Keywords: architecture, urbanism, literature, augmented reality, embodiment, agency
This paper introduces a collaborative digital project focused on “reconstructing” early 20th century US fiction writer H.P. Lovecraft’s hybrid of real and imagined Providence, Rhode Island, USA. Beginning with his well-known tale, “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, our interdisciplinary team of scholars and architectural engineers are repurposing the tools of digital art history and urbanism to create spatialized imaginative reconstructions of Lovecraft’s places and spaces. We are building upon our work in the international Visualizing Venice consortium, expanding our approach to engage affective and embodied responses. Drawing upon the text itself, primary and secondary sources, and new archival research, we are “reconstructing” Lovecraft’s literary landscapes at the scales of individual historic structures, the city (Providence), and the area (New England) with 3D models, layered and annotated 2D maps, and immersive and interactive XR experiences.
Our first research output is a location-based augmented reality app that includes a dozen key locations and important narrative moments in the tale, and which can be traversed sequentially or at random in Providence. Location-based augmented reality is especially suited as a medium for Lovecraftian interpretation because it allows the tale to unfold over space as well as time. Its open structure is consonant with Lovecraft’s narrative themes of recurrence and inheritance. Lovecraft’s narratives superimpose a world of haunts and demons upon more familiar urban terrains and domestic interiors. Buildings, rooms, and natural landscapes function as both settings and as supernatural agents in their own right. The fears of the Lovecraftian unconscious – that of the individual and the collectivity – manifest in crowded urban centers, secret rooms, shadowy corners, and the crevices between this world and the shadow realms. For a Lovecraftian protagonist - and for the urban explorer - movement through these places and spaces is also a journey through an interior, psychic house of many rooms.
The locative AR affordances of agency, immediacy, embodiment, and emplacement allow us to tap into multiple registers of experience. Our goal with this design is to promote deeper interactor engagement with the source material on both intellectual and affective levels, via comprehension and apprehension. In addition to the story text and audio, scholarly sources include historic maps and images, and 3D reconstructions are associated with discrete points in the city. In addition, immersive set piece dynamic scenes and effects tied to dramatic narrative moments can also be triggered at key locales. Our application allows users both to conjure Lovecraftian scenes and monsters – and to banish them, in real time, with all that connotes. By translating elements of this fictional work into an on-site, layered, and embodied lived experience of the city today, we ultimately seek to explore richer techniques for urban representation and interpretation that will enrich our other Visualizing Cities projects, and enable us to rely not only upon strict measurement and precise translation, but also upon the intentional engagement of the affective, storytelling elements of spatial and immersive media forms.
HP Lovecraft, "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward" [1927]
Visualizing Venice: Mapping and Modeling Change and Time in a City, Kristin L. Huffman (Editor), Andrea Giordano (Editor), Caroline Bruzelius (Editor) (20190
Victoria Szabo, Research Professor, Department of Art, Art History & VIsual Studies and Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies, Duke University, USA. Szabo is a member of the international Visualizing Venice consortium and Chair of the Art Advisory Group for the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics and Techniques (ACM SIGGRAPH). She is also a principal in the Psychasthenia Studio Art Collaborative. http://vszabo.net
As architectural researchers and engineers, we create spatialized imaginary reconstructions of the places and spaces of American writer H. P. Lovecraft, notably his famous tale "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward". Our aim is to promote a deeper engagement with the material, on an intellectual and affective level, via comprehension and apprehension. By translating the elements of this work of fiction into a lived experience of today's city, through VR, we seek to explore richer techniques of urban representation and interpretation, as well as the intentional engagement of the affective and narrative elements of spatial and immersive media forms.