The cave

Research Background: The Melbourne International Jazz Festival invited interior designer Caroline Vains to assemble a design team to construct the environment for the festival's 'The Cave' event. The brief was Jazz: Past/Present/Future. Produced by Si Jay Gould, The Cave was a late-night event held over four nights in the historic Kelvin Club, a private men's club set up in 1865. Vains collaborated with well-known video projection artist Sean Healy and designer Adelle Lin to design an immersive space, over two floors, that explored ways of interpretating jazz spaces of the past through contemporary projection technologies. Research contribution: The Cave designers expanded flat-screen technologies out into three-dimensional physical environments that could be occupied, played and danced in by performers and hundreds of audience members. Beyond these technological innovations, the designers also played with time by projecting simulations of past jazz spaces into a contemporary jazz club. They also used mapping and projections to speculate about jazz clubs of the future. Research significance: Caroline Vains created The Cave at the invitation of the Melbourne Jazz Festival (documentation attached). Aside from this commission as peer review, The Cave enjoyed enormous public esteem. The three-night event (2nd, 3rd & 9th June 2012, from 9pm until 5am) was sold out. The venue held an average of 500 people a night and hosted 14-piece orchestras, afro-futuristic producers, break-dancers, rappers, Ethopian jazz pianists DJs and more.