Cupola
Cupola utilized a hemispherical projection screen of 20 metres in diameter. Viewers were invited to stand or lie under it and look up at the imagery. The thematic focus of this work was the ceiling architecture of buildings in the city of Lille, ranging from churches to municipal sites, factories, shops and houses, and showing an appreciation of their formal beauty, everyday ordinariness and sometimes decaying structures. These images present a variety of architectural environments of various scales and identities, both historical and contemporary.
Correct geometric ‘projection mapping’ of these ceilings within the dome maintained the architectonic integrity of their varying sizes and proportions, providing dramatic perceptual shifts in scale and form as the sequence of images unfolded. To amplify this, digital image processing techniques were used to create transitions between these images and the locations they presented. These deconstructed the internal pixel structure of each image, then modulated and blended them in various patterns and transformations. This cinematic trompe l’oeil of structural conjunctions and iconographic interpolations created an aesthetic re-visioning of these various sites, and they became remediated as a narrative sequence that focused their spatial, formal and pictorially associative qualities. An underlying symbolic dimension also revealed itself, as the architecture and decoration of many of these ceilings implied correspondences of cosmological significance.
The later versions of this work, Look Up Kyoto (2004) and Look Up Mumbai (2015) explored the ceilings of those two cities.