PLACE-Turkey © Sarah Kenderdine & Jeffrey Shaw
Forty-nine years upon these roads,
On desert plain, on mountain height,
In foreign lands I make my way,
I walk all day, I walk all night
This visual landscape of scenes and events is conjoined to a spatial sound field of ambisonic 360-degree recordings and, with musical compositions specially selected from the archive of Kalan Music. The soundscape encompasses a fusion of historic, traditional and contemporary interpretations, whose compositions signify the layered and complex histories of the panoramic locations
'Going around' in YER-Türkiye invokes embodied analogies to a whirling in the Sufi sema, the potter throwing at his wheel, and the circumambulations of visitors inside the Panorama 1453! YER-Türkiye is an immersive and emergent narrative experience that kinesthetically engages the entire audience, and as the operator rotates the projected image around the panoramic screen, visitors within the enclosure walk around to follow its circular path. In this way, their physical actions in the real space have proprioceptive concurrency with their movements in the virtual space, a corporeal conjunction of real and virtual modalities of passage. This is then reinforced by the conjunction of real and virtual modalities of 3D representation of place, to afford the viewer an intense experience of immersion, presence and engagement in the YER-Turkiye's aesthetic and conceptual construct.
YER-Türkiye uses an innovative visualization and interaction environment based on an artistic paradigm invented in 1995 by Jeffrey Shaw for his seminal installation PLACE-A User's Manual. In conjunction with Sarah Kenderdine this platform was renovated in 2006 for stereographic projection on for the PLACE-Hampi installation, with its pioneering use of 3D panoramic photography and animation. For YER-Türkiye, new application software provides additional interactive functionality and its stereo panoramic photography is now augmented by high definition 360-degree cinematography.
YER-Türkiye's interaction environment is a panoramic 360-degree screen in the centre of which is a large motorized platform that allows the viewer to rotate the projected image around its cylindrical screen. Standing on the platform the viewer can control the rotation of the platform to the left and to the right, which in turn rotates the projectors mounted on this platform. The user interface has an LCD screen which shows a dynamic map of the visitors momentary location, two handles to rotate the platform, and buttons that allows the viewers to control their forwards, backwards, up and down visual movements within the immersive virtual worlds on the screen. By speaking into a microphone mounted on this interface the visitor is also able to release prescribed texts -of A. Veysel (1)- in the virtual world, which traces their movements in that space as a three dimensional poem.
