Projects
Limehouse Déjà Vu
Limehouse Déjà Vu
A site-specific augmented reality experience that constructs an encounter with the city as a place layered with histories and potentials for alternative futures.
Limehouse Déjà Vu is a site-specific augmented reality experience that constructs an encounter with the city as a place layered with histories and potentials for alternative futures, resisting the flattening of East London’s urban landscapes by ongoing regeneration processes. Building on the artist’s 2025 residency exhibition “Archives of Weird Memories” at the Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives, the project experiments with generative AI, 3D rendering technology, and spatial sounds to speculatively reconstruct lost buildings from Limehouse’s early 20th century landscape - architectures significant to the multicultural communities that once called Limehouse home.
Experiment
£20,000
Aims of the project
The project will explore the potentials of AR as a medium for reclaiming agency in imagining urban futures beyond nostalgia and finance-led regeneration. The 3D assets will be anchored via GPS in the streets where the buildings once stood, allowing audiences to encounter them through their phones or other AR devices as they walk. Layered with speculative sonic compositions, the reconstructions will be woven into the present-day streets dominated by views of Canary Wharf, producing an uncanny overlap of past, present, and future.
Towards the end of the R&D phase, the project will also prototype an immersive performance centred around the legendary pub – The Railway Tavern – that stood 100 years ago in Limehouse and welcomed a cosmopolitan community of sailors. It will remix the project’s audio-visual assets and transform the solitary experience of an AR walk into a collective gathering.
Meet the artists
Tan Wang-Ward
Lead Artist
she/her
Tan Wang-Ward is an artist and creative technologist based in London. Her practice centres on retrieving time, texture and experience from the flattening forces of urbanisation and technological change. Through interactive and immersive works, she creates spaces for subtle expression — rooted in the present yet deeply connected to archival and ancestral pasts. Approaching technology in a deliberately nuanced way, moving both with and against it, she embraces AI and immersive technologies to generate creative and critical insights that only emerge through sustained, hands-on experimentation.
