Augment represents the best in collaboration, combining child-like investigation and digital world-building software to bring something really special to Princes Avenue.
It’s an augmented community garden – made to be enjoyed by everyone, whether you’re a young person, or looking to re-connect with your inner-child. In a unique collaboration between multidisciplinary artist Ellie Niblock and 87 Gallery
Explorers, Augment offers a tangible link to the digital and imaginary. The virtual installation is a new kind of garden, linked to our physical space. It utilises experimental ways of creating to enhance our community through the addition of a ‘green space’ where we can reflect and explore. The work is a playful foray into the ways in which children create uninhibitedly, and serves as a reminder of the value of process and play for our mental health. Augment serves as a permanent time stamp of both our current technology and the individual Explorers’ creative decisions at this specific point in time.
In addition to the garden, Augment also presents three new sculptural works by Ellie Niblock which reflect on the possibilities of how materiality and technologies can alter our perception of experiences.
Augment
This unprecedented project, taking place throughout 2022, centres on the creative agency of 87 Gallery Explorers, challenging them to make design choices, find solutions to practical challenges, and develop outcomes with an early-career contemporary arts practitioner using Augmented Reality.
Beginning by capturing textures from our garden spaces, Ellie introduced emergent visual arts processes through a series of practical activities, including the use of Unity – a game development software – to extend 3D scanned physical sculptures informed by those textures and the concept of the garden, and create two computer-generated worlds which can be activated on people’s personal devices by scanning the QR codes around the building.
Augment has extended the opportunity for young people to work with a contemporary artist as well as our own gallery staff, including making key design choices and material for the promotion of the project with our Marketing and Communications manager, to produce an exhibition and shape the representation of an experimental body of work together as a team.
Ellie Niblock
Ellie Niblock is a Northern Irish artist living and working in London. Interested in the possibilities of how materiality and technologies can alter our perception of experiences. creates highly decorative and tactile objects and manipulates them through various software to investigate the relationship between the digital and physical worlds.
Ellie said: “It was really exciting working with the Explorers when we were doing our first workshop making physical sculpture. I introduced them to lots of different materials like soft clay, and 3D paint.
“The second part of the workshop was remote and we created a virtual space together using Unity software. We thought about what we would like to see in the space – the colour of the skybox, the colour of the terrain, were we going to edit the sculptures or keep them the same. We thought about how a person can ‘walk’ through the space and what they will see first.
“In response to the work I’ve been doing with the Explorers, I’ve created three sculptures that are influenced by the work that we have done and inspired by the garden at the gallery. They are slightly larger sculptures than I’ve created before, so they have quite literally grown. We’ll also be creating a QR code trail so that visitors can physically experience the virtual space that we’ve created through scanning with a phone.”