You can find our application #Моя_башня (My Tower) in App Store and Google Play.
My Tower is the world’s first Digital Art AR application that allows placing a city-scale virtual Tower which was demolished earlier.
Ekaterinburg, Russia.
240 meters high abandoned TV tower after 30 years under construction stage was blown up on March 24, 2018. The Tower was an essential part of the city landscape and a non-official symbol of Yekaterinburg. Many different reconstruction projects have been proposed in the last few years, from the living building and restaurant to a church, city viewpoint, lighthouse, etc. In 2017 city authorities sold the land, and Tower was blown up. Society’s reaction split into 2, first said that the city lost a symbol, and others were happy to have a sky arena instead of a dangerous abandoned Tower in the city center. Meanwhile, the story of the Tower is just about to begin.
Today, the internet allows you to access any information at any time. Books, pictures, movies, and music – acquires digital immortality in the microworld. Architectural objects with cultural and historical value but not preserved by man could turn into virtual monuments. Augmented reality allows us to reproduce destroyed buildings on a city scale on the place. We decide to digitalize Tower because we think that it is an important part of the city and a self-identification tool for citizens.
All you need is a mobile device with an installed application. Find one of many posters with the Tower we placed around the city, launch an application, rotate your phone camera to the side where the Tower was, and you will see an augmented reality, an exact copy of the real Tower. Users can freely walk around and observe it from any angle and position. The Tower is back.
Also, we added the ability to return to the Tower with google maps and Yandex maps in satellite mode and with a simple transport e-card.
It’s not enough to build a digital copy of the Tower – it’s too simple and boring. We decide to turn it into the biggest virtual monument in the world, a digital gallery for artists from all around the world. The digital DNA of the “New Tower” gives us the freedom to play. Artists could paint it, reshape it, animate it, and even demolish a copy. Tower, as a digital gallery, will be changing skins with different varieties and adjustments. It’s a unique place and environment for an artist to represent thoughts with radically different scales of freedom and scale of meanings. New skins are proposed as an optional feature, and users are just free to choose.
The digital monument of demolished Tower it’s not just a resurrected symbol for a city. It’s a new landmark, a new place of attraction, constantly updated gallery of worldwide artworks from different contemporary artists. My Tower project is a statement for new as an alternative to binary good or bad, and there is no power to abolish it.
It’s a noncommercial project made by group of enthusiast who just loves Ekaterinburg. We think that it’s important to save key city-scale objects in a digital layer. The real object can decay, fall apart, and disappear, opposite to the digital twin, which exists as long as the technology itself. Physical objects always have a fixed status, owner, boundaries, forms, and restrictions. The virtual object may belong to a city, hover in a server cloud, or is decentralized and sorted on any personal device.
It belongs to everyone.
Slava Ptrk – idea, markers, texts
Evgeny Krishtal – modeling
Grigory Kashtanov – development of the app
Darya Veretennikova – design
Anatoly Veretennikov – video
Ivan Puzyrev – producing
Thanks to Maria Balakireva, Alek Devyatov, Artur, Artem.