Study name: Virtual Assembly
Research project lead: Dr Julie Marsh
Project overview
Virtual Assembly is an interactive virtual space and archive for Old Kent Road Mosque and MANUK (Muslim Association of Nigeria UK) due to the demolition and redevelopment of their mosque on Old Kent Road in Southwark. Built using 3D software and immersive technologies (VR/AR), the space combines spatial scanning technologies with drawings, audio, film, and speculative design.
The content is co-created by the Old Kent Road Mosque community through a series of workshops bringing together different narratives of identity to interact, communicate and learn from each other and carry the community (in its diversity) forward. The project also explores the potential of new technologies in the creation of virtual communal spaces/archives, providing a platform for wider engagement on a local and national scale.
Visit the Virtual Assembly website.
Methodology
Virtual Assembly uses the artist’s methodology of ‘site-integrity’, a collaborative approach to fieldwork, transforming the traditional anthropological ‘subject of research’ into the producer of its own voice. This egalitarian approach to art making encourages reflexive conversations that avoid reductive ethnographic portraits of ‘subjects’ and fixed representation.
The personal, aesthetic, and everyday cultures of place and community are often museumized, subjected to the disciplinary gaze of Western art historians and anthropologists. Site-integrity repositions this act of representation from its retrospective or projective dimensions towards that which is experiential and encountered within the context of the place and its people.
Key questions
- How might an immersive virtual site help the community maintain a sense of identity and belonging?
- How can co-creation articulate the material, architectural, social and institutional discourses present in site?
- Can innovative/digital technologies capture, record, disseminate and preserve dynamic cultural heritage, particularly interior spaces and intangible cultural practices?
Virtual Assembly includes co-investigator Dr Roza Tsagarousianou, Reader in Media and Communication and project partners The Muslim Council of Britain & Inclusive Mosque Initiative with support from The Fabrication Lab.