Présence - 

Antoine Francois-Saint-Maur (CA)

Presence: The state of being for someone, something to exist physically, materially, within a determined space. The act of participating, of playing a role somewhere. The phenomenon of experiencing one’s own existence. 

Présence is an experiment combining a broad spectrum of disciplines: dance, music, circus, and theater. Presented in the metaverse, holographic actors will meet a virtual audience, spectating from their webcams. Présence proposes a dramatic reflection on our critical perception, our role in this world, and on the meaning of our existence. This theater piece in the metaverse, in collaboration with SAT, will be both a creative laboratory and a world premiere. 

Antoine Saint Maur is a multimedia artist and a transmedia specialized producer. Always looking for new ways to create and tell new stories, his practice pushes the boundaries of the immersive experience and its storytelling, be it in cinema, music, live performance, AR and VR, and interactive public installations that connect people and their environment.

The Mutual Penetration of Physical and Virtual Bodies - 

Daria Smakhtina – Vadim Smakhtina (RU)

Real/virtual experience

The installation is an artistic research on the emerging forms of virtual-physical communications developed using customized Mozilla Hubs Platform. It is an interactive environment for two users that are learning to communicate in a room using only their body’s language. First user is wearing a virtual reality headset and is presented as an avatar inserted into the space which is fully controlled by the second user. Using his body language, the second user is able to control the appearance of the room, employing it as a spatial communication device, replacing oral language with a language of non-orthogonal shapes and forms.

Cassandra Rooms - 

Anke Schiemann (DE)

Cassandra Rooms is a future bound fantasyland, a spatial metaphor for human existence. The interactive WebVR space consists of a series of rooms illustrating snapshots of human life, such as birth, religion, human suffering, animal suffering, and death. Interactive objects help to navigate through the maze and give the visitor something to talk about. Just like Cassandra, who was cursed to be able to predict the future without being believed, it seems just as impossible for us humans today to react according to our own apocalyptic visions of the Anthropo/Techno/Capitalo-scene. Cassandra Rooms is a somber reflection on the human condition and its future.

As a media artist and filmmaker, I [Anke Schiemann] am interested in exploring new ways of narrative and shape them to immersive, sensory installations. I like to experiment with XR, where grammar is not established yet and much scope for experimentation to be found. Throughout all my works, animation always serves as a tool to inject a surreal element and bring fine art practice such as drawing and painting into the filmic experience. My background as a set designer helps me to design the stage for these moments of distorted reality to take place.

Learn more: https://ankeschiemann.de

Oscuterium - 

Red Spills (CA / SG / CA)

Real/ Virtual Live theatre performance – Spatialized Audio

Oscuterium is RedSpills’ latest Web XR project. Oscuterium is a neologism that combines auditorium and a reference to the Open Sound Control (OSC) networking protocol. RedSpills (Seta, Stewart, and Stromberg) perform on three Digital Musical Instruments (DMIs), sending OSC control data remotely into a HUBS scene that is equipped with embedded VR synthesizers. In Oscuterium, RedSpills plays these VR synthesizers, while using the OSC data from their instruments to simultaneously transform the HUBS scene; the tangible physical gestures required to maneuver and operate the DMIs are “transduced” into data signals that produce high-quality sound and manipulate VR objects.

In this Land - 

Patricia Echeverria Liras (US)

In This Land is an XR project exploring indigenous futures with the Bedouin women native to Israel/Palestine. The project seeks to digitize landscapes that are shrinking and a culture that is disappearing, re-creating spaces, artifacts and stories of indigenous past and futures into the virtual realm, and building a platform for indigenous spaces, histories, and futures, eventually within the metaverse. 

Patricia Echeverria 

Patricia is a Spanish artist working across immersive technologies, social justice, audio-visual poetics, and storytelling to explore forms of collective (and personal) liberation, digital protest, and equity in the machine age.

She has previously collaborated on international projects including: a “Public Therapy Tour” across Palestine with AM Qattan Foundation and Matadero Madrid, “Outside In,” a playback performance with the Freedom Theatre from Jenin, rapper Shir3p andSakakini Cultural Center, “Parallel Utopias,” an environmental conflict resolution scheme at the Korean DMZ with National Geographic, and more. She is currently a Sandbox Fellow, and NYU ITP/IMA Project Fellow.

She is currently focused on bringing collective (and personal) memories into the metaverse. She is now developing In This Land, which was initially conceived out of the Venice Biennale VR Lab; and ‘Memories for a Metaverse’ as a cultural repository for the future. The project seeks to address the glaring gap between the new frontier of the metaverse, and the marginalized communities that inhabit our Earth, which we have gradually left behind physically, technologically, and hence virtually. Through In This Land she is collaborating with partners in Colombia and local communities in Palestine to build an XR universe that can bring memories of lost histories and spaces into the metaverse. On a more personal note, she is working on a poetic audio-visual project based on personal memory called: “Entre el tiempo y la memoria existe un espacio” (Between time and memory there is a space.)

En savoir plus:

https://theofficeforpublictherapypolitics.com

https://invr.space

https://nowherelefttogovr.com