Turning Cancel Culture into Cultural Debate

Graffio Arts worked with Emily Laurens from Oriel Myrddin Gallery in Carmarthen, Wales, to create Pillars of Society. Pillars of Society (Hoelion Wyth Cymdeithas) is a community project investigating public art in Carmarthen and asking who are our pillars of society?

The project is a response to the national (and international) debate around statues, monuments and colonial history. It provides an opportunity to discuss race, equality, diversity, Welsh identity and language, and the experience of Wales as coloniser and colonised.

We created a set of souvenir postcards and a project within our augmented reality app showing alternative public art created by first year sculpture students from Carmarthen School of Art as well as a set of humorous animations depicting the students work.

Project information and postcards were available at Oriel Myrddin Gallery, Carmarthen Library, St Peters Hall Nott Square and other venues in Carmarthen.

PROJECT DESIGN

The premise of the project is that the alternative public art pieces created by the students should be viewable within the app as an overlay when pointed at the monuments- a discussion point rather than a physical replacement of the current monuments.

The project had to be accessible to anyone with a mobile device. To generate 3D models of the students work required iOS technology thats not currently available to Android users so we had to develop two ways to display the augmented reality. We created six short, animated films depicting the current monument and the proposed student replacement that would play through the screen when pointing at the monument for all devices. For those unable to travel to the monuments in Carmarthen, we set the front of the postcards to also display these animations.

The back of the cards presented a map and trail for the monuments throughout Carmarthen and also acted as triggers to release the 3D models for those with iOS devices.

For augmented reality to trigger it requires a visual marker. The app recognises the marker and plays an augmented layer over the top. In this situation the markers would be of monuments that would be lit differently throughout the day. This presented quite a challenge. We took multiple photos of the monuments at different times of the day and created additional versions with low-light, and no cloud cover and high contrast to increase the chances that the app would be able to recognise the monuments. In the end, it worked better than we could have imagined.

THE CONTEXT

The project was created in the context of the Black Lives Matter movement and the physical dismantling of statues in the UK and other parts of the world. The project emerged out of art gallery with an agenda to engage with art and culture in Carmarthen. The project had to be disruptive to a certain extent but tread the fine line that encourages debate rather than polarising opinion.

The animated sequences that we created had to be mindful of this and we called upon some old fashioned tricks for our baseline.

We used a visual language influenced by Terry Gillam’s work for Monty Python in the 1970s.

Monuments would be toppled or squashed by large hands, this would be accompanied by an audio clunk. The students work would replace the current monuments but all with the virtual world of AR. We made a big deal out of crediting the students and used a variety of music and sounds to convey the context of conflict in a light hearted way.

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CONVERSATION vs CONFLICT

The project was well received and helped Emily and the gallery reach a broad audience when it was picked up by ITV news: Wales This Week: An Uncomfortable Truth. The project was a technical and cultural challenge but in the end, it managed to frame the student’s work without putting them in the firing line- the animated sequences were just too silly to cause offence, we had replaced community monuments without anyone breaking a sweat and Oriel Myrddin Gallery engaged positively in debate with it’s target audience and beyond.

THE CARDS

CREDITS

Design, augmented reality and animation: Graffio Arts. 3D objects: First year sculpture students at Carmarthen School of Art. Project Coordinator: Emily Laurens.

LINKS

Emily Laurens - Community Co-ordinator at Oriel Myrddin Gallery.

PoS Facebook Page

Art Wales

An Uncomfortable Truth

VIDEO, AUGMENTED REALITY, CULTURE, 3D, ART EVENT, GRAFFIO AR APP, GRAFFIO ARTS, HISTORY, ANIMATION, SCULPTURE, IDEAS, DESIGN, ART, ARTS & CULTURE, EVENTS, RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT, SOLUTIONS, TECHNOLOGYGraffio ArtsMarch 26, 2022solutions, design, brands, marketing, events, experiences, AR, augmented reality, art trails, culture, history, satire, sculpture, animation