Overlooking the sea, the Swabian Castle of Trani is one of Puglia's most visited destinations and preserves centuries of historical layers. To enhance this heritage without altering its character, Dotdotdot designed three interactive and multimedia installations, each dedicated to a different perspective on the Castle: its architecture, its relationship with the surrounding landscape, and the imagery that inhabits its stones. The narratives are conveyed through a variety of multimedia languages, creating experiences that engage visitors emotionally and intellectually, using technology as a tool to restore value to the Castle's history and its link to the territory.
At its core is sound design: a musical score composed by musicians but interpreted by a parametric algorithm across different registers and timbres, resonating through the hundreds of pipes of the hall's nineteenth-century organ. Alongside it, images unfold across five large semi-transparent veils, arranged like Renaissance-inspired theatrical wings, each an allegory of a natural environment, in continuous transformation.
The Dotdotdot intervention was designed to integrate harmoniously and non-invasively with the existing spaces, and focused on three areas. Through different multimedia languages, each offering a distinct interactive experience, the installations bring new layers of content to visitors, stimulating emotion, focus and interpretation while always allowing the architecture to speak first.
In Room 5A, an eighteenth-century model becomes the starting point for a tactile and auditory experience: a replica lets visitors perceive the complex's shape, while an interactive table reveals fifty digitally 3D-scanned artifacts. Six three-dimensional reproductions activate, upon touch, animated projections on the vault, narrated by the voice of Apulian actor Fabrizio Vidale.
In the Manfredi Room, the medieval bestiary comes to life: dragons, lions, eagles and griffins interact with an animated projection and an interface tracing their symbolism throughout the region. One section invites visitors to create their own fantasy animal, illustrated and projected into space.
In the former stables, a "generative" sea, created entirely through code, animates a large wall in a three-minute cycle shifting from calm to storm, while the Castle's façade emerges from and dissolves into the waves. In this immersive environment, which wordlessly conveys the age-old relationship between the Castle and the Mediterranean, interfaces disappear, leaving only the sensory dimension.
Laura Dellamotta
Giovanna Gardi
Alessandro Masserdotti
Fabrizio Pignoloni
Sara Maniscalco
Martina Merigo
Nicola Ariutti
Antonio Cioppa
Pietro Forino
Donato Renzulli
Jib Ambhika Samsen
Andrea Ascani
Tiziano Berti
Edoardo Delille