will include newly commissioned work, Artworks visual art exhibition, VR cinema and exciting new interactive Digitally Native projects and a live hour-long special.
Carlow Arts Festival live stream #SLICE2 took place on 6 June, on what would have been the weekend of the festival. The special broadcast featured a stellar line-up of national, international and native Carlow artists. From ‘Exotic v. Baskin: The Micro-Opera’, a Tiger King-inspired micro-opera to Cian Kinsella’s (Lords of Strut) ‘Grow Your Own Way’ to Crash Ensemble CrashLands, Carlow Arts Festival and broughtviewers a diverse range of art forms from Circus, Opera, Dance, Comedy, Theatre, Visual Art, New Writing & Music – including newly commissioned and site specific work. This work is still accessible via YouTube for a limited period.
Featuring Louis Lovett (Theatre Lovett) as the festival host, international arts critic Villum Harsch, the special online festival edition can be viewed in its entirety until Saturday 13 June 2020 on YouTube and Facebook Live. It features sign Language Interpretation and/or Subtitles throughout, demonstrating the festivals continued commitment to accessibility.
Editors Notes – Carlow Arts Festival 2020 Slices Programme
Although Carlow Arts festival cannot present the full event this year, the team has reimagined what a festival can be using digital tools. Acts from Carlow are presented alongside those from Argentina, Austria, Germany and the USA.
– SLICE #1 – TechCity Connect – May 2020
First up, on Wednesday 6 May 2020, festival director Jo Mangan hosted a panel discussion (with Jude Kelly, CBE – Director – WOW Foundation and former director of the Southbank Arts Centre, Hamish Jenkinson – Creative Director & Co-Founder, The Department & Richard Norris – Music Producer, Writer) at TechCity Connect – a day of tech, art & culture online. Their discussion about about positive future narratives and a demand for positive change is available to listen to as a podcast at www.carlowartsfestival.com
– SLICE #2 – Live Streaming Broadcast – June 2020
Online. There will be a one hour broadcast on June 6th at 8pm featuring pieces no longer than 5 mins each from Circus, Opera, New writing, Dance, Comedy, Theatre and Music.
June 6 @ 8pm – Live on YouTube and Facebook
– SLICE #3 – Shelter & Place – from 10 June 2020.
Commissioned by Carlow Arts Festival and Cork Midsummer Festival.
Shelter and place is an interactive experience that mixes location mapping, spatial audio and dream-like vignettes. This work by Leon Butler and Peter Power will allow the audience to upload 3D imagery using freely available software from their own place of lockdown and share it with the public. Examining isolation, survival, connection and quiet inequalities, Shelter and Place is a world built from our hidden moments, collected in virtual space in the absence of the real.
– SLICE #4 – Virtual Reality Cinema – July 2020
Building on the successful VR strand at Carlow Arts Festival 2019, XR Producer Camille Donegan, will curate a series of 360 films that will be hosted on our YouTube channel and be accessible to all. For a non desktop experience, VR viewers will be available to purchase on our website where you can use your own smartphone to experience the 360 3D content.
– SLICE #5 – ARTWORKS – July 2020
Our annual open submission exhibition with VISUAL Carlow will happen later in the year. Director of VISUAL Carlow, Emma Lucy O’Brien will announce this year’s featured artists as part of SLICE #2 on June 6.
– SLICE #6 – AUGMENTED REALITY/LIVE PERFORMANCE
– SLICES 7+ in development. Stay tuned for more later in the year…
Editors notes – ‘Shelter and Place’
The name of the work comes from a play on the American governmental advice during crises to seek safety in the buildings you already occupy, rather than to evacuate to community shelters. The Covid-19 global pandemic saw many of us being isolated in this way to our domestic spaces, where our refuge has become a prison.
Yet our experiences of isolation have not been equal. Domestic environments are not equal. The virus may infect indiscriminately, but it’s ability to do so has followed the well worn architectures of discrimination. Economic, social, age, race, geography, gender; all these factors and more have been exposed as causative agents in how the illness has spread. Through this we have found ourselves asking what exactly we value, who exactly we are, and how exactly does the society we have built around ourselves protects us all.
Digital media has kept us connected but through a form of false intimacy. The urge to be together has been overwhelming for some, too much for others. We have had the scope of our universes reduced to the size of a house, a garden, an apartment, a room. The loss of these freedoms here has been mutual, but the scale of those losses has not.
In this period of global vulnerability priorities have shifted where more meaningful exchanges of ideas and experience are now as vital as ever. By creating a dialogue between each other using freely available technologies, we can come to know one another, to be with one another, to stand in each other’s worlds.
From these places a beautifully political act can happen; to share shelter with strangers so that we can know them in ways we never have, where unseen stories become seen and we discover a sense of place together in a world that asks us to be divided.
Visit www.carlowartsfestival.com for more details
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