A Mirror For Remembering
Alex May

Summary

Artist Alex May discusses 'A Mirror for Remembering', a virtual-reality commission for Tunbridge Wells Borough Council that uses museum collections to explore digital preservation. May explains that the project had to remain accessible for at least twenty years, so he chose a stereoscopic video workflow built in open-source Blender with photogrammetry from 3DF Zephyr, deliberately avoiding platform-specific interactivity so the work can be re-rendered for future headsets. Working with council and museum staff including Luke Carroll, he scanned selected artefacts such as a fragmented Iguanodon bone, a fern fossil, local pantiles, crickets, and a doll's house, then reconstructed them inside dreamlike VR scenes that visitors can experience on phones, cardboard viewers, or headsets. The piece uses Plato's cave, light as knowledge, and memento mori as structuring metaphors, while also acknowledging the limits of digitisation and the risk of misinformation in preserved data. May shares around 200 gigabytes of source assets with the museum and has added a 3D-printed fossil to the physical collection. The talk argues that artists must plan for longevity from day one, document process and context, and resist the assumption that digital storage in the cloud is automatically permanent.

Generated by AI using kimi-k2.7-code (2^nd September 2026).