Cupola

The world of cinema is being radically transformed by the new digital recording and visualisation technologies, and one of its salient features is the creation of highly immersive audiovisual experiences. The intention here, as in all forms of art, is to create for the viewer a heightened sense of physical and emotional engagement in the work. In Jeffrey Shaw’s media art practice over the last thirty years he has explored various types of immersive strategies. One milestone was Heavens Gate (1987), where a projection on the ceiling and a large mirror on the floor created a state of vertiginous suspension between the real and reflected image planes. The digital trompe l’oeil of its video content revealed the awesome contemporary view from space down onto the planet Earth, inverting the ecstatic Baroque gaze upwards to the heavens.

The spatial conjunction and merging of ceiling structures inside the Cupola dome creates a new aesthetic and spatial experience of these often-familiar sites. They are extracted from their original contexts and are now relocated as a narrative experience that explores their spatial, formal and pictorially associative qualities. There is also an implicit symbolic dimension evoked as culturally the architecture of a ceiling often constitutes a correspondence with cosmological principles. A dome usually represents the vault of heaven, while other structural geometries including the choice of materials and colors, also embody meaning related to natural and spiritual dimensions.