(Photo via DigilAndGrab.com)
ORLANDO | Inspired by the erasure of the Pulse nightclub crosswalk, two Denver artists created a digital memorial using augmented reality to celebrate inclusion and diversity and reclaim public spaces.
Molly Valentine Dierks and Corrina Espinosa have spent months creatively defying the Florida Department of Transportation‘s removal of the rainbow memorial that once lined the crosswalk on Orange Ave. Now, their project “Soft Power” is finally ready for the world to see.
Espinosa, a new media artist and assistant teaching professor at the University of Colorado Boulder, is the founder of Denver Digital Land Grab, an artist collective and the AR platform on which the project lives.
Rather than replace the crosswalk’s original art, Espinosa says, the new digital memorial depicts a new iteration of the Pulse memorial – one with floating elements and an embedded sound.
“We decided to make the 49 orbs, one for each soul,” Espinosa says. “None of them are specific; they’re just all kind of floating and moving and living. And then we decided to put in the sound of the heartbeat, right? Because of a couple of reasons. Obviously, the name pulse implies a heartbeat, but then also just to show that the memory is still alive, the pulse is still beating, and so we thought that that was important that we put that audio in there as well.”
The digital memorial can only be experienced when physically present in the location of the crosswalk. Built by hand through open-source coding, the platform lives on a private server under their own domain.
Espinosa says that unlike paint or a physical art installation, which can be altered or removed by the state, there are no laws governing the digital space. As the platform does not exist on any app store, it can’t be taken down digitally either.
“Our whole goal is we wanted to take back space for artists, and we’re not asking permission,” Esinosa says. “That’s the big thing, and so we’ve got very much like a renegade sort of style to us, where we’re done asking politely. We’re just going to take back what we feel like should be all of ours. It’s public community property. It’s a public street. That’s the same thing that we were thinking with the Pulse nightclub crosswalk.”
Espinosa met Dierks, an interdisciplinary artist and designer, while they were both teaching at Boulder. Together they’ve also digitally recreated the Black Lives Matter street painting that spanned two street blocks of downtown Washington, D.C.
Although Dierk typically deals with broader themes of nature and technology in her art, she says she was enticed by the idea of resurrecting art removed by the government.
“As an artist, to erase and oppress things that are really authentically about who the United States actually is, and then also to make it seem as though something traumatic didn’t, or hasn’t happened, or hasn’t been part of history, just really bothers me,” Dierks says.
Dierks designed the lettering for the BLM mural and the sides of the floating rainbow cubes in the Pulse memorial. She says that as allies and educators, it was important to her and Espinosa to use their skills to push back against censorship and show solidarity to marginalized communities.
“We teach a lot of kids that are trans, that are LGBTQIA, that are coming from all different kinds of backgrounds, and they’re doing this really amazing thing, which is majoring in art, which is especially right now a big risk,” Dierks shares. “So, I, as an educator, want them to feel like they are in a place where people have a voice.”
Getting people to see their digital project is their next challenge. To get the word out about the Pulse memorial, they received help from friends in Orlando to distribute stickers with a QR code that links to their digital platform.
“There’s nothing wrong with rainbow-colored paint on the crosswalk,” Espinosa says. “It’s not hurting anybody. It’s actually helping people heal and connect and unite. We couldn’t see anything negative about it, and so we were deeply hurt when we heard that it was being erased.”
“And we’re not even from Florida; we’re all the way across the country in Colorado. But we still stand with that community. I think a lot of people across the country do. And so since we had the platform, we thought we would go for it.”
Stickers with the QR code can be found at LGBTQ spaces Se7enBites, The Center and Zebra Youth.
For more information, visit DigilAndGrab.com.
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