“Playtime” is an art/photography project created by Will Lakeman and there is currently an exhibition displaying his work being held in the Capital House. It features several photos of AI altered images of Fort Regent from times ranging from the 70s to the late 90s, when it was a main tourist attraction, the main theme for the project is “Nostalgia” as the photos are from Will Lakeman’s perspective and depict the fort in the way he remembers it.

The photos themselves feature the swimming pool, the outside playground, the funfair, the arcade and more. The photos being Lakeman’s own interpretation of how he remembers the fort makes them appear distorted and mysterious, they look like the things you would see in a dream.

Will Lakeman:

Will Lakeman is a photographer and writer who was born in Jersey. He spent a lot of his childhood around the fort with his brother and experienced what it had to offer during it’s prime when it was a main tourist attraction. He has a condition called Synesthesia, which is when you can essentially see sounds, shapes and music etc. as colors. This made lots of his memories of the fort slightly different from other people’s. He wanted to start his “Playtime” project to revisit his memories of the fort to show us how he remembered it. And also to memorialize his brother, who died in 2007 from a heroin overdose.

The Exhibition:

The exhibition had all kinds of items. It had an old sign of the fort’s mascot, a large collection of his photos that were made for the project, an old arcade machine, a dark room with more photos being lit up to show themself and an old lifeguard seat from the pool. Lakeman also made sure to have the smell of the pool in the building to make the experience better.

“I am interested a lot about nostalgia, when people talk about what life was, they are not talking about reality but what their memory is.”

“I am interested in making those images, but I also understand that it is not reality and that you cannot go back there. I try to make them spooky, very colourful and weird, because even in a nice dream, there’s always something that happens that is a little bit weird. I wanted to try and capture that in an image, to make people remember and think about their own dreams.”

My Thoughts:

I thought the exhibition was pretty good as a whole. I found the images very interesting along with the items too. I think it’s interesting also to learn and understand what the fort used to be and feel like before I was born. I think it’s cool that he has used an AI to produce these images, It’s as if the AI also knows what a dream would look like especially of a topic that existed far before itself has, AI is only very new so as time goes on and it improves who knows what else people can use it to do, both intriguing and scary.