In early 1922 the Irish State organised a seminal art exhibition at a fashionable art gallery in Paris: Galerie Barbazanges. The Exposition D’Art Irlandais launched the emerging Irish nation on the world stage. In January 2022, Noho launched the Seeing Ireland website for Trinity College Dublin marking the centenary of the exhibition of Irish Art staged in Paris in 1922.Â
Visitors to this site can visit an immersive recreation of the exhibition and, for the first time in 100 years, experience Irish art and culture as it was exhibited at a key moment in the history of the nation. The gallery is an interactive 3D space featuring over 100 works of Art. The gallery was designed and built by our team so that it could be an interactive space delivered over the web. The design of the space was inspired from a contemporary photograph of the Galerie Barbazanges. The content of the gallery was inputted using our cross-culture system which allowed us and the historians to enter content into the gallery.
We also created an introduction video that introduces the project and sets the tone for the entire experience. We were able to draw from the rich visuals associated with the exhibition and also show the virtual gallery highlighting specific works.
We also created a map of Paris with other events that were happening at the same time as the exhibition, for example James Joyce was publishing Ulysses that year nearby in Shakespeare & Co. The content for was inputted through the cross culture manager as well.
The website also featured sections devoted to theatre, lectures and the music performed in Paris as part of the cultural programme. This includes a set of new recordings produced in Chicago in January 2022 in response to the commemorative exhibition in the Snite Museum of Art, Notre Dame University and the music of a century earlier.
The Seeing Ireland project is relevant as it deals with a huge amount of content that needed to be managed and displayed in an interactive environment.