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London's National Maritime Museum Rides The Digital Wave

Digital art ahoy.

A district in South East London, known for its naval heritage and for being the home of Greenwich Mean Time, is now the unlikely home of some digital art. AV installation Voyagers (above) created by The Light Surgeons, with help from James George of the Flightphase, has just recently grazed the shores of the Greenwich-based National Maritime Museum. As you can imagine, the museum has a vast archive of maritime materials, from cartography to manuscripts and scientific equipment—this wave-like geometric installation serving as a thematic intro to Britain’s naval history. The 20m long piece, designed by Real Studios, is made up of 26 triangular parts with a spherical Puffersphere projector situated at one end.

The Light Surgeons’ meta tagged films and pictures from the museum’s archive cover the wavy structure. Old maps are displayed alongside photographs and keywords relating to the installation—shown as cascading typographical waves, ebbing and flowing like a virtual word-tide.

And as if that wasn’t enough, the National Maritime Museum is also currently running an exhibition about the polar ice caps melting away, designed by United Visual Artists called High Arctic (below) running now until 13 January 2012. We mentioned it previously, but it now has finally opened to the public, allowing visitors to explore the disappearing world of the Arctic in a futuristic environment. According to UVA it’s “a monument to an Arctic past which invites us to think about human impact in the Arctic region and contemplate its fragility, its beauty, and its scale.” As well as looking stunning, of course.

Set in an ultraviolet world that wouldn’t look out of place in a club, it features over 3000 white towers split into archipelagos with names of the Svalbard glaciers atop them. Tracking devices monitor visitors’ movements as they stroll around holding ultraviolet torches, which then activate projected animation pools in different areas. Nick Drake narrates poems playing through speakers that explore our relationship with the Arctic since its discovery in the 4th century BC.