Sunderland station to get Jason Bruges designed ‘ghost-art’ wall
As part of the GBP7 million ($11.37 million) refurbishment of the Sunderland Station in north-east England, Jason Bruges Studio has been roped in by Tyne and Wear transport executive Nexus, to design a 144 meter long lightwall artwork that will run along a platform at the station.
The consultancy’s concept is to create ghostly characters, which appear behind the glass wall opposite passengers waiting for a train. Behind the glass wall is actually a disused platform, which has been bricked up. The London-based architecture and experimental design studio was appointed by Nexus, to create an artwork along the 144m long, 3m-high glass wall on platform three, as part of a refurbishment conceptualized by Reid Jubb Brown Architecture.
The idea and inspiration behind the concept comes from Sunderland’s football stadium – the stadium of light, as it’s popularly known. Nexus wanted to bring in the illusion of light to the underground station.
The studio design treats the wall as an interactive digital canvas, where each glass brick is taken as a “pixel”, each of which has 255 different states between being off and on. This creates a huge, low-resolution 755x15 ‘pixel’ video screen.
Each time a train leaves the station, the wall will be blank, but shortly after the train has pulled away, the first character will appear. One by one, more characters will arrive, reflecting the build-up of passengers on the real station opposite, until eventually a small crowd has gathered.
Each character will have its own behavior. For example, two might stand together as friends, or a character might appear with a dog or read a newspaper. As the train pulls in to hide them from view, the characters will disappear.
A system of sensors will be used to register when a train has arrived, and what sort of train it is. This is important as four different types of trains use the station - run by different operators - each of which stops at different parts of the platform and cover up different parts of the wall. The installation will be in place when the refurbishment, scheduled in April 2010, completes.
Artist Morag Morrison and photographer Julian Germain are also working on commissions for the station.
Sunderland Station is used by three train operators - Tyne and Wear Metro, Northern Rail and Grand Central, which operates a direct service to London. Nexus is the Tyne and Wear Passenger Transport Executive and administers funds on behalf of the Tyne and Wear Passenger Transport Authority.
