Memory Lane in Augmented Reality

By Justin Choo | June 16, 2015 0 Comments

For many of us, Tanjong Pagar Railway Station is childhood institution that has been consigned to the footnotes of history. But in the lead up to this year’s Singapore International Festival of the Arts (SIFA), feel free to indulge in a little of the past, with a little help from the future.

15 Stations is an exhibition that is part of The O.P.E.N. (Open, Participate, Engage, Negotiate), a pre-festival of ideas, issues, and themes that will prepare its audience for SIFA; an opening act for the festival that will kick off in August. It is a wonderful fit for the pre-festival’s theme of POST-Empires.

The exhibition documents the rich history of the iconic Tanjong Pagar Railway Station (TPRS). Closed in 2011 and marked as a national monument, the station was more than just another terminal for public transport and home to some delightful street food. The Art Deco style building is a rich tapestry of our colonial past and also features four reliefs that are the work of Rudolfo Nolli, an Italian sculptor who has contributed many familiar sights in Singapore that are still visible today; such as the pair of lions in front of the Bank of China, as well as marble decorations at the College of Medicine and the Old Supreme Court.

From 17 June, this revered landmark will function as a platform of a different sort – it will be the landscape on which an augmented reality will take place. 15 Stations is no ordinary static exhibit. Within its magnificent façade, the station lies derelict, bearing little clues of the many stories that it used to stage. But it will be revived with the help of a smartphone.

Directed by Noorlinah Mohamed and written by Christopher Fok, this rather intruiging project is an augmented reality tour comprising of three parts: a historical route exploring the past, a route adapted from an actual love story, and a third what-if future created by students who knew not what the station meant to than older generation of Singaporeans.

“The railway station is a symbolic vestige or memory site of a time when Singapore was part of Malaya. That was an empire that Singapore eventually left in 1965 to eke out its own future and direction,” said Noorlinah. “As a memory site, Tanjong Pagar Railway Station also holds many stories; a witness to the different milestones of nation building. And it has a peculiar position – owned and managed by the Malaysian government but situated in Singapore. It is a significant historical site.”

The exhibit draws upon archived historical materials as well as animation to tell its story as you make your way around the station. The bare, dilapidated walls now carry a symbolic remnant of the history – in the form of QR codes and other triggers, revealing its intimate stories through the pixels of your phone.

The use of AR was fundamental to the ethos of 15 Stations: Noorlinah is fascinated by both the concept of memory being unstable and ephemeral, and the idea of interaction between site and object as triggers of memory; AR was a natural fit. “With AR, reality melds with the virtual. And like memory, AR is highly unpredictable and dependent on trackable sources to set it off.”

Working with AR proved to be a challenge for Noorlinah and her team. “Augmented Reality is not new but when made to work in an exploratory and creative environment, you need time to manage the various surprises you are faced with, such as the need to schedule repeated testing. And if you work with 3D or environmental markers, you’d need to test under different weather conditions,” she mused.

But after four months of work, the app has been fine tuned to perform reliably, day or night. Developing the app alone had cost S$46,000 and did not factor in the work done at the station itself.

The installation at the station has been broken down into three routes that have a narrative of their own, depicting the relationship between the station and those who have passed, and will pass through its doors. Collectively, they depict the central theme of 15 Stations: Reflect, Connect, and Imagine.

“Because when you have history, you cannot stay in it. You have to move on,” explains Noorlinah. “History is told through the gradation of a ‘moving on’ phase. You need to know where you are moving off from, before you know where you’re going to. So there is a trajectory of the past, the interim of connecting, and the future – Reflect, Connect, and Imagine.”

The theme of Reflect is represented by a historical account of the station. Filled with many archived photographs that are not readily available for public viewing, this route will appeal to history buffs or people who would like a rare, intimate retelling of the station’s story.

Connect retells a story from the archives, describing a woman who travelled regularly up to Malaysia to meet her lover in Kluang, and presented in audio and video. It symbolically draws attention to the lives connected by that railway back in its heyday.

And most interestingly, the content for Imagine is created by a group of NTU students who have never experienced TPRS, but add their imagination and creativity in visualising what the place should be like in their future – which at this point is still up in the air.

Each route takes about half an hour on its own, so the entire experience runs up to 90 minutes. As they are independent of each other, you need not experience all three routes in one sitting if you wish. If the moment triggers your memory and nostalgia grabs hold of you, you can share your own stories through the 15 Stories app on Facebook, as well as revel in the recollections of others. In this day and age, a walk down memory lane does entail more than just a single platform.

Details

The 15 Stations app will be available for both iOS and Android from 16 June 2015. Smartphones are available on loan to visitors should they not have one of their own. The app is site-specific, and the 15 Stations Augmented Reality Memory Tour may be taken at Tanjong Pagar Railway Station on: 17 June (Opening 7pm-10pm), 18 June-4 July (Tues-Sat 12pm-10pm, Sun 12pm-6pm, Mon closed)

The O.P.E.N. Pass costs S$45 via SISTC and will entitle you to attend all the concerts, films, salons (artists’ talks and symposiums) and exhibitions at The O.P.E.N., including 15 Stations. Local and international students, NSFs and senior citizens 55 and above qualify for a concession price of S$25. Pre-registration at sifa.sg/theopen is required. A limited number of single entry tickets at $10 per show is available at the door.

The O.P.E.N. Pass will entitle the pass-holder to attend: (1) 15 Stations Augmented Reality Memory Tour (2) Concert by indie artist, iNCH (3) Concert by audio-visual collective Syndicate SG (4) THE PRICE OF NEGLECT, photo exhibition by award-winning environmental photojournalist, Lu Guang (5) Artist talk by Lu Guang (6) The Arrival of Vasco da Gama, photographic recreation by Pushpamala N. (7) Avega, the Passion, Artist Talk by Pushpamala N. (8) Show me the World Symposium, Talks and Presentations on Curatorial Practice in the Performing Arts (9) The Role of Tomorrow’s Architects, 2015 Keynote Insight by Toyo Ito, Pritzker Prize-winning Japanese architect (10) Dance Marathon – OPEN WITH A PUNK SPIRIT!  Reflections on Contemporary Dance and Archives by two Japanese dance experts (11) A line-up of 14 international films, many of which are showing for the first time in Singapore, and award-winning. Note that the four performances in The O.P.E.N. are separately ticketed. 

 

**Trivia: The number 15 denotes the 15 pit stops or stations available on site. 15 is also 1932 added together; 1932 being the year the station was established. Noorlinah says that numbers play an important part in a life of a railway station – time, dates, ticket numbers, seat numbers, train numbers, which makes the use of numbers in the name appropriate.

 

Additional picture credit: SIFA

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