Lost Moments: An Art Project In Response To The Lockdown / by harry wakeling

Pleased to announce that I have started a residency with Festival Stoke as part of their Stoke Echoes programme !

I am interested in exploring moments and experiences that have been lost due to isolation and social distancing, bringing them to life using the tools available to me within the confines of my room. My initial idea was to create a series of experiments with projection mapping, based off responses from the public. Below is an initial mock-up I created in support of my application:

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I started by conducting a survey with residents from Staffordshire, asking the following questions:

  1. What experiences have you missed due to the Covid-19 pandemic?

  2. When you think about what you have missed, what locations come to mind?

I received a lot of interesting responses, a few of which I have listed below:

“I miss live music and dancing with my friends.”
“I missed my sons’s wedding and seeing my baby granddaughter. ”
“In the early days of lockdown I was too anxious to go for my walks so I missed the fresh air and wildlife. ”

I related to these responses in particular as they reminded me of my own experiences with the lockdown. One of the main ways I am able to relax and stay positive is when I am amongst nature; this was made made a lot more difficult at the start of the lockdown as I became very hesitant to leave the house. I also believe that the feeling of missing experiences with friends and family is something that can be widely shared with the rest of the country.

I began thinking about different ways I could create pieces in response to these themes, becoming particularly interested in projection mapping and the way this process is able to add new meaning to static objects and locations; I felt like this could provide an effective avenue to explore the themes of my project. I produced some initial tests using Resolume, a program intended for producing projection mapping and visuals for live music. I mapped animations onto a series of objects that I constructed out of paper; I will explain this process in a subsequent blog post. You can see some examples of my experiments below: