Into the void

Champagne Valentine, a recent directorial signing for Nexus Productions, has created a beautifully realised, fully interactive website for How It Is, by renowned Polish artist Miroslaw Balka.

How It Is is the the tenth commission in The Unilever Series for the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern in London.

Working in close collaboration with the Tate and Balka himself, Champagne Valentine designed the site to allow the online visitor to experience the concerns of the work via a 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. Alsocleverly integrated throughout the site are  films of Balka, explaining and describing the work and its inspiration.

Demonstrating both a keen understanding of interactive multimedia formats and artistic flair, the Champagne Valentine How It Is site combines Flash and Papervision3D 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 also developed a How It Is iPhone application, which 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 ‘thumbpad’ 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.

Explore the How It Is site

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