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An art exhibition with a technological twist is due to open at The University of Nottingham later this week.
Art in Your Park will transform the leafy green parkland of the University’s award-winning University Park into a free outdoor and online public art gallery when it opens for a month-long run on Friday September 27.
Created by Theresa Caruana, an artist and researcher in the University’s research hubs, the Mixed Reality Lab and the Digital Humanities Centre, the exhibition will connect art exhibited in a ‘real world’ setting around the lakeside area of the campus with virtual galleries via audiences’ smart phones.
The exhibition will feature:
- A real world gallery — sculpture, photography, painting and solar powered sound installation which can be encountered among the park’s woods, lake and architectural feature. In addition, screens and projectors will use shrubbery as a backdrop in a series of free video nights.
- Online gallery — online visitors can witness artists’ candid thoughts, studio practice and resulting artworks through images, texts and videos. This innovative blog has been custom built to allow the artists to ‘tag’ an artwork to a location on a map with one click of a button.
- Smart phone experience — whether wandering the exhibition by day or attending a video night, ‘virtual’ artworks of sound, imagery, video and text have been ‘geotagged’ to link with the real world artworks located around the campus for visitors to discover with their mobile phone. Visitors who want to experience the exhibition as a digital and real world combination, simply need to search ‘artinyourpark’ on their smartphone’s browser, click mobile and begin walking around the park. Their mobile will buzz when interactive material is available, for example the voice of a statue speaking as the viewer stands in front of it.
Theresa, whose research centres on interactive and location-based creativity, co-developed the Wander Anywhere app used in the exhibition with Dr Ben Bedwell, of Horizon Digital Economy Research based at the University.
Dr Bedwell specialises in development and research into how people use digital technologies to create new products, services and experiences and developed Wander Anywhere to host blog posts and media that can be ‘geotagged’ or tied to locations on a map by their author.
The technology has recently been used at the Thoresby Estate in North Nottinghamshire to allow visitors to explore the artworks created by Countess Manvers, Marie-Louise Roosevelt Pierrepont, who repeatedly painted favourite scenes and views of the Estate, her family home from the 1940s.
The Art in Your Park exhibition is being held in association with the University and the WW Gallery, London and features newly commissioned work by artists Chris Meigh Andrews, Kirsty Tinkler, David Lane, Frank Kent, Flora Parrott, Kate Davis and David Moore, as well as Theresa Caruana herself.
More information on the exhibition is available online via the Art in Your Park website on Twitter @ArtinYourPark and Facebook /ArtinYourPark
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Notes to editors: The University of Nottinghamhas 42,000 students at award-winning campuses in the United Kingdom, China and Malaysia. It was ‘one of the first to embrace a truly international approach to higher education’, according to the Sunday Times University Guide 2013. It is also one of the most popular universities among graduate employers, one of the world’s greenest universities, and winner of the Times Higher Education Award for ‘Outstanding Contribution to Sustainable Development’. It is ranked in the UK's Top 10 and the World's Top 75 universities by the Shanghai Jiao Tong and the QS World Rankings.
More than 90 per cent of research at The University of Nottingham is of international quality, according to the most recent Research Assessment Exercise. The University aims to be recognised around the world for its signature contributions, especially in global food security, energy & sustainability, and health. The University won a Queen’s Anniversary Prize for Higher and Further Education for its research into global food security.
Impact: The Nottingham Campaign, its biggest ever fundraising campaign, will deliver the University’s vision to change lives, tackle global issues and shape the future. More news…