Remnant: Fife’s Post-Conflict Landscape in VR (2022)
SteamVR Experience
Runtime approx. 20 minutes
Awarded The Glasgow School of Art Chair’s Medal in Simulation and Visualisation 2022
Investigated over four years and developed in my final year at art school, ‘Remnant’ is a narrative experience that combines archives, photogrammetry, film, oral histories and VR, using WW2 concrete structures as lenses that refract past and present experiences of young people in Fife, Scotland. Starting with the pillbox my friends and I would hang out in as teenagers, I began to unravel the human experiences woven into the post-conflict landscape that surrounded me in my childhood.
The project led me to libraries, archives and museums, but also through caravan parks, pine forests and sand dunes. Talking to experts, locals and friends, I found hidden stories of an invasion that never came, of creativity and coming-of-age, of loss and rehabilitation, and of home and belonging, among many others. I then conceived, designed and curated a virtual commemorative space that leverages the embodiment and empathy afforded by VR to engage ‘visitors’ as active explorers of the past and agents in remembrance and forgetting. ‘Remnant’ was awarded the highest grade possible, and I was awarded the 2022 Chair’s Medal in Simulation and Visualisation.
Trailer
Stills captured in Unity
©2024 Maximiliano (Maki) Wardle