Some giddy-making news: a team of architects and designers in Italy, together with a couple of us here in California (we bring the curatorial and mixed reality expertise to the enterprise) have been in competition for the award to design a new historical-didactic exhibition. Well, we won!
Not your everyday sort of place, this exhibition is to be constructed in a re-purposed highway tunnel in Trento, in the Dolomites, just south of the Austrian border.
That location has much to do with the forthcoming exhbition’s content and reason for being. It’s an area with a heavy cultural investment in the World War One period and years just preceding: border disputes with Austria, the Irredentist movement in Italy, challenging topography, wartime martyrs …
So there’s going to be a long-term exhibition, a bit of deconstruction of some wartime mythology and a lot of community participation and interaction. Part of the interaction will come from parallel constructs in Second Life, which we’ve used to good effect already in winning this award.
The team in Italy sourced a mountain (heh…) of CAD and topo data and sent it our way. Based on this data and their architectual renderings, I put together a mock-up of the exhibition site on our Gallerie della Memoria island, including some of the projected displays and imagery. This mock-up was used as part of our walk-through presentation to the panel of judges, on April 28. After three weeks of deliberations, we got the word: the project is ours.
So now I need get to work.
