Dom Biddulph BA Graphic Design, VRchway, digital files, 2017
At the same time that Dom Biddulph was in his final year getting to grips with VR technology, Central Saint Martins was moving the printmaking workshops from its Archway campus to its main site at King’s Cross.
Biddulph was interested in how virtual reality could memorialise and preserve space. Having captured the printmaking spaces in Archway, he began creating a virtual version complete with the sounds of people and machines at work. Through a process that promises to capture a kind of reality, the stitching of photogrammetric imagery highlights glitches he finds compelling such as a ray of reflection, the seam of two images meeting or overly complex surface texture.
“Dominic’s work has opened up a conversation for us; it is a really interesting piece to be the curator of, to look after its longevity. He was happy to be involved in the discussions of preservation and process and it’s created conversations with other national collections as together we discover how to preserve VR works. Often archives are seen as a static history, but this a great example of unstable forms that challenge how we address objects in the future.”
Sarah Campbell, Curator, Museum and Study Collection
