Microsoft and artist Mel Chin partner to bring Mixed Reality into art

What will New York’s Time Square look like if climate change remains unchecked? Artist Mel Chin, together with Microsoft, Time Square Arts, No Longer Empty, and Queens Museum, sought to answer this question with Mixed Reality experience Unmoored and Wake. Unmoored shows a submerged Times Square in a future where the ice caps have melted and the oceans continue to rise. You can see this submerged area through a Mixed Reality experience using Microsoft HoloLens or via augmented reality through their mobile phones. Meanwhile, Wake is a sixty-foot animatronic installation you can interact with that “evokes the hull of a 19^th century shipwreck crossed with skeletal remains of a marine mammal.”

Chin’s works will be on display at the Broadway Plaza between 46^th Street and 47^th Street as part of the multi-location Mel Chin: All Over the Place exhibition. You can experience and explore Unmoored using the Microsoft HoloLens until July 13^th or use mobile devices until the exhibit’s end on September 5^th.

Pompeii in the Shadow of the Volcano exhibit opens at the ROM on June 13

The Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) hosted a media preview of the upcoming exhibit titled Pompeii: In the Shadow of the Volcano, which features over 200 artifacts dating back over 2,000 years when the catastrophic eruption of Mt. Vesuvius which led to destruction on a massive scale and the deaths of over 16,000 people.

The ROM has prepared for the opening of the exhibit by projecting a simulation of the volcano on to the facade of the ROM Crystal. The volcano projection will erupt on Friday evening.

As part of the media preview, Tenor Francesco Pellegrino opened the proceedings with a reading and a song. Tited Fronna, the above song an improvised lament sung a capella, evolved from traditional funeral laments in the countryside.

The exhibit shows various artifacts and even molds of people and animals whose forms were preserved through time as well as examples of art, design and day-to-day Pompeii life. Pompeii will run between June 13 2015, to Jan 16, 2016 before moving to  the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.

Japanese designer Kunihiko Morinaga futuristic exhibition opens with no distractions.

By Sonya Davidson

How curious are we? An invitation to a special exhibition piques our collective interest for the forward thinking fashion collaboration between Japanese designer Kunihiko Morinaga of ANREALAGE and Trident gum. Wait. What?

The conceptual fashion line asks us to focus more and minimize distractions in our daily life. Each piece in the collection is made of radio frequency shielding fabric protecting us from the virtual world.

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