Unshackled! – a Convict Memorial | Circa Morris-Nunn Chua

This project is unique. The essence of the Convict Memorial has been to create a dramatic new memorial, a hanging four–sided 8m high tower of LED screens, which uses smart technologies to visualise the lives of 75,000 men, women and children transported to Van Diemen’s Land between 1803 and 1853.

Designed as a place of reflection and interaction, this innovative project is underpinned by Australia’s largest historical dataset with the aim of ‘bringing to life’ the personal details of all the individuals who were ever transported as convicts to Tasmania. The project uses AI to digitally reunite Tasmania’s UNESCO Memory of the World registered convict archive with the Hobart Penitentiary in which those records were once housed, in the very space where male convicts were formerly housed. To the best of our knowledge, this is the very first time that anything of this nature has ever been attempted, anywhere.