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A giant pair of binoculars curiously appear in public space – perhaps a busy high street, a white sand beach or in a train station.
From one end, the lenses are mirrored and eye catching. Striking, beautiful and recognisable as an object of use made giant, they easily draw interest and interaction.
When you look through them – as each person passes within a certain distance of the lenses, their image morphs and mutates.
Colours flash, textures bulge in and out, snapshots stay rooted in the air as each person dances around or flits past. From hidden speakers, sounds triggered by each mutation rumble and hiss.
These fun and mischievous oversized spyglasses are here to remind us: there is always to the world more than meets the eye!
Commissioned by Curiocity and on the streets of Brisbane for the duration of March 2021.
Now You See Me started life as a commission for Shakespeare Birthplace Trust and Royal Shakespeare Company.
It was called I See The Future and it was a participatory public art project, prompting conversations about the future between communities.
Two giant pairs of binoculars appeared on the streets of Stratford on Avon in September 2019.
The sculptures sparked a vital contemporary conversation: what will Stratford be like in 100 years time?
The Anagram team ran a series of creative workshops and spent many long afternoons on the streets, musing with people from all walks of life on their hopes and dreams for the future.
Drawings and audio from these conversations were then transformed into vibrant animations, to play inside the binoculars as a layer over a real-time video feed of the view beyond. Each pair of binoculars had a different animated film on loop – focusing on different ideas and themes, and creating a conversation between the two locations.
Amy Rose
Amaya Jeyarajah Dent
Tabitha Pope & Giles Thaxton
Angus Denton
Ben Bailes
Lottie Kingslake
Tom Berry
Limbic Cinema
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