An Immersive Digital Library
Ever since I knew the Old Library existed, I saddened me to see these empty bookshelves. These bookshelves used to contain knowledge and an archive of history. Through this assignment, I wanted to re imagine what it was to be like in a library. A library doesn’t have to be about just books in the contemporary world of art and design. I re imagined it as a library of visuals and sounds that catalog everyday phenomena, pull them out of the context and store them as moments or memories that an onlooker can reflect on. I chose a library because I find it interesting that everyone at a library respects the code of being quiet and personal space, no matter what. It adds a layered level of individuality to a public space.
The Old Library works exceptionally well because of the recessions that essentially isolate and help categorize different moods created by these memories. The closed window is symbolic for how the video is showing the outside without showing the outside, the decontextualizing comes into play here. I was skeptical about inserting audio into the video because you can assign your own sounds to the videos, that is just how your memory works. These videos are all things that people forget to notice during their busy lives which makes this library multi-purpose. Additionally, it serves to stop time and observe all the unseen moments in life at once.
In my immersive library, I wanted the viewer to feel immersed into their own subconscious. It is highly likely that the loops being projected are things that the audience has already seen, just not had to time to reflect upon. This library provides an isolated space for the audience to connect with things that are buried under their busy lives, immersing them into their own subconscious. I want the viewer to understand just how vast the human mind really is and how easy it is to lose something in your memory. At an educational level, the re imagined Old Library can teach people about the human mind but at a metaphysical level it will be a way to tap into your own subconscious, irrelevant of who is standing around you.
As an improvement on the current state of the project, I would like to make each video book sized, just an absolute overwhelming number of videos implying how many beautiful things we miss every day. I would like to create a set of projections for each section of the Old Library, categorizing the subconscious through emotions so that adds a level of intimacy to the collective experience.
To push this project further, I would rig up projectors and directional speakers into each section of the Old Library, maybe fill it with significant moments of my undergraduate program – an immersive space built out of memories of the class of 2022. To make it more open to the public, it could be used to create literal biography of a person. For example, you could walk into different sections and each could represent a decade of that person’s life.
This project is adaptable to any empty library, re imagining the space as a literal digital library of the human subconscious.
Use of MadMapper to project videos accurately onto empty bookshelves
