A new interactive art gallery opened in the O’Shaughnessy Education Center Sept. 12.
The installation, a product of St. Thomas’ E-Learning and Research Center, merges portraits with augmented-reality technology to tell the stories of community members. It all stems from President Robert Vischer’s idea of “culture of encounter,” which his portrait will tell you in the exhibit.
“The idea is that he’s really trying to ensure that every student, every faculty member, every staff member feels heard, feels seen, feels connected to the community, feels loved,” center Director Lisa Burke said.
An exhibit at the Minneapolis Museum of Art called Talking Tintypes inspired Burke’s team. Peter Monahan did the videography with the subjects of the portraits and Eric Tornoe focused on the technology used to make it all happen. After trying nearly 10 apps, Tornoe landed on using Artivive to bring the pictures to life.
“This isn’t precisely the use they envisioned for it and there are quite a few other things you can do with it. It seems more like an artistic tool, but it works beautifully for this,” Tornoe said.
Burke said that she has already had conversations with university admissions about including the technology around campus to “enhance campus tours.”
“Let’s say you’re walking through McNeely Hall, you see some portraits of business majors and business faculty,” Burke said, “You’re in Anderson Athletic Recreation Center and you’ll hear some stories about athletes, or you’re on the Minneapolis campus you might hear from law students and Dougherty Family College students.”
The piece has also garnered interest from groups outside of campus who want to implement this merging of art and technology in new ways.
“We also had a really nice meeting with somebody from the National Parks yesterday who wants to use this same technique to tell the stories of 50 faces behind Voyageurs National Park,” Burke said.
Monahan said that they did the work for this project over the summer, and because campus wasn’t as full, that may have affected the voices represented.
“I think if we did it again we would want even more because our community is so diverse. We got a bunch of different people from different departments, different areas,” Monahan said, “…there’s still a lot of people’s stories we didn’t capture, but that’s just because I think there’s a lot of people on this campus that have a lot to say.”
The Culture of Encounter exhibit is open until Oct. 18.
Adam Mueller can be reached at muel7541@stthomas.edu.