Antecedent: Creating a Digital Twin of Rone’s Empire
When you enter Rone’s Empire, you brush shoulders with ghosts.
They murmur secrets into the abandoned telephone. They linger on the piano trying to remember that elusive childhood tune. All around you is the familiar click-clack of billiards, the clinking of glasses and even the faint airs of elegant laughter drifting from room to room.
The atmosphere ignites your imagination. It asks you to step inside this portrait of nostalgia — a mirror held up to the art-deco world.
It’s no wonder Melbourne buzzed over Rone’s Empire. This newest venture into the transience of beauty and the ruthlessness of progress was a sell-out, with 26,000 visitors over the April-May season. Tucked away in the romantic greenery of Sherbrooke, the Burnham Beeches mansion holds a wealth of history and as we discovered, more than a few ghosts.
Empire brought this neglected art-deco icon back into the limelight for the first time since its foreclosure over 20 years ago. That’s what Rone does. Transfigure abandoned spaces into ethereal works of art, and get everyone talking about it. With every whisper, the mythology surrounding Burnham Beeches swells. The estate even supposedly played host to Princess Diana in the 1980s — if the lore is to be believed.
Built by Alfred Nicholas 1930s, Burnham Beeches had been everything from a children’s hospital to bourgeois hotel. But by 2000, it was simply the neighbourhood enigma. A lonely shrine to the art deco movement, shrouded from the outside world. No one, not even the locals knew what was left inside. So it’s no surprise that it garnered the attention of developers over the years.
In late in 2018, the State Government gave approval for restaurateur Shannon Bennett and developer Adam Garrison to regenerate the estate, converting it into a luxury hotel. The historic Norris building would have stayed suspended in limbo until the time of construction, if not for Rone and his team. With the keys to the dilapidated mansion, they breathed echoes of life back into Burnham Beeches. Dust-ridden champagne towers. Piles of broken velveteen chairs. Cabinets left ajar and clothes abandoned on wire bed-frames. Cobwebs and brittle leaves and branches and splatters of paint to appear like mould. All of these elements and more brought into the space by hand to create a mirage of the past in the present.
The combination of cleverly designed sound scape, lighting and even scent profile build this dreamlike mirror world. It even manages to hark back to the forest of beech trees in Buckinghamshire, for which the mansion itself was named, thanks to bespoke botanical sculptures from Loose Leaf.
Scattered all around the mansion are Rone’s iconic and powerful ‘Jane Doe’ portraits — this time drawing their likeness from the actress Lily Sullivan.
The delicate, fragile and almost translucent features hold you close in an intimate communion, like a silent film. There is something important to say, and no time or words to say it.
Going behind-the-scenes on Empire
Like many we have been long-time admirers of Rone, a moniker for the artist Tyrone Wright. PHORIA was first connected with Rone by our good friend Luke McManus from Invurt, when Rone launched his first large-scale installation Empty in the stunning 1920s-style Star Lyric Theatre. We scanned Empty in 3D and created a 360-degree walkthrough experience before the Lyric Theatre was demolished and rebuilt into an apartment complex. Empty was one of the first art exhibitions worldwide to be scanned and captured in 3D and truly elevated Rone to international acclaim.
Since Empty, we’ve collaborated with Rone’s Alpha and Omega installations, continuing to show how 3D scanning technology can create digital time-capsules for large-scale art exhibitions and installations. And Empire is Rone’s largest, and most ambitious project yet.
Before he embarked on the journey to build Empire, Rone dropped into PHORIA HQ to see how we could augment this installation to the next level. That’s how Antecedent was born — an augmented reality experience that visualises the past, as you walk through the present.
Antecedent means a thing that existed before or logically precedes the other. While you’re being overwhelmed by sights, sounds, scents and textures of Empire, it’s perhaps easy to forget Rone’s detail-oriented methodology and incredibly stylised practices. We wanted to illuminate just how extensively Rone and his team has transformed Burnham Beeches.
Our creative director Rayyan Roslan discusses how we captured Rone’s creative process like never before.
“Essentially we’re using 3D mapping, and the positioning technology within the iPad camera, to let you step into a point in the past. It’s like having x-ray vision: you can see the bones of the space and how it has been transformed in real time as you walk through it. We hope it adds a bit of drama to the experience and encourages a greater appreciation of Rone’s very involved process.”
Empire is now closed, but here’s a Virtual Tour of what Burnham Beeches looked like before the exhibition:
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