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Evan Starling-Davis was inspired to create his latest exhibition after spending long hours in the back rooms of the Syracuse University Art Museum among thousands of artworks and cultural artifacts. Starling-Davis, an artist and doctoral candidate in literacy studies at SU’s School of Education, noticed how many of the museum’s pieces he had never seen before.

As a curator himself, with a master’s in museum studies from SU, he understood the practical limitations that caused these hidden gems to go unseen: a lack of funding and physical space meant that only so many pieces could be shown at a time. He wished there was a place beyond the physical world where the public could form a relationship with the museum’s collection.

“We have 40,000 objects, and none of that’s seen on a regular (basis),” Starling-Davis said. “How can technology really help solve this issue of non-transparency or inaccessibility?”

His answer to that question, “FRACTURE,” helps to bring some of these underseen artworks from local museums and archives to the public, combining extended reality technology, poetry, yoga and West African artifacts. Starling-Davis used photogrammetry, a technique that creates 3D models using a set of 2D images, to create digital versions of lesser-known pieces that spoke to him.

He was particularly struck by a set of artifacts from the African diaspora donated to SU by former professor Andre Nitecki, who also served as an art historian and museum curator at the university. Starling-Davis said they have not been exhibited since the 1970s.

It took Starling-Davis as long as an hour and a half to photograph and scan each individual artifact in the collection, but he found the long stretches of time he spent alone with them to be meditative. “FRACTURE” uses the video game engine Unity to host a virtual world that displays a select group of 3D models to the public on the nearly IMAX-sized wall on the side of the Everson Museum of Art.

In the world of “FRACTURE,” the one-to-four-foot statues that Starling-Davis scanned are supersized into monuments. They tower over the scenery, which consists of rolling green hills and blocky structures floating on an island in outer space. As a viewer navigates the world, poems and readings are narrated aloud while soft music plays in the background.

Courtesy of Light Work

Evan Starling-Davis’s ‘FRACTURE’ used the video game engine Unity to host a virtual world that displays a select group of 3D models. The projection is visible on the side of the Everson Museum of Art. Courtesy of Light Work

Starling-Davis wrote more than 200 poems for the project, although not all are featured in the final version. He is an avid practitioner of yoga and hoped to create an environment that would inspire mindfulness.

“I’ve been meeting people in the plaza night after night, or whoever hits me up on my cell phone, they’re just like, ‘Hey, can you walk me through it and walk me through some meditation?’ So I’ve actually done some yoga sessions downtown,” Starling-Davis said.

The project is projected on the side of the Everson through a partnership with the Urban Video Project, a program dedicated to public displays of media. The exhibition is a partnership between Light Work, the Everson and Onondaga County. Anneka Herre, the director of UVP, was first introduced to Starling-Davis’ work through a speech he gave as part of his 2020-2021 Public Humanities Fellowship.

In the speech, Starling-Davis showed off a proof-of-concept of what would eventually become “FRACTURE.” At the time, Herre was looking for ways to expand UVP’s work from single-channel video projection into interactive work. She asked Starling-Davis if he would be interested in developing the concept with the help of UVP.

“Light Work’s fundamental mission is the support of emerging underrepresented artists working in mixed-media, and UVP really is an extension of that into the realm of moving image, video film, but also, these broader areas that include things like virtual reality, interactive,” Herre said.

Among other things, Starling-Davis used his funding to hire a small team to help him with the technology side of the project: lead developer Sonny Cirasuolo, consulting developer Gary Tyler McLeod and 3D model and game design consultant Chanee Choi.

Their support allowed him to achieve his vision by ironing out glitches, building QR codes that could facilitate player movement and providing other technical support. Choi, who works at Light Work, said she was proud to work on a games-based project that, like her own multimedia projects, is about more than entertainment.

“It was an honor for me to work with him because his project is not just about the video game,” Choi said.

In addition to the nighttime projection at the Everson, “FRACTURE” will be presented as part of the 21st annual Syracuse University Human Rights Film Festival this weekend. Starling-Davis will host a talk at 4 p.m. on Saturday in Shemin Auditorium in the Shaffer Art Building as part of the festival.

While “FRACTURE” is different from many of the more traditional narrative and documentary films that the festival selects, its inclusion is a way for the festival to celebrate alternative methods of communicating about social justice.

The exhibition’s themes of unearthing and reclaiming lost histories through a lens of speculative science fiction brought a style to the festival that it hadn’t previously seen, said Roger Hallas, associate professor of English and the director of the festival. Hallas said that the contrast between the realistic scans of the museum pieces and the surreal game world is part of what makes the project exciting.

“Dissonance can create new kinds of ways of thinking about the future,” Hallas said. “In my mind, the sort of exciting aspects of Afrofuturism and that kind of speculative fiction is, so often, the popular imagination of the future in science fiction has been racialized as a kind of white space.”

The show’s title, “FRACTURE,” references this dissonance. It’s a term that comes from Christina Sharpe, a professor at York University, describing the effects of significant events in the past on the future. Starling-Davis chose the title because he sees his own navigation of his identity as a fracture and because it also plays on the idea of a fracture between reality and the digital world.

His takeaway from Sharpe’s writing was that people should confront and dive into fractures in order to move culture forward. While he was working in the museum basement photographing the artifacts from Nitecki’s collection to create his models, Starling-Davis felt a sense of connection to the items from his cultural heritage.

“It was a very surreal experience seeing something that’s a part of my own history as someone from the diaspora,” Starling-Davis said. “Knowing that memory gets lost all the time and then physically interacting with lost histories and trying to figure out my identity as an artist as well, while engaging with that lost history.”

Published on September 20, 2023 at 10:54 pm