Time Lens: Interactive Art Project

Time to Live »

« Time Frames

Keywords: mobile app, interactive art, interactive documentary, social practice, augmented reality, gentrification, homeless, landscape.

Time Lens is an interactive, multiplatform art project and a mobile App featuring a series of immersive panoramas documenting the rapid gentrification of an urban neighborhood in Philadelphia. Incorporated into these digital panoramas are the voices, stories, dreams and memories of members of the largely invisible homeless community. A collaborative participation model is used to engage the community. We partnered with men from a homeless shelter to create photographs, videos and interviews of the neighborhood’s past, present and future. At the core of the project is the idea of home and community and what these terms mean to people in the neighborhood. What are the cultural treasures and invisible markers that are wiped away to make way for the betterment of a neighborhood. What are the stories that are lost forever? What traces remain behind? Users can download the App on their mobile devices and then follow along in the actual location and experience both the past and the present, the virtual and physical worlds all at the same time. The goal of Time Lens is to bring people to a specific location to participate in a transformative experience of that space, to infuse media art into the geographical landscape.