A Mirror For Remembering
A virtual reality journey through scanned artefacts and museum objects that treats digital preservation as a question of access, care, and survival over time.
A Mirror For Remembering is a virtual reality artwork that takes viewers through a sequence of immersive 3D environments built from scanned museum artefacts and everyday objects. Moving between fossil bone, hard drives, cricket boxes, plastic waste, and a final mirror, the work treats preservation as a lived cultural question rather than a purely technical one. Commissioned for Tunbridge Wells Borough Council, it was designed from the start for long-term care, with source files, scans, models, and code preserved alongside the finished experience.
Preservation is staged here as dependence: on devices, institutions, file formats, and future acts of maintenance. By building archival care into the work itself, May turns the museum frame into part of the artwork’s meaning. The piece sits close to the centre of his practice because it asks not only what is worth keeping, but what a digital object needs in order to remain legible at all.
Additional notes
- Commissioned through an international open call by Tunbridge Wells Borough Council, with support from Arts Council England and the Kent Medway Museums National Portfolio Organisation partnership.
- Format: 3D, 360-degree stereoscopic video for VR headsets and mobile stereoscopic viewers.
- Duration: 9 minutes 50 seconds.
- Built using Blender, 3DF Zephyr, and Fugio, with an original soundtrack by Alex May and an AI-generated voiceover.
- The preservation package supplied to the museum included source code, 3D models, PNG frames, and original photogrammetry images to support future re-rendering.
- Presented at WeMissIPRES in 2020 and later exhibited in Collecting Tomorrow at The Amelia Scott in 2023.
- Project site: A Mirror For Remembering