Pioneer 2.0

How artist Luciana Haill uses state-of-the-art digital technology to recreate feats of Victorian engineering

Take a look at the photograph opposite… or better still, take a look at the postcard that you will have found inserted inside the pages of this magazine.

Perhaps you’ve seen images of Victorian inventor/engineer Magnus Volk’s Pioneer (aka Daddy Long Legs) before.

Dubbed ‘A Sea Voyage on Wheels’, this was an ingenious contraption which, between 1897 and 1901, transported hundreds of thousands of passengers from the terminus of Volk’s electric railway at Paston Place in Kemp Town, Brighton, eastwards to Rottingdean, through coastal waters, along tracks embedded in the sea floor. Sadly, Brighton Corporation’s decision to extend its sea barriers meant that the tracks needed to be diverted, and Volk could not raise enough money to do this, so the Pioneer was decommissioned.

The project was, needless to say, ahead of its time. Perhaps it’s ahead of our time.

Now, thanks to some imaginative digital wizardry from Sussex artist Luciana Haill, you can relive the magnificent sight of a (seemingly) 3D recreation of the Daddy Long Legs, by installing an app (details below) and scanning the image we have provided.

Like magic, up pops the War of the Worlds-style vehicle, available for 360-degree inspection.

Better still, make a journey to the East Brighton seafront, point your app-loaded device in the direction of the Pioneer’s tracks, still running along the seabed, and you can watch a recreation of a 3D Pioneer in-situ, travelling eastwards, real waves lapping its digital stilts, destination Rottingdean.

This feat of back-to-the-future augmented reality is the fruit of several years’ hard work by Haill, as part of an ongoing project to bring to life bygone monuments and structures from the Sussex seaside’s glorious heyday.

Without going too far into the technical side of the project, Haill uses mobile technologies, such as geo-tagging and SpaceX’s Starlink satellite network, to bring the past to life, with the help of an app made by creative technologist Alex May.

Her stated aim is to “explore urgent contemporary themes around innovation, hubris and technology elitism through a reflection of Victorian technology.” “By fulfilling a ‘hauntological’ desire to visit places that no longer exist,” she says, “the past becomes present and absent at the same time.”

This is the second stage of Haill’s heritage artworks, unveiled with great success in November 2021 at the Brighton Digital Festival, when 60 excited punters witnessed the relaunch of the Pioneer, through their mobile phones and tablets. The experiment was repeated a couple of weeks later, on the 125th anniversary of the real-life maiden voyage of Volk’s outlandish seatrain. The best viewing places, it turned out, are from Banjo Groyne in Kemp Town, or from the seawall of the Marina.

The first stage of the project, Apparitions, created in 2017, was based around long-disappeared landmarks near Haill’s St Leonards home: some much-loved Bexhill beach huts blown away in a storm in 1905; St Leonards Pier, demolished in 1951 after being ‘severed’ in WW2 and never restored, and the Prince Albert Memorial clocktower, which stood in central Hastings between 1862 and 1973, when it was demolished after a suspected arson attack. These structures were similarly re-edified as scannable 3D images, with recreated Victorianera sound effects enhancing the experience.

As for Brighton’s Daddy Long Legs, Haill hopes it can once again, in its new form, become a popular Brighton tourist attraction. She is currently in discussion with Brighton Council about mounting plaques on the seafront, alerting tourists to the possibility of witnessing the digital apparition of Volk’s majestically ungainly contraption.

And there may be more to come. The artist has recently managed to transpose a 3D video image of herself sitting inside the Pioneer, using “mixed reality”, and is working on a way of enabling other viewers to do the same. So as well as watching the seemingly miraculous passage of the Daddy Long Legs along the sea bed in front of our eyes, we might soon be able to enjoy the ride from within it, like so many Victorians did before us.

Words by Alex Leith

To activate the experience, install the free app ‘Pioneer AR’ from Google Play or Apple iTunes App Store. You can scan the photo opposite, but you may get better results if you scan the inserted postcard. Or point your device at the sea from one of the two locations described. Headphones are advised, to enable a complete experience, with added sound effects. daddylonglegs.site

In every issue of ROSA participatory artists Leap Then Look will invite you to actively explore and investigate an artistic process, prompt or question. These activities can be done alone or with others, by the young, the old, the newcomer, the experienced artist and anyone in between.

You don’t need specialist art equipment. The pair often use things they find outdoors or around the house and use their phones to take pictures and make videos