Broken but not destroyed

摘要

I am standing on a bustling street corner in Aleppo, Syria. At one side, a group of people chat; above, a young girl's voice carries a song. Until a bang stops her melody dead. Smoke and chaos pour into the street - a barrel bomb has exploded metres away. Removing the virtual-reality goggles, the adrenaline continues to course even though I was only inside the Project Syria immersive for minutes. It was commissioned for the 2014 meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos to give an insight into life in Syria. And it works. It uses gaming technology and audio from a real bomb blast in Aleppo on 6 November 2012. This is just one of a number of strikingly diverse installations in the new exhibition Trauma: Built to break, at the Science Gallery at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland.