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EDGE OF SHADOW

Edge of Shadow is the virtual companion to ‘Drawing Room’, a large scale architectural installation at the Center of Contemporary Art, Christchurch, New Zealand.

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A realistic digital rendering of the ‘Drawing Machine’ can be seen moving across the Mair Gallery. Its projected shadows are recorded.The walls and floor disintegrate. The machine is doubled, mirrored: Drawing Machine’s arc and tethering point remain. The plan grid of CoCA provides a framework for new context and geometry.

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The projected shadows are materialised, casting their own shadows. These shadows need planes and surfaces to fall on: a new peripheral edge catches them.     

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In architectural practice, virtual reality offers clients a point of view within proposed designs, to aid comprehension of the scale of these spaces. It models proposed built architecture as close to reality as possible, yet often inadequately simulates shadows and light quality.

Here, VR is removed from its role as instructive simulation. Instead, it uses realistic rendering as a point of departure, towards forms that will never be built. Scale is maintained but it is immersed within a vastness of space. The real becomes an abstracted fiction, yet built upon concrete space. A new drawing is created, generated from the physical context of the gallery, but expanded beyond these bounds. 

 

As the virtual space shifts and expands, the sound environment evolves in parallel; vast new shapes shift and turn and the sound of their passing echoes outward, resonating with the familiar and the impossible, with music and distortion.

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- New Zealand premiere at the Drawing Room exhibition, Centre for Contemporary Art, Christchurch, November 2

- Online premiere at Ars Electonica Garden Aotearoa, November 27, 2020

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