During our visit to Liverpool on Bank Holiday Monday, while we were passing the Mann Island buildings we spotted that there was an art exhibition in the unit on the end, facing the Museum of Liverpool. It was free entry so we decided to take a look.
The exhibition was titled “The Danger Tree” and featured the paintings of a British artist, Scarlett Raven. The paintings were hung in what resembled a set for a play about the First World War – a bombed out gallery on the French / Belgium borders in1916 . As we entered the gallery we were given headphones and an iPad, which included an app – Blippar. Pointing the iPad camera at one of the paintings .and up popped an interactive viewing the paintings and the story inspired by the artwork by digital artist Marc Marot..
The artist creates her works by applying layers of paint, building up a thick impasto image, mainly fields of flowers and seascapes. A series of photographs taken of each of the layers are shown by the app allowing the viewer to see how the painting was built up. In addition there were animations of photographs and images – digital art – based around stories and poems from WWI, with music, recordings of soldiers from the War and a narrations from leading actors including Stephen Graham, Christopher Eccleston, Sean Bean, Vicky McClure and Sophie Okonedo., who read out poems by Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon and Rupert Brooke.
It was well done and after popping in out of curiosity we spent a good hour viewing the paintings and the accompanying interactive works. I though the paintings were attractive, and the interactive art very professional and well done. It was interesting to see how the paintings were built up. However the digital art probably dominated and distracted somewhat from the physical “analogue” art. I also thought that the link between some of the paintings and the theme of WWI was a little tenuous. But we enjoyed the exhibition and the novelty of the digital content, enough to purchase the exhibition guide. I downloaded the Blippar app onto my phone and by focusing on the reproduced paintings in the book we can view the digital content. Indeed, if you do the same and focus it on the images of the paintings in this post, you can see them for yourself
Down by the Dougie 
That’s a really interesting idea, though I’d like seeing how the picture was built up more than the accompanying material which, as you say, could be distracting. I like the paintings too, though my least favourite is the most relevant – the WW1 poppies. They seem just an amorphous red mass – but maybe that’s meant to represent blood.
That sounds really intriguing, and I like the images you have posted here.
Hmmm. That could possibly be what some woman was doing/using in Chicago’s Art Institute while we were there. We were wondering why she “needed” a photo of everything. Maybe mystery solved.