Transcript for 'The Materialised Temporality of Dust: VR project by Carolina Ramirez-Figueroa' video

View The Materialised Temporality of Dust video on Carolina's staff profile.

I’m Carolina Ramirez-Figueroa. I'm a senior tutor in Information Experience Design at the School of Communication at Royal College of Art. I've been working on a project called The Materialised Temporality of Dust. The project combines archival research with 3D scanning, visualisation and mapping. The project looks at RCA Kensington Library, which was initially built in the 60s and then renovated in the 80s. And I look at that space as a space for knowledge production, creativity and innovation.

Normally we think about an archive as something that is very human, we think about collections of photographs, videos, oral histories. I was quite interested in looking at the gaps in the history of the space, looking at dust as a metaphor but also as a material object of study. Initially, we collected dust around the library to see what was actually alive, because dust is this collection of organic and inorganic matter, that moves around and flows in space. What is interesting about dust in terms of the information that it brings – it's been used quite a lot in forensics and also archeology. So we started looking at: what is a microbiome that actually exists in the dust?

In the end, we produced a VR experience which invites participants to experience the library – but not from a human perspective, but from a non-human perspective so you become a tiny particle of dust, a microbe in the space.

The whole VR experience takes you through this journey. You land in the library in the 60s and we have this archival photography on the walls and then there is this awakening moment, where you are, all of a sudden, in this colourful space where everything is out of scale. You are in this big bookshelf, and you can see particles and you can see everything surrounding you. And finally you are back into the library as it is now, and you can walk around and you can explore the area as it is.

We decided to set up the project in the new stage space on the Battersea campus, which allows you to have a full-width projection on the wall, and you can control the lighting and the sound.

The whole idea of the project was moving away from being a human to then, all of a sudden, getting into this new kind of world. I found VR an interesting media, because it allows you to access the spaces you wouldn't normally be able to access. How can we imagine the idea of history that is not entirely human? It is still related to it, it is still based on traces that we left behind, but would it be possible to experience it from a different perspective?