PRESENCE
Two words written directly on the wall and a QR code beneath them.
There was no physical object to encounter. To access the work, the viewer had to make the first move — take out their own phone, scan the code and choose to enter.
That action activated the work. What appeared next existed through the relationship between the physical space, the viewer and their personal device.
PARTICIPATION
Scanning the code opened an augmented reality experience within the exhibition space.
Through the phone, an over-life-size digital avatar appeared in the same space as the viewer. It was not physically present in the room, yet through the screen it could be approached, viewed from different positions and experienced in relation to the surrounding architecture.
The phone did not simply display an image. It became the point where physical and digital space met.
TRANSLATION
The digital garment was developed as part of my MA research into how digital fashion could be used to reinterpret visual languages from Estonian material culture.
One of its starting points was the medieval Karja Church in Saaremaa. Painted on the vaults inside the church are a series of unusual symbols and figures dating from around 1340. Their exact meanings are not known, but some interpretations connect them with protection and with beliefs about good and evil.
I was particularly interested in this contradiction. Some of the figures can appear strange, threatening or even frightening to a contemporary viewer, yet they may have been placed inside the church to protect the space from evil. In this reading, an image that looks threatening does not represent the threat — it acts against it.
I began by redrawing the motifs from Karja Church by hand with an ordinary blue ballpoint pen.
The choice of tool was deliberate. I wanted the drawings to retain a sense of simplicity and ordinariness. The motifs may now be encountered as historical or symbolic images, but the visual culture we describe as “folk” once belonged to everyday life. The ballpoint pen brought that sense of the everyday back into the process.
I transferred the drawings into CLO3D, where they became a pattern on a transparent silk organza dress. Organza allowed the motifs to exist as a visible layer without becoming a solid surface: the body, the other garments and the drawings could remain visible through one another.
The dress was one part of a larger digital ensemble. Rather than reconstructing a historical folk costume from a single region, I brought together references from different parts of Estonia.
The wool leggings developed from traditional long socks and embroidery patterns found on a Halliste hip apron. The references included the cross, Tree of Life and circle motifs.
The same source material developed differently on the puffa jacket. Motifs including the ring and rose were taken from the flat surface of Halliste embroidery and given three-dimensional form. Some became applications attached to the jacket, while the same shapes were also cut from the jacket itself, allowing the layers underneath to remain visible.
The visual language extended beyond the garments onto the avatar itself. The avatar drew on Kihnu apron embroidery, using motifs including the circle, rose, cross and Tree of Life.
I was interested in what could happen to this visual language when it moved into another time, another technology and another body.
In doing so, the motifs changed location as well as form. They moved from the physical architecture of the church into a hand drawing, from the drawing into a digital textile, and from the textile into a garment that had no physical counterpart.
Scan Me moved them once again.
Through augmented reality, the digital garment returned to physical space. The movement had now come almost full circle: from an image embedded in the architecture of a medieval church, to a hand drawing, to a digital textile and garment, and finally back into architecture — no longer permanently painted onto a surface, but appearing temporarily through the action of a viewer and their personal device.
The object had changed, but so had the conditions through which it could be encountered.
I am interested in what happens to an image or object when it crosses these boundaries. Its form can change, its location can change and the way we encounter it can change — while something of its earlier meaning can continue to travel with it.
CONTEXT
CONTEXT
I experimented with placing the same digital avatar in three very different physical settings.
At Tallinn Art Hall, it appeared in a space made for encountering art. Its digital presence was unusual, but encountering an artwork there was not.
At Põhjala Factory, the avatar appeared in a corridor surrounded by artists’ studios — a working creative environment where art and design are made rather than presented as an exhibition.
The forest introduced a different question. A person standing on a forest path might seem to be in the most natural of these three environments. Yet the same person is holding a phone and looking through it at an entirely digital object.
The digital object remained the same in each place. What changed was everything around it — and with that, its scale, presence and relationship to the space.