Time Lens is an interactive documentary and mobile iPad app featuring a series of 360 degree panoramas documenting the rapid gentrification of an urban neighborhood in Philadelphia. Incorporated into these digital pearls are the voices, stories, dreams and memories of members of the largely invisible homeless community. Media artists Michael Kuetemeyer and Anula Shetty collaborated with men from the homeless shelter, Sunday Breakfast Rescue Mission, to create photographs, videos and interviews of the neighborhood. Time Lens uses the dimension of time as way to experience a place. Users can download the App on their mobile devices and then follow along in the actual location and experience both the past and the present, the virtual and physical worlds all at the same time. The goal of the project is to bring people to a specific location to participate in a transformative experience of that space, to infuse media art into the geographical landscape.
Time Lens was created as part of the Asian Arts Initiativeʻs Social Practice Lab and receives funding from ArtPlace, Temple University and the Philadelphia Cultural Fund.
