“Generative Waters” is an investigation of Palissy's Lost Grotto co-lead by Luis Rodríguez-Rincón (Assistant Professor of Spanish at Haverford College), and Kelley O'Brien (Assistant Professor of New Media at UNC Greensboro). Together we are working on a multi-phase project to recreate Bernard Palissy’s sixteenth-century ceramic grotto, as described in his text Architecture et Ordonnance de la grotto rustique (La Rochelle, 1563), as an immersive 3D environment to complement the translation into English of this description for the first time.
We have already translated his written description of the Grotto from French to English and are working to construct a 3D digital model of the space. Our hope is that this digital model will then take the form of a digital interactive space, specifically a webpage devoted to the translation and a navigable version of the model. Additionally we want to explore the use of Virtual Reality/VR headsets as an immersive animated experience of the model and a specifically designed directional soundtrack.
As part of this work, we are aiming to gather a group of humanist specialists (both art historians, literary scholars, and historians of Early Modern France) to help us brainstorm possible frameworks for bringing our immersive digital project to as wide a public and specialist audience as possible. In working towards this massive project, we are soliciting a multi-stage grant from the NEH to help support this work. One of the goals of the first stage would be to convene humanist scholars of the Renaissance together to discuss ways to best align our project with the needs and insights of specialists in the field. Can our model be made into a useful tool for Renaissance scholarship and pedagogy today? How can we ensure our website and model reflects the most up-to-date insights of specialists in the field? These are just some of the questions we hope to answer to help guide the realization of the project.
Our full Call for Collaborators can be found at in this google doc
Please email your qualifications, interests and questions to Kelley O’Brien at kaobrien@uncg.edu