Tirana Time Capsules
Year: 2021
Browser-based 3D & VR experience
The Tirana Time Capsules are a series of three virtual environments, accessible via web browser, that act as time capsules for three different neighbourhoods of Tirana in 2021. The chosen areas - 21 Dhjetori, Kombinat, and the Teatri i Gjelbërimit, an area of the Tirana Great Park - each embody different aspects of Tirana’s urban development over the past 100 years. Particularly since the early 2000s, this has been characterised by the gradual disappearance of public space as the building sector has increasingly become controlled by private interests.
Drawing on the metaphor of the time capsule and employing so-called high-fidelity recording techniques such as photogrammetry and field recording, the work re-appropriates and re-constitutes these different areas of the city as virtual environments as a way of exploring the intersection of personal memory and community heritage. In addition, the work seeks to question the promises made by such recording technologies that claim to render and preserve reality as a high-fidelity digital copy: in short, what exactly is being preserved when we use these techniques of digital preservation?
Update: Tirana Time Capsule #2 (Kombinat) is currently viewable online as part of the Beyond Matter online programme. To view the project, click HERE (best viewed in Chrome and with headphones).
