Abstract

This paper presents how technologies were explored to create site-responsive, immersive installations and performance art forms within the fabric of Chirk Castle in Wales. It discusses how creative technologies, materials, process and scale have been explored to create immersive sensory environments within a site-responsive exhibition: Golau (light).

My residency within the castle is reflected upon, in particular, by exploring what emerged through interdisciplinary exchange and heritage interpretation. To encapsulate the experience of the landscape, methods of walking and mapping were used to trace rhythmic patterns of perceptual engagement with the environment; these poetic geographies were used to begin to define my place in time. Intrinsic to this residency was the collaboration between artists from different disciplines including film, dance and sound, to enrich my personal practice, and to generate multi-sensory and multidisciplinary responses to the ‘memory of place’.

Traced networks of the landscape were transcribed into the art forms installed within Golau, through the exploration of CAD technology, coding and electronics. The representation of space within the tower of the castle was explored and translated through the implementation of light and sound installations, to provide an exhibition which aimed to stimulate a different perspective of heritage and enhanced meaning of place. Pure Data, a visual programming software was implemented to animate and correlate light to sound, to embody the experience of time, thus magnifying the networks within the tower. The multi-sensory exhibition was orchestrated to reveal the representation of space. Light and sound acted as points of communication, to illuminate and entice the viewer to voyage on a transcendental journey through the installations. The paper will explore the outcomes to the exhibition and how the immersive experience simulated a new perception of place, fusing together and reflecting a moment in time within Chirk Castle. It will find that creative technologies were integral to guide the audience through the exhibition and that the transient and static performances within the castle connected people to place, abstracting an experience of nature within the fabric of the castle itself.

• Angela Davies, UK, is an interdisciplinary artist based in Wales. Her work is underpinned by themes of time and place; in particular the changing ecologies of the natural and manmade environment. Craft disciplines and creative technologies are drawn upon to create site‑specific multi‑sensory interventions. Davies graduated from Manchester Metropolitan University in 2000, with a BA (Hons) degree in Contemporary Crafts. In 2013, she graduated from Manchester School of Art completing a Masters in Textiles.

Full text (PDF) p. 404-407