‘Portals’ site-specific library activation is a series of digital art projection displays created for Bergen Public Bibliotek, Norway. Over a series of months, Jason Nelson and I created digital artworks and installed them around the library using pre-loved and restored technologies and projectors. Of particular interest was activating the space through rear-projection that mapped to the library’s interesting windows, allowing passers-by outside to believe something was happening within the building. As Norway only gets dark for around 4 months over Winter, the race was on to light up this historic old building in a short amount of time. The below images focus on my (Alinta’s) artworks for these spaces.
As myself and Jason were also in charge of designing the exhibition spaces within which these would be installed, we then gave a series of workshops to library staff from all over Europe dedicated to helping them design and implement their own digital exhibition spaces within their libraries. This was done with the help of funding from ‘Turn on Literature’ Creative Europe Programme of the European Union.
I had an interest in using this space to draw attention to climate issues specific to Norway. The below image shows my specially made frame-by-frame animation ‘The Melting’ of humans with stylised digital glacier bergs for heads. Over time, depending on how many people walk by the display, the glaciers, and thus the human bodies, melt down to nothing, before starting over again. This projection was done from the ‘music room’.
Moving from the music room to the library archives, we had the pleasure of projecting out through a series of tall skinny windows from within the stacks where no member of the public is allowed. Due to this, I was interested in showing, in some way, what goes on inside those stacks, by mapping a view of the inside to the usually-frosted windows, so that those on the outside could look in. For this, I spent 24 hours inside the archives, living, reading, being bored, dancing, etc, within the space. I filmed myself for most of this time, and edited together pieces of my life within the archives to fit to these tall windows. From the outside, it looked as though someone was constantly living within the book archives.
Below is a still from the portrait-shaped video.
