Follow VG Art Gallery

Basket

Your basket is empty.

Shop as a guest

No "Sign in" is required to shop as a guest. Just add your items to Shopping basket and pay with PayPal.

Forgot your password?

Art by Vlad Exhibitions & Events Augmented Reality Art, Plymouth Blitz, from 21 March 2011 to date

Augmented Reality Art, Plymouth Blitz, from 21 March 2011 to date

Invitation in PDF Format:

Invitation.pdf

Article in The Herald:

Article.pdf

----------------------------------------

Artwork Opening and Artist’s Talk

Monday 21 March 2011

4pm

Charles Street adjoining The Plymouth College of Art

“Plymouth Blitz – 70 years on”

Augmented Reality Artwork

by Vlad Geroimenko

http://bit.ly/blitz-art

“Plymouth Blitz - 70 years on” is an augmented reality artwork by UK artist Vlad Geroimenko.

During the night of 20-21 March 1941, the Luftwaffe bombed and destroyed Charles Church in Plymouth. The church is now a living memorial to the 1,200 civilians who died in the city during the Blitz. The augmented reality artwork is a digital painting that depicts a bomber in the sky above Charles Church, dropping its payload. Gothic text above the plane shows the date of the air raid. The button “Play Air Raid Audio” triggers original sounds of sirens and bombing from the BBC audio resources (http://www.bbc.co.uk/schoolradio).

What is Augmented Reality?

Augmented Reality (AR) is a combination of a real scene viewed by a user and a virtual scene generated by a computer that augments the real scene with additional objects and information.

Mobile Augmented Reality is a novel smartphone technology that can display real time digital information on top of the real world. It augments the real world as seen through your mobile phone, based on your location.

Meeting Point

Charles Street adjoining The Plymouth College of Art.

Don’t forget to bring your iPhone or Android mobile!

How to View the Augmented Reality Artwork

You will need an iPhone 4 / iPhone 3GS or Android mobile phone equipped with an augmented reality browser.
To get the browser, go to the iPhone App Store or the Android Market and search for “Layar”.
Choose the “Layar Reality Browser” (free) and then select “Install”.
Make your way to any spot from which you can see Charles Church, launch the browser, search for “blitz”, and select the “Plymouth Blitz” layer.
Point your mobile phone at the sky above the church and view the artwork.
Touch the description at the bottom of the screen and then the “Play Air Raid Audio” button to listen to the original sounds of an air raid in progress.

Artist’s Statement

This project is based on my current research into the use of augmented reality in art, 3D design and architecture. It explores the ability of the new emerging technology to augment the current view of the real world with its past, something glorious or tragic that happened on this particular spot some time ago. Also, in this project I tried to go beyond visual augmentation by adding a sound dimension to the artwork. I hope that this first step into a new direction will lead to the creation of complex augmented reality soundscapes in my future projects.

The tragic WWII history of the city where I have lived and worked to more than 12 years (and which I love very much) has provided me with a unique opportunity to implement my project as an original audio/visual artwork. I hope that the use of the latest augmented reality technology will make it of interest to a wider audience, ranging from schoolchildren to those who still remember the ruins of the Plymouth Blitz. But not only people have memories, the surviving Plymouth’s buildings also bear witness. Some rafters in the loft of my house in Lower Compton still carry the marks of a fire – during an air raid, an incendiary bomb hit the house.