Tempor(e)alities: An Urban Palimpsest

AA Diploma 2 2017/ 2018

Tempor(e)alities: An Urban Palimpsest is a 3 dimensional digital immersive and inhabitable archive where digital information of our lost pasts (eg lost facades of buildings) is spatialised and overlaid onto the present physical environment.

The project is about immersing into this spatialised digital information through the technology of Augmented Reality (AR), thus removing the interface of the screen of our phones and computers, to create a fully immersive environment to experience this information. Thus, with the pasts and presents co-existing in the same space, it will highlight the sedimentation and eradication of histories, facilitate a better understanding and knowledge of our city, and increase our awareness of the lost layers of the city through multiple trajectories and narratives to be experienced and explored.

Media Archaeology of Google Earth

Google Earth stores ephemerality of temporal conditions, geo-tagged to specific coordinates to where they were experienced. These can only be accessed through an interface, creating a disjunction in the transition of accessibility of information. What if the archive of information is moved spatially into a three-dimensional environment?

Palimpsest of Times Square

Cities are constructed of processes of historical sedimentation that has been accumulated overtime, much like a palimpsest. In Times Square in New York City, many buildings have been demolished and new ones built on the very same site. To increase understanding of the many lost layers, history would be taken and engaged with, to be stitched together through trajectories and narratives within the city.

Trajectories and Narratives

The theatres below are brought together by a common strand – theatres that were met with public protests to resist their demolition, failed to obtain landmark status and got demolished in the end. They were demolished at different moments of the New York Landmark Preservation Commission (LPC) but they failed to preserve them.

All of them also went on to spur the preservation movement in the US, for example Helen Hayes Theatre was the catalyst for landmark designation of historic buildings, specifically in the Theatre District. (Within 1987, 5 years from its demolition in 1982, 25 broadway theatres were designated and eventually 46 theatres were designated.)

Other trajectories include discovering the lost rooftop gardens of New York or tracing the lost adult theatres in the sleaziest block in America.

Interface Immersion

Through the various trajectories within the city, we can become aware of the vast amounts of histories that has been lost and accumulated overtime. Once lost and ‘unseen’ and only existing within archives such as Google, it (info/ history) comes to life through the spatialisation and the overlay onto the physical environment. The physical and digital becomes merged, allowing us to inhabit and immerse fully.
With the adjacency of information, pasts and presents co-existing simultaneously in the same space, we are able to tap into it, learn from it and experience it as an urban theatre.
The interface is now the real world and we are immersed in it.

Tempor(e)alities: An Urban Palimpsest

Share