"Ville Venete – interactive environment for the Venetian villas"

Year: 2015

Authors: Andrea Santini & Francesca Sarah Toich.
Commission: Istituto Regionale Ville Venete, in the context of EXPO 2015.
Location: Villa Contarini, Piazzola sul Brenta (Padua), Italy.

Ville Venete is a permanent immersive interactive environment created for Villa Contarini, designed to guide visitors through the architectural and cultural heritage of the Venetian villas. The installation begins with an interactive map projected onto the floor: entering the map activates a virtual magnifying glass, allowing the visitor to move across the Veneto region and discover selected villas through an embodied exploratory interface.

When the magnifying lens is positioned over one of the marked sites, a panoramic screen activates documentary video and multimedia materials drawn from the photographic archives of the Veneto Region. These short narratives offer geographical and architectural information, while also opening onto the wider historical, political, productive and cultural context of the territory.

The project combines spatial navigation, audiovisual storytelling and museographic interaction in a single environment, transforming regional heritage into an explorable digital landscape. It is also an important example of my work on interactive systems for cultural interpretation, where movement in space becomes both an interface and a curatorial device.

Credits:

• Production: UBIKteatro.

• Conception and design: Andrea Santini.

• System and programming: NiceFall Visual Support.

• Historical research and texts: Francesca Sarah Toich, Lele Piovene.

• Audio and sound design: Andrea Santini, David Calliaro.

• Narration: Francesca Sarah Toich, Lele Piovene.

• Music: ensemble Radio Antiqua, Pierpaolo Ciurlia (Sistro Barocco), Baroque Music Library.

• Video processing: Fabio Ferrando, Andrea Santini.

• Graphic processing for mapping and landscape elements: Andrea Santini, Andrea Fincato.