Art, technology merge in innovative mural project
The 600-square-foot installation on the south wall of the Newberry Building in downtown Wooster is an augmented reality work five years in the making.
It looks like a mural, and it is a mural, but it’s also more than a mural.
The 600-square-foot installation on the south wall of the Newberry Building in downtown Wooster is an augmented reality work five years in the making.
“There’s lots of science behind it,” OHuddle Executive Director Sara Reith said, noting only five such murals exist across the state. But it started with a spark, the core belief of the nonprofit mentoring organization.
Reith said among the 714 mentees, several said, “I’m an art kid.”
“That’s my spark of interest,” Reith said.
And that spark became a true community project, from The Rose Companies, which owns the building and offered the wall space, to instructors at the Wayne Center for the Arts, who served as artistic mentors, to the City of Wooster, whose design and review board had the final approval.
And most important to the AR aspect of the work were College of Wooster computer science students, who worked as part of the school’s Applied Methods and Research Experience to code individual works of art, which are viewable through a website on smartphones. The AR art can be changed at any time so more artists have the chance to have their work seen.
“This has kind of become our community (refrigerator),” Reith said of allowing mentees to display their work for the entire community.
The line drawing was created by Crystal Madrilegos of Wild Daughters in Medina, with patterning and colors inside the drawing being coded for the AR by the AMRE students.
The project received funding from the Ohio Arts Council and the Wayne County Community Foundation, but Reith said 85% of the project was made possible through in-kind donations and services.
“We were able to make a really big thing on a really small budget,” she said.
The mentees learned about more than art and AR through the course of the project — working through contracting, grant writing and collaboration and even presenting to the design and review board.
“We were all students of the process,” Reith said.
OHuddle is planning for a formal launch of the installation sometime in late August. “For dress rehearsing and making sure there aren’t any bugs,” Reith said.
Reith noted the mural’s proximity to the city’s arts district, which includes the new Lyric Theater and the Wayne Center for the Arts. The organization’s next foray will see a partnership with both as mentees begin exploring videography.
“We want our kids,” Reith said, “to get in front of those adults who are really here for them.”