RETRONAUT'S NEW YORK Pop-Up Exhibition to Open at Premier Exhibitions in NYC, 2/25

By: Feb. 12, 2016
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Mashable, the leading media company for the digital generation, announced today that "Retronaut's New York," a pop-up exhibition of historic panoramas of New York produced by SC Exhibitions with Retronaut's Wolfgang Wild will open on Thursday, February 25 in New York City. The exhibition will be in the lobby space of Premier Exhibitions (417 5th Avenue) for a limited time and is free to the public.

Wild, also an editor for Mashable, founded Retronaut, the "photographic time machine" in 2010 and since then, has helped fuel the exploding public fascination with historical images. Starting in 2014, Mashable became the exclusive host of new Retronaut articles, photo spreads and videos created by Wild and his curators in a new section of the site devoted to history. Wild and his team scour the world's archives and museums, physical and digital, looking for extraordinary material - pictures, film, sound, stories and songs - that are not on our maps of the past.

For "Retronaut's New York," Wild has taken as his starting point a set of extraordinary panoramic photographs capturing New York City more than a hundred years ago. These widescreen images are not the small, sepia and faded snapshots of the past that we have come to expect. The images are massive, super high-resolution, and extraordinarily over a century old.

Each photograph has been painstakingly digitally cleaned and restored from the versions held by the Library of Congress, the results wiping away the decay of time and rendering the scenes of New York City into crisp detail. The past becomes the present once again.

Taken together, the images form a time capsule of New York City at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth century. This time capsule is a physical manifestation of the hundreds of online digital time capsules Wild has been assembling on Retronaut.

At the center of the historic panoramas is a "Timescape" of Times Square created by Dynamichrome's Jordan Lloyd. Lloyd has woven together fragments from Times Square's hundred-year history into a seamless and spectacular image where decades cascade into one another. The hypnotic result is a beautiful and surreal panoramic photograph, simultaneously instantly familiar and disconcertingly anachronistic at once. It is a physical manifestation of Wild and Retronaut's mission to show "the past like you wouldn't believe."

The exhibition will be unveiled during a private opening party on February 24, 2016 and will be on display to the public through March 28, 2016. Additional information can be found at www.tutnyc.com/retronaut.

Retronaut's New York:

Retronaut's New York is a new free exhibition of historic panoramas of New York in the lobby space of Premier Exhibitions, 417 5th Avenue, New York, NY 10016 - no ticket purchase is required. The exhibition is part of the accompanying program to The Discovery of King Tut. It is presented in co-operation with Mashable, and produced by SC Exhibitions.

About Wolfgang Wild:

Wolfgang Wild is the creator of Retronaut - a brand that shows "the past like you wouldn't believe." In its article on Retronaut, Fast Company wrote: "Retronaut's images are chosen to make the viewer feel like they're looking not at the past, but rather at a different version of the present." In 2014, Wild licensed Retronaut to Mashable, and National Geographic published the first Retronaut book with two further books following in 2016. Number 20 on the Times of London's list of the "50 people you should follow on Twitter," Wild is guest curator for a range of digital and physical museums, and lives near Oxford, England, with his wife, Annie, and two children.

About Jordan Lloyd:

Jordan Lloyd is the director of Dynamichrome, a team of creative experts based in London and Cambridge. Dynamichrome is dedicated to sharing the stories behind some of history's greatest black and white photographs through digital color reconstruction. Early photographic technology lacked a crucial ingredient: color - the gap between the world as we see it, and the abstract, black and white world we imagine. As early as the invention of the medium, skilled artisans applied color to photographs by hand, making an attempt to convey the vibrancy and immediacy of life in color.

About Mashable:

Mashable is the leading global media company that informs, inspires and entertains the digital generation. Mashable is redefining storytelling by documenting and shaping the digital revolution in a new voice, new formats and cutting-edge technologies to a uniquely dedicated audience of 45 million monthly unique visitors and 27 million social followers.

About The Discovery of King Tut:

Seen by millions of visitors worldwide, The Discovery of King Tut takes visitors back more than 3,000 years to trace the story of the boy king who reigned for a decade and died suddenly at age 19. This thrillingly unique experience explores the legendary tomb and its treasures as they were at the exact moment of their discovery. Visitors can feel the rush of excitement as they step into a moment only ever witnessed by Howard Carter's excavation team, view more than 1,000 precisely crafted replicas and reconstructions and discover the story behind one of the most iconic moments in history. The tomb's magnificent burial goods have been reproduced exactly down to the finest detail by expert Egyptian craftsmen and renowned Egyptologists. These exquisitely crafted replicas and reconstructions allow visitors to step into the wonder of the discovery as if the original excavation in the Valley of the Kings has been reopened. Crucially, the exhibition also brings together a collection that can only be seen separately elsewhere, even in Egypt, where the king's treasures are kept in the Cairo Museum. In addition, Tutankhamun's beautifully painted tomb in the Valley of the Kings has been stripped of everything but his mummy, the outer coffin and the stone sarcophagus. By contrast, the exhibition experience culminates in exact reconstructions of three chambers from Tutankhamun's tomb, revealing themselves just as the discoverers saw them. A radioplay-like audio tour based on Howard Carter's diaries, video documentaries, extensive texts and object descriptions, as well as unhindered access to the objects, together provide an exciting, as well as informative, experience for all the senses. The Discovery of King Tut is scheduled to run through May 1st, 2016. Tickets are on sale now at www.TUTNYC.com.

Premier Exhibitions 5th Avenue:

Premier Exhibitions 5th Avenue is a state-of-the-art exhibition and special events center located at 417 5th Avenue, between 37th and 38th Streets. With a goal of bringing the love of learning to life, Premier Exhibitions 5th Avenue offers exciting, informative and behind-the-scenes experiences through a diverse range of museum quality exhibitions.



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