Captivate Exhibition: 11th April – 12th May 2023

University of Greenwich, 10 Stockwell Street, Project Space
University of Greenwich Galleries

A Captivate exhibition showing works and models in and around Maritime Greenwich and beyond.

Captivate Spatial Modelling Research Group is making synthetic compositions of the entire Maritime Greenwich World Heritage Site. Never before seen views of Queen’s House, St Alfege Church, the Old Royal Naval College, Greenwich Park, the Painted Hall and the wider Maritime Greenwich buffer zone. These views expand into three dimensions Canaletto’s own curiously synthetic composition of 1750-52, ’Greenwich Hospital from the north bank of the Thames’ (at Royal Museums Greenwich).

Captivate uses a variety of remote sensing technologies such as 3D scanning, photogrammetry, ground penetrating radar, hyper-spectral frequencies and drone surveys. The ensuing data accumulates into vast point clouds, a Milky Way of millions, billions, of points. These multitude points are universally though unevenly distributed as points of data, think of the cumulations of stars in the firmament above. 

As with a vision in a swirling mist, there are thickenings and thinnings amid the confusion, densities fizzing at the edges, unstable, playful, dissolving/resolving into ghostly forms. Wildly fluctuating architectural inventions, oscillations of shivering veils, x-ray labyrinths and parallel worlds.

The familiar made strange revealing perpetually evolving pointillist views of Greenwich.