VAN MCELWEE

(American, Born 1948)

Time Fork, 2020
Augmented reality application
Laumeier Sculpture Park Commission, with funds from Nancy and Ken Kranzberg and the Mid-America Arts Alliance.

Laumeier Sculpture Park is proud to present Van McElwee: Time Fork. McElwee, a local media artist, will create an Augmented Reality environment contemplating choices and possibilities, each choice crafting a new world. Created from a topographical drone mapping of Laumeier, imagined structures will be placed virtually within the landscape at Laumeier. McElwee’s interactive application incorporates both sculpture and the natural landscape that will offer an alternative Laumeier experience for visitors using their hand-held personal devices. Time Fork will be a remarkable setting for pondering the nature of choices, time, and reality itself.

Time Fork, organized as a walking tour of the Park viewed through the lens of technology, entertains a playful fiction: roughly a thousand years ago, time branched to create a parallel world. In McElwee’s installation he will use Augmented Reality to reveal features of a settlement that exists in that parallel or even future world, overlapping what we know as Laumeier Sculpture Park. McElwee explains: “We see structures that could be under construction or in ruins; they could have a ritual, municipal or even an industrial function. Using phones or tablets as windows, viewers can fully explore these mysteries, inside and out, a tool that is at least conceptually, archeological and anthropological.”

Laumeier’s Curator Dana Turkovic states: “Laumeier is very excited to present this groundbreaking interactive project that allows visitors to take a solo journey using their own devices to explore a parallel world built to excite curiosity and wonder. McElwee’s project takes the idea of touring the Park to another conceptual level, Time Fork is an online portal of discovery, creating an experience that is both virtual and real.”

Download the Guide to Van McElwee: Time Fork here.

How To Explore Van McElwee: Time Fork

1. Download the app. Go to www.therampant.com/timefork. There are also QR codes throughout the Park that you can scan with your phone’s camera to download the app.

2. Find a starting point in the Park. There are five total, and they are marked with orange and white yard signs. The starting point closest to the main parking lots is located near Tony Tasset’s Eye.

3. Open the Time Fork app.
You may need to allow the app to access your camera and location. Select GPS Enabled Mode for the smoothest experience.

4. While facing the starting point sign, line up the nearest sculpture within the outline on your screen. Hold steady until Time Fork appears.

5. Explore!
Take photos within the app by snapping a screenshot. Please note that you may need to refresh the app as you explore. To do this, simply find the nearest starting point and repeat step 4.

learn more about time fork

Curator Dana Turkovic interview with artist Van McElwee

Dana Turkovic: Let me just say that this has been a long road to get here. We have been in conversation about developing a project here at Laumeier for a long time but the timing of your work Time Fork as the 2020 Kranzberg Exhibition artist and the situation we find ourselves in, has been quite fortuitous.

First, can you tell us about the technology of Augmented Reality, what is it and how does it work? How did you and your team create the work? Tell us about the development of a project like this.

Van McElwee: Augmented Reality combines computer graphics with real-world video, usually on a mobile device. In Time Fork we use AR to reveal features of a settlement that exists in an alternate timeline, in a parallel world that overlaps what we think of as Laumeier Sculpture Park.  I’d been thinking about this project for 5 or 6 years and it matured in conversations that you and I had about a year ago.

The opportunity to be the 2020 Kranzberg Exhibition artist allowed me to hire people who could actually make it happen. I designed the structures and the space that make up the installation. My son, Casper McElwee, a professional animator built the computer models which became architectural forms. We enlisted Mike Rosenthal to do a 3D drone mapping of Laumeier, which allowed us to nestle the buildings into the terrain of the park. Rampant Interactive designed the amazing Time Fork App that actually makes World B appear in Augmented Reality. We were all testing the limits of the medium to do a virtual artwork on this scale.

DT: How can visitors experience Time Fork here at Laumeier?

VM: To view the piece, visitors download the free Time Fork App, through the App store, the Laumeier website or at the park. Then it is just a matter of following some simple instructions.  

First they download the free Time Fork App. At Laumeier, there are four signs where the experience can be deployed. The first one is just behind the Kranzberg Education Center; the old house. There are simple instructions, on set for GPS devices and another for non-GPS devices.

They can then use their mobile screens as windows to peer into an alternate world, to see structures that could be under construction or in ruin; mysterious buildings of unknown function. The features of World B appear as self-luminous, abstract sculptures, with texture and detail left to the imagination. We move like ghosts here, passing through walls and other barriers, archaeologists of a parallel world.

DT: Van, you have a long career in video and mixed media, tell us about your process, how did you arrive at this technology as a new way to express your ideas, especially filtering real time through a digital viewfinder that presents this alternative or parallel world?

VM: If we consider media as the nervous system of the planet, then its important for artists to shape that flow, to contribute to the digital culture that we swim in. New media call for new ideas, which is something that excited me about video decades ago. I use video and sound to explore time, dimensionality and the nature of reality. Augmented Reality is a natural extension of that line of work.

I believe, for example, that a “world” is a new unit of media, like a frame, a shot or a story. These worlds proliferate and overlap; they intersect in various ways, creating a multiverse. This is new territory for exploration and discovery.

DT: Why do you think a project using augmented reality is important at this point in time?

VM: There is a rich artistic and philosophical territory to be explored at this moment in the evolution of immersive media. As actual and virtual merge, various media become philosophical tools for contemplating the nature of experience. How do we live in a reality that is constantly branching, constantly being invaded by other realities? How does our existence change when actual and virtual occupy the same space? What is reality and is it a work of art?

DT: What are your goals for Time Fork, tell me about where the title comes from, can you set the stage for the piece and how it relates to what you hope visitors will encounter while exploring?

VM: Time Fork stems from the premise that each choice creates a world.  Individuals and societies chart courses through a space of possibilities. The viewer is asked to entertain a playful fiction: almost a thousand years ago, time branched to create a parallel world, which has continued to change and develop to the present. We call this World B, which split from our common timeline around 1054 C.E, concurrent with the appearance in the sky of Super Nova 1054 (which created the Crab Nebula). This celestial event was visible worldwide and is associated with the rise of Cahokian civilization.

With the Time Fork App, visitors can explore a parallel World B which covers what we think of as Laumeier Sculpture Park. We move like ghosts here, through walls and other barriers, archaeologists of a parallel world.

DT: Can you speak a little about some of the architectural references you are making through the mysterious structures that appear within the app while exploring the Park? How do they tell the story of World B but also the story of Laumeier as a sculpture park?

VM: There are strata in the Ceremonial Gate that suggest levels of temple construction; a cutaway of history. This “slice” could have at least two meanings: the gate could be a celebration of cultural growth, of eras of religious and political authority. Alternately, the bands could represent a catastrophic mound slump, in which sections of earthen mounds collapse, revealing levels of construction. These sudden events probably undercut the authority of rulers and destabilized Mound Building cultures. For us, the stratification tells two different stories, one of growth, one of collapse.

Three Towers on the site could have a variety of functions: defensive, ritual, ornamental or industrial. Windows point to Cahokia (26 miles away), Winterville Mounds in Mississippi (418 miles distant), and Teotihuacan in Mexico (1,700 miles from Laumeier). Other windows open to unknown sites that have no correlation in our world. Next to one tower is a pile of gigantic rings that could be materials laid out prior to construction or alternately, the remains of a collapsed tower.

The Terminal is the focal point of the site. This prominently situated structure is most likely a temple, a transport hub or a government building. The large openings appear where steps would be in a Mesoamerican stone pyramid. They lead to a vast octahedral space opening to an oculus above and to an inverted pyramid below. Standing at the center, one is suspended precisely between real and virtual space.

DT: Exploring the project within the context of the exhibition The Future is Present: Art and Global Change, a show that examines the intersections between art and some of the most pressing issues to humankind: climate change, environmental crisis, and related global repercussions. How does Time Fork explore both the past and imagine the future of landscape and our relationship to the natural world through the built environment?

VM: I’ve made the direction of time ambiguous in World B, which reflects a branching of outcomes at different decision points. For example, the Boat Landings intersect the hill at different levels suggesting a rising or lowering of water levels over time. Some of the buildings are either under construction or in ruin. The DOORS (Tombs/Dwellings) in the South Lawn have a subtle range of styles that indicates a classical period, but no hint as to a direction in time. So the idea of choice is borne out in the simultaneous waxing and waning of the civilization of World B.

DT: In thinking about some of our previous conversations at the beginning of our project together, how can Time Fork extend the definition of sculpture?

VM: Time Fork is spatial, it contains virtual mass and volume. It articulates an architectural form, with a clear inside and outside. Still, Time Fork is ephemeral; it is made of pixels, not particles.

DT: I would like to finish by adding that Time Fork for me has enhanced what is possible at Laumeier. The work has challenged the perception that the Park “doesn’t change”, beyond the changing seasons, Time Fork reveals how active and organic the museum and its collection really is.

Thank you so much to you, Rampant Interactive and Casper McElwee for all of the hard work that has generated such an innovative and unique project specifically for Laumeier that interacts beautifully with the artworks in the collection, the Park landscape within our 105 acres and gives our visitors a new way to engage with art and nature.

ARTIST BIOGRAPHY

Van McElwee received his MFA in Multimedia 1978 from Washington University School of Art and his BFA in Printmaking in 1973 from the Memphis College of Art. Selected installations and one-person shows include: Anthology Film Archives, New York; ARTpool in Budapest; The Shanghai Duolun Museum of Art, China; Galerie Trabant, Austria; Rencontres Video Art Plastique in France; Berkeley Museum of Art Pacific Film Archive, California; The Marsh Gallery at the University of Richmond, Virginia; Medienwerkstatt in Vienna and Ohio University Gallery of Art. Selected group shows and festivals include: The National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; Paula Cooper Gallery New York; The Long Beach Museum of Art; Ars Electronica, ZKM, Siggraph; Camden Arts Centre, London; Wexner Center for the Arts; Milwaukee Art Museum; Japan Media Arts Festival, Tokyo; ASIFA Austria, Museum Quartier, Vienna; Worldwide Video Festival at the Stedelijk Museum; The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago; Art in General, New York; Digital Dance Festival, Seoul, South Korea and Palais des Beaux Arts, Lille, France. His grants and awards include: A John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship; St. Louis Regional Arts Commission Artist Fellowship; The American Film Institute Independent Filmmaker Award and the National Endowment for the Arts Independent Production Fund. McElwee’s work is represented by Bruno David Gallery, St. Louis, The Kitchen in New York, Inter Media Art Institute in Germany and Galerie Trabant, Austria. He is Professor of Electronic and Photographic Media at Webster University, St. Louis, Missouri.

Laumeier Sculpture Park’s ongoing operations and programs are generously supported by St. Louis County Parks; Regional Arts Commission; Missouri Arts Council; Arts and Education Council; among other corporations, foundations, individual donors and members. 

Additional funding related to  COVID-19 relief has been provided by the National Endowment for the Arts, the Windgate Foundation, the U.S. Small Business Administration, and the St. Louis County Small Business Relief Program.

2020 Exhibitions are supported by Ellen and Durb Curlee, Alison and John Ferring, Jan and Ronnie Greenberg, Nancy and Ken Kranzberg, Joan and Mitchell Markow and Two Sister’s Foundation, Emily Rauh Pulitzer, Mary Ann and Andy Srenco. 

Van McElwee: Time Fork is supported by the Windgate Foundation; the Whitaker Foundation; and Mid-America Arts Alliance, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the state arts agencies of Arkansas, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, Oklahoma, and Texas.​