How It Is: Champagne Valentine for Tate Online
Nexus Productions’ recent directorial signing, Champagne Valentine, has created a beautifully realised, fully interactive website for the tenth commission in The Unilever Series for the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern, How It Is by renowned Polish artist Miroslaw Balka.
Working in close collaboration with the Tate and the artist himself, Champagne Valentine have designed the site to allow the online visitor to experience the concerns of the work via a unique 3D interface.
By exploring a series of dark and abstract spaces, mirroring the vast black void Balka has constructed in the Turbine Hall, the visitor encounters visions and sounds inspired by notes made by the artist, with these notes themselves suspended in the darkness. Also scattered around the site are cleverly integrated films of Balka explaining and describing the work and its inspiration.
Demonstrating both their complete understanding of the multi-media interactive format and their artistic flair, the Champagne Valentine How It Is site combines Flash and Papervision technologies to create the essence of darkness, using complex shading algorithms to give the user the experience of an infinite landscape of audio and visual content. Champagne Valentine have also developed a How It Is iPhone application that will shortly be available at Apple’s iTunes store. Based on the website’s design the app again offers the user the opportunity to explore a 3D world, this time via a custom made ‘thumpad’ joystick and the Unity 3D engine.
A special component of the app is the ‘location based gameplay’, which launches a new level of experience when users are detected, using the phone’s GPS system, in the physical vicinity of the Tate Modern gallery. Through thoughtful design and expert technological knowledge Champagne Valentine have realised an immersive experience that successfully communicates the power of Balka’s work. Click here to explore the site: http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/exhibitions/unilevermiroslawbalka/explore/
