Using LiDAR scanning and photogrammetry, real-world locations have been captured and then transformed into unfamiliar virtual landscapes. The architectural details, navigation paths, objects in scene and fragments of recognisable places have been reconstructed through digital modelling to create virtually navigable environments within Unreal Engine, designed to be distorted and reimagined through fantastical colours, surreal scale, and perhaps unsettling atmosphere. The resulting environments linger in spaces between memories and simulation, nostalgia and fantasy: places that feel strangely familiar, despite never having been visited.
The Internet is used as a space of retreat, a place where we can construct identities that feel more ‘us’ and find communities that may feel more familiar or accepting than those immediately around us. In being situated within these online spaces, we feel a peculiar sense of belonging: we know their languages and rituals intimately, but we have never physically occupied them. ‘this is the place, i've been here before’ translates these ideas of familiarity into virtual landscapes, designed to be explored through virtual reality (VR) and as large-scale projected installations, creating embodied immersive spaces that viewers can move through.
‘this is the place, i've been here before’ features elements of Internet nostalgia and digital folklore, and uses the visual language of early virtual worlds, combining mundane architectural forms with whimsical colours and surreal transformations. These are also site-responsive: environments can incorporate scans of locations surrounding the exhibition sites, allowing each iteration to reconstruct and reimagine elements of its immediate surroundings, transforming familiar streets and public spaces of the world surrounding the exhibiton into fictional landscapes that are recognisable to viewers without being entirely geographically accurate, evoking feelings of displacement, liminality, surrealism.
‘the place’ in question in the title lives within the space between the real, and the imagined: a world made from somewhere we have been, transformed into somewhere we have never been, but one that we somehow feel that we already know.