Installation set up at the University of New South Wales in Sydney lets visitors explore virtual reconstructions of temple
An interactive installation of the Mnajdra Temples set up at the University of New South Wales in Sydney will be touring the world and might make it to Malta when Valletta is crowned cultural capital in 2018.
The Spaces of Mnajdra project is a walk-through experience where visitors explore the temples in a virtual world.
A panoramic view of the archaeological site’s chambers is projected on to a 30-metre screen, and visitors’ shadows cast on the display act as a cursor, triggering changes on screen.
The installation was set up following extensive research by Bernadette Flynn as part of her doctoral studies.
She started in 1997 after seeing photographs of the stone buildings when on a sabbatical as a visiting scholar at Middlesex University’s Media Arts Department in London.
“Walking down from the Ħagar Qim temple, I first noticed Filfla out at sea across the low scrub landscape dotted with stone bird traps. I then came upon Mnajdra nestled in a hollow,” she said, adding that at the time there was no signage and little fencing.
Dr Flynn – a media artist, curator and researcher – spent the next 10 years recording images of the temples, focusing on the Mnajdra site and artefacts.
She returned to Malta five times before 2011 to complete her research. In 2009, she started developing the installation at the iCinema Centre for Interactive Cinema Research, at the University of New South Wales, and last year graduated with a doctorate in Cultural Heritage and Media Arts.
She told The Times that Spaces of Mnajdra was a real-time virtual world where visitors could navigate through the chambers, showing how the temples are today and how they might have looked in Neolithic times.
Upon entering the exhibition, you find yourself at the forecourt of Mnajdra, accompanied by the ambient sounds of local scrubland birds and the distant Mediterranean sea.
As you move around, the responsive system tracks where you are in the room and your shadow appears on the screen. You use this to access the interior chambers.
Human figures moving through the doorways invite you inside the temple and as you step towards the entrance of the lower, middle or east structures, the forecourt panorama slowly changes into the inside of a semicircular chamber.
Dr Flynn believes Spaces of Mnajdra could promote Malta’s cultural heritage overseas, especially in activities marking Valletta as the European capital for culture in five years’ time.
“We are investigating touring options and plans to take the project outside of Australia. We plan to tour in Europe and bring the project to Malta... V18 [Valletta cultural capital city 2018] might be one option,” she said.
At the end of last month, former Foreign Affairs Minister Francis Zammit Dimech and High Commissioner in Australia Francis Tabone launched a website about the project bringing to life the original Mnajdra site.
The website is supported by the Foreign Affairs Ministry and the Malta High Commission in Canberra through the Cultural Diplomacy Fund 2012.
More details about the project are available at http://spacesofmnajdra.com .