Pandemic portrayal
IT SLIGO LECTURER LEON BUTLER SPEAKS TO CATHAL MULLANEY ABOUT A 3-D VISUAL ARTS PROJECT HE IS WORKING ON OF PEOPLE’S ROOMS WHERE THEY LIVED DURING COVID-19 OUTBREAK
ASLIGO based artist is part of a unique project which seeks to capture the personal spaces we have occupied during the course of the Covid-19 pandemic. IT Sligo lecturer Leon Butler, alongside Peter Power, is in the process of putting together a 3-D Visual Arts Project ‘Shelter and Place’ in association with the Carlow Arts Festival and Cork Midsummer Festival.
The innovative proposal is inviting people to take a 3-D scan of their room or the space that they have been in during this pandemic, with the idea being that the finished product will allow people a virtual experience in visiting the spaces of others.
“We developed a system for creating 3D scans of people’s room, the spaces that they’re sheltering in,” Leon told The Sligo Champion.
“Then put those on a platform that people could explore them in virtual reality, through their browser or through their phone or whatever.
“It’s a co-commission between the Carlow Arts Festival and the Cork midsummer festival.
“Both festivals were affected badly by Covid and had to come up with something new and how to work in this environment so they commissioned myself and Peter Power to create a digital immersive experience of how we are experiencing place at the moment, how we’re experiencing these kind of places where we’re locked down.”
The project has gone well thus far, and provided an interesting insight for both Leon and Peter, as well as those who have contributed images of their own space.
“It’s really interesting,” Leon says. “Sometimes crisis is great for invention, that it makes you think about something differently.
“I suppose we were interested in people’s experience of it and not everyone has an equal experience of place and shelter, people say the virus doesn’t discriminate but it kind of does when you’re in a house with ten other people who need to work compared to someone who might have a big mansionsion with loads of different roomsrooms. “People have been asked to reconsider their space and reorientate things so we found a lot of people had work stations set up in bedrooms, a lot of places where people had co-habiting spaces usually where they’d go to work and come home and sleep but now their bedroom is both their work place and their sleep place.
“It’s kind of an interesting thing to come out of it.”
After an initial phase of getting people to contribute, there is now an open-call to get involved to anyone who may wish to contribute to the work - and it is easy to be part of the project.
“It’s been really well received. I suppose we’re at the first stage where we wanted to reach out to some people and do a kind of closed call, where we asked people to do it and explained how to do it.
“Now we’re at a kind of second phase where it’s open to the public to sign up to be involved to capture their space and to share it and in that we hope to build a bigger artefact, digital artefact, to remind us of this time and to understand those spaces better so that’s the call out at the moment and I think it’s getting a reasonable reaction. It’s good to get it out there and get other people involved.
“The Carlow Arts festival and the Cork midsummer festival both have on their website pages about shelter and place and there’s a sign up form there where you can enter your details and why you want to get involved and then just a general area where you are.
“Then we’ ll send out some general information about how to do it. But we try to keep it really simple so it’s not that you need to know any technology or need to do anything it’s just using a simple smart phone app.
“Then we build the other end of it which is an open source platform that anyone can access through their browser so we’re trying to keep it as open and as egalitarian as possible and not put up technology barriers.”
While it will be a unique piece of artistic work, there will also be an important historical context as it will capture a truly unprecedented time in the history of mankind.
Leon explains: “Trying to understand the spaces we’re sheltering in at the moment and making our entire world, for people who are cocooning. And how those spaces might have changed, different people might have different experiences of them and a chance to walk around other people’s spaces and build up an empathy for how other people are living through this time.
“It’s interesting that we can walk around these spaces and understand them. It’s important to capture them at this stage and to archive them and create this kind of digital monument to them now.
“So people can get back to that stage and understand it instead of trying to recreate it from memory at a later stage that we can create the capture now and build a monument digitally now.”
The work on this project has coincided with a return to Sligo for Longford native Leon, who spent time here in college during his student days.
It is good to be back in the north west, he says.
“I love Sligo, I went to college here so it’s been really great to come back.
“I’ve been working in Los Angeles and in Dublin for the last number of years so actually to get some time to spend in a place for me has been actually really nice and reflecting on my own place.
“Sligo’s great and it’s great to be back.”
I’VE BEEN WORKING IN LOS ANGELES AND IN DUBLIN BUT IT’S GREATTO BE BACK IN SLIGO.