During Public Visits, CAMLab welcomes our audiences to explore immersive installations that stage cultural history with digital technologies.

CAMLab Cave Public Visits are guided group tours. Reservations are limited to 15 per hour, in order to preserve the experiential dimension of CAMLab’s multisensorial project installations. Tours are led by a team of Harvard Student Educators, hailing from graduate programs across the university as well as Harvard College.

Currently installed in CAMLab Cave, the Cave Dance and Embodied Architecture projects activate the narrative, cultural, and sensorial potentials of interpreting historical data.

Cave Dance integrates thousands of depictions of dance from Dunhuang with motion capture of trained dancers, who performed movements preserved by textual records. With this human-computer collaborative choreography as its foundation, the Cave Dance installation instantiates movement sequences within ethereal motifs and enacts the “bodiless body,” a state of transcendence epitomized by celestial dancers at Dunhuang.

Combining photogrammetry with procedural generation and CGI, Embodied Architecture presents the world’s most comprehensive 3D model of the Yingxian pagoda, the world’s tallest timber structure. Serving as a stage for opening a cosmological understanding, the installation progressively unfolds the multisensory experience that the pagoda embodies—elucidating the lens of ritual practice.

Advanced reservations are required, and all are welcome. Tickets are pay-as-you-wish, with $10.00 suggested for non-Harvard visitors. Proceeds directly support CAMLab’s future research and projects.