Stories of the Stones
St Mary's Abbey in York was one of the largest monastic establishments in medieval England, featuring as prominently in the religious and political life of the region as it did in the city's skyline. It was dissolved during the Reformation, and over the years that followed many of its constituent stones were spread throughout the fabric of the city itself, in public buildings or in private gardens. The standing remains of the abbey are now part of the Yorkshire Museum Gardens, but there is little to convey the scale or significance of the site, and for visitors and residents alike it seems to function mostly as part of the landscape.
Churches and sacred sites like St Mary's were not only venues of religious activity and expression but also the focal point of their communities, and as such served a variety of other functions too. These buildings, or the stones that remain of them are present in our community today, and we walk past them, or around them or over them regularly, but they are a religious focus for a relatively small number of regular churchgoers. These buildings continue to fulfil more ambiguous roles in our society, especially in the cases where these church buildings become performance venues, cafes, art galleries, housing and so on.
The Stories of the Stones project will seek to recover something of this past life for visitors in the present, through a virtual reconstruction of the Abbey. Guided by historical, archaeological, and audience research, and by the work of York Museums Trust, Audiolab and ArupDDS will virtually rebuild the abbey’s structure and its soundscape, and pilot innovative ways of allowing individual visitors to experience and interact with the Abbey as it once was. One of the key mechanisms for this will be the use of voice and the consideration of church space as a venue for both passive listening and community interaction.
IPUP's main role, as well as co-ordinating the project, will be to collect and analyse the audience data from visitors to the site that will be used to develop an understanding of the processes by which visitors engage with the site and its history.
The Stories of the Stones seeks to research, understand and
promote wider engagement with the legacy of late-medieval stonework
that remains in our communities as complete, part-complete or ruined
church buildings. State of the art visual/acoustic virtual reality
techniques will facilitate new and effective means of engagement with
the site, and explore ways in which visitors can successfully interact
with the virtual reality presented to them.