The Dungeons: AR/VR

Using immersive digital tools to reconstruct the memory of a lost East London nightclub.

Led by Katherine Green for Rendezvous Projects, the project worked with Brain Records and DJ Dlux (Creative Engagement Services) to document The Dungeons — an underground club beneath Lea Bridge Road in Leyton, active from the late 1980s to the mid-1990s and closely associated with early rave and nascent jungle scenes.

Funded through the Mayor of London’s Commission for Diversity in the Public Realm, it used photogrammetry, VR, AR and oral history to explore how immersive digital methods could preserve and share place-based music heritage. At its core was the idea that the building itself could be treated as an archive of lived experience. Developed on a modest budget, the work tested how low-cost digital tools could be used inventively to preserve and reactivate under-documented cultural history.

Approach

  • Photogrammetry of the venue using 4,000+ images, converted into 3D models and shared online via Sketchfab
  • Digital model with annotations linking to oral history extracts
  • Volumetric capture and AR prototype using a dancer looped to Brain Records tracks to suggest a living statue
  • New and edited oral histories focused on The Dungeons and its role in local music culture

Augmented memory

A prototype AR experience testing how site-specific digital layers could reanimate the derelict building, revealing a volumetric dancer and archival material when viewed through a mobile device.

Volumetric capture session

Screens from the AR prototype

Footage from the volumetric capture process