Program (quick overview)
Lone Wolves Stick Together (Nadja Lipsyc)
Using physical experiences as a mean to create and playtest virtual first-person narratives and multiplayer games, «Lone Wolves Stick Together» explores the possibility of combining VR with tools and techniques coming from live roleplaying, videogames, film and participatory fiction. The project is inspired by the movie Stalker by Tarkovsky (1979), using similar themes and surreal settings to investigate one main question: Is it worth cheating fate to fulfil our deepest desires?
To Look Directly At You (Sonya Teich)
To Look Directly At You is a narrative CG VR experience developed in Unreal Engine. Through the tradition of oral storytelling, it explores the ways we affect other people and how we make sense of what we are responsible for.
The viewer watches an avatar of the artist telling a story of moving to Los Angeles when she was young and of a relationship she had there with a man who disappeared twice, in two very different ways. Through talking to the viewer, she tries to make sense of how she behaved and what it meant to him, knowing those are questions that will never have answers. The words being spoken, the voice being heard and the movements being seen are all authored by the artist, and are experienced inside of a virtual environment that is handcrafted by the artist. The events are not being visualized explicitly, but rather the viewer is hearing the story being told in a space that embodies the artist’s experience of it. As the performance progresses, the environment shifts. Pieces of it collapse, morph or disappear, reflecting the instability of the past and the artist’s relationship to it. We most often see effects in blockbuster films as forms of spectacle. This project aims to apply these same kinds of cinematic effects techniques on a personal scale.
VR (and Unreal Engine specifically) offers the opportunity for a multidisciplinary storyteller to create a new kind of literary experience - to communicate not just through words, but also through voice, movements and the ability to create a computer generated world based on memory. This project intends to explore a new frontier of filmmaking in which a single author uses as many avenues of immersion as possible to relate her point of view, bringing the viewer ever closer to her experience of the world.
Ascensions (Jenny Perlin)
The doctoral project (working title: Ascensions) approaches the rise of stratospheric balloons for research, surveillance, and tourism. Since I have worked extensively in the relationships between underground spaces, analog materials, and literary and political histories, I have become increasingly compelled by the ways that narratives of the upper limits of the atmosphere, specifically the winds and the stratosphere, have parallels to the ways in which subterranean spaces are characterized, approached, and mined. My current doctoral project relates literary, scientific, and historical narratives from the 19th century to current concerns about stratospheric (near-space) exploration and colonization. Much like the rockets being used to bring billionaires to space for momentary thrills, stratospheric balloon tourism is a new way that wealthy people can partake in unique experiences. Stratospheric balloons are also used for domestic and international espionage and for deeply engaged scientific studies about climate change and the weather. I am interested in the ascents of stratospheric balloons and what happens when they fail. The detritus of balloons, their fragments and residues can be found in deserts and jungles around the world and are sought by contractors for major scientific and commercial enterprises to be tested for what caused their failures. My project will investigate the failures as much as the successes, using 16mm film, video, drawing, photography, and writing to do so.The presentation will comprise images and texts from my current artistic research, works in progress images, speculations, and open questions.
