Virtual Reality continues to entrance.
With hardware and software and becoming more affordable and easier to use, VR is once again capturing the imagination of artists. It is both a tool and environment potentially offering a wide range of experiences not just for one body but also for a collective. The potential for empathy, dislocation and shared sensory experience is rich for artistic work but the technology tends to be directed towards the consumer electronics market and ever more ‘intimate’ and targeted advertising. Approaching VR artistically is therefore not just one of creation but of critique – of commercial interest and of the purely technological motivated concepts. We need to ask ourselves why VR. What possibilities lay in the VR technology for artists and researchers and how does this contribute with new formats and ideas around the artistic work with audience, participants, history and places.
This two-day Maker-Symposium is build up around the exchanges of ideas in three on-going and in-progress VR projects by Bombina Bombast (SE), Makropol (DK) and Gibson/Martelli (GB), all artists known for their progressive work with VR.
Day 1 (7 Nov) is devoted to intensive shared processes between invited artists and lab technicians, but Day 2 (8 Nov) is open to the public.
This event is free, but please email to register to julia.bjornberg@iac.lu.se
Limited seats available.
November 8
Red Room, Inter Arts Center
09:00 Arrival and coffee (in the café)
09:30 – 09:45 Introduction by Christian Skovbjerg Jensen, Director, Inter Arts Center
09:45 – 11:00 Experiencing VR processes #1
Bombina Bombast & Makropol: The Shared Individual
11:00 -12:00 Discussion: Electronic empathy and shifting identities
Roundtable discussion with Bombina Bombast (Emma Bexell & Stefan Stanisic), Makropol (Mads Damsbo & Johan Knattrup Jensen), Johanna Koljonen, Bjarke Pedersen & Temi Odumosu
12:00 -13:00 Lunch
13:00 – 14:15 Experiencing VR processes #2
Gibson/Martelli: Man A
14:15 – 15:15 Discussion: Animating virtual worlds, aesthetic limitations and participation
Roundtable discussion with Ruth Gibson, Bruno Martelli, Susan Kozel and Johanna Koljonen.
15:15 – 15:45 Fika (in the café)
15:45 – 16:30 Experiencing VR processes #3
Gibson/Martelli & Susan Kozel: MoCap Studio Session
16:30 -17:00 Closing discussion
Biographies:
Gibson/Martelli
British electronic arts duo Gibson/Martelli make live simulations using performance capture, computer generated models, and an array of technologies including Virtual Reality. Artworks of infinite duration are built within game engines where surround sound heightens the sense of immersion. They playfully address the position of the self in relation to technology, examining ideas of player, performer and visitor — intertwining familiar tropes of video games and art traditions of figure & landscape. Experimentation with software epitomises the work of the artists, adapting and ‘modding,’ to create tightly controlled worlds for people to explore and interact with. Gibson/Martelli strip away, reconstruct, re-purpose, re-mix and customise the tools of mass entertainment, integral to their contemporary digital craft.
Makropol
Mads Damsbro, founder and lead producer. With a background in film and media directing and with a passion for technology and experience design, Mads has found himself involved in a wide variety of alternative projects exploring the frontier of new media storytelling. He considers himself a craftsman and creative producer, and sometimes an artist and conceptual junkie.
Johan Knattrup Jensen, partner, director and artist. Johan is schooled through the progressive alternative filmschool Super16 where he wasted his time doing regular “boring” films. Now with Makropol, he has reborn himself as a conceptual writer, experience deliverer, chairman of THE board and shaman.
Johanna Koljonen is CEO of Participation | Design | Agency AB. She is a writer, broadcaster, and participation designer consulting on experience design with museums, the public sector, and media companies. She is an authority on designing for safety and trust in participation, and lectures internationally on analog experience design, Nordic Larp, and changes in the media landscape.
The symposium will be moderated by Christian Skovbjerg Jensen.
This is the start of a longer collaboration between IAC (Lund University) and K3 (Malmö University) into developments in arts, performance and technologies.
Image: Gibson/Martelli