Mother/Home/Heaven

Mother|Home|Heaven is a magic-mirror augmented reality installation that overlays digital assets – 3D models, video, poetic spoken word and soundscape over a series of objects sourced from a pioneer village in Canada. It combines historical fact and literary fiction to weave together a series of fragments that together consider gender, space and place, private and public, loss, longing, time and place. Created with the Unity game engine and the Vuforia augmented reality plug-in, the experience uses fractal and non-linear narrative to bring real objects and accounts – notably an archive of amazing diaries – to life, while also using fictional, whispered secrets and ghosts to suggest what might haunt the neatly ordered shelves of the General Store. We wish to track 2-D images rather than physical objects. The viewer would encounter shelf after shelf of everyday objects relating to domestic material culture – teapots, kerosene lamps, spools of ribbon, wood burning stove and parlour games etcetera. The objects we found in the general store serve as a cypher through which to conjure messy everyday lives, playing with the tension between the calm and regularity of the public objects on the shelves and the curious, lonely, worried, violent, in-love and sometimes desperate and forgotten hands we imagined might have touched them. Having been given access to thousands of pages of diary entries allowed us a factual window into the lives of Markham residents in the 19th century and early 20th century, and we used these to structure our storytelling. The written reflections ranged from lists of daily chores to discussions of the rhythms of pioneer life, more lyric meditations on God and existence and birth and death. One particular entry from September of 1867 entitled “Heaven” became a guiding theme for the project. The opening line of this entry read: Someone said that the three most beautiful words in the English language are Mother, Home, and Heaven. The three words bring to our notice three phases of life... In response to this entry, we decided to organize our augmentations around both temporality and gender, domesticity and riffs on immortality. The shelves and objects of the General Store became visual “trackables” to be detected by the iPads’ cameras. When visitors hold up an iPad – their magic looking glass – they are positioned to see both the real world object and to unlock a series of connected story fragments we’d inferred and projected from the diaries: a rich imagined memoryscape held by and within these everyday objects for over a century, accessed through a magical eye. (source: ELO 2015 catalog)