Digital Art Installations: Vanishing Point(s) and Communion

Two installations by the digital artist Michael Takeo Magruder will run throughout the conference.

Vanishing Point(s) will be installed in the Great Hall.  It is a site-specific work by Magruder and Hugh Denard which explores creative collisions and collaborative possibilities between contemporary art discourse and humanities research, taking as its inspiration the astonishingly complex and beautiful ways in which Roman architecture and painting often converged, immersing the viewer in imagined spaces – idealised cities and gardens, palaces and shrines, theatres and basilicas – and beguilingly interweaving physical architecture with painted views so that it is not always easy to discern fact from fantasy; these are indeed "virtual" worlds that speak to the digitally-generated virtual worlds of the Avatar Age.  Through processes of reimagining and reconstructing, Vanishing Point(s) invites ancient and medieval principles of spatial and pictorial representation to speak to this present age of data networks, mixed-realities and multimodal existence.

For more information see http://www.takeo.org/nspace/sl005/.

Michael Takeo Magruder is an artist and researcher based in King’s Visualisation Lab (KVL), part of the Centre for Computing in the Humanities at King's College London. His creative practice extends traditional modes of artistic production through the use of emerging media, including high-performance computing, mobile devices and virtual environments, blending Information Age technologies and aesthetics to explore the networked, digital world.

Hugh Denard is Associate Director of KVL and a Lecturer in the Centre for Computing in the Humanities.  He is a specialist in ancient Greek, Roman and twentieth-century Irish theatre history and in the application of digital visualisation methodologies in the humanities.  He collaborates regularly with Magruder.