As Alice falls through the rabbit hole, she enters her own wonderland.
Our project shows a free interpretation of this land, which interacts with the spectators in a dimension beyond time and space. The question “whoisalice” is therefore also a question for fiction and reality.
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Directors: Ai-Nhu Vo, Dorian Behner, Fynn König, Gloria Schulz & Sarah Kolodziejczyk
Hamburg, 2018
An immersive, verbatim 360° documentary about the Canadian immigration detention system. The artwork employs the practice of Verbatim Theatre and techniques and technologies of 360° Cinema to present the events surrounding the death in 2013 of migrant Lucia Vega Jimenez while in detention with the Canada Border Services Agency. The main objective of the project was to question what is visible in the Canadian migrant detention system by looking at its out-of-sight bodies. Research started with an examination of the Forensic Architecture collective and obtaining materials that would articulate Lucia’s story.
Videos available online demonstrated the architecture of detention center, which served as the initial core evidence representing the constraints that detained migrants face. Reading the coroner’s inquest transcriptions allowed the many traces left behind in Lucia’s case to appear and build the story. The forensic gaze of 360° film and verbatim theatre combined are the artistic substrate of a digital immersive experience of enactment that merges theoretical considerations of networks, assemblies, and appearingness with the lived experience of Lucia.
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Director: Fusun Uzun
Canada, 2017
„Trans//form“ is a choreography looking at the progress of evolution to determine the future of the human body in an increasingly technologized world. Three dancers dance a critical approach to topics like cyborgism and transhumanism, exploring to what extent the human body can be modified, improved or even rendered obsolete through technology. Which importance does the carnal body hold for mankind? What will happen to humans when their body becomes dispensable?
Transforming the body into the digital world, where the limiting laws of our real nature are replaced by digital laws of a virtual reality, a redesign of the representation of the individual is taking place.
Entering the virtual world, we become part of and experience blurring the boundaries between the digital and analogue world. Virtually bodiless, the users establish an interaction with the transformed dancers.
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Directors: Suse Tietjen, Maria Gibert, Martin Kupfer & Fabian Knieling
Hamburg, 2018
A unique combination of theatre and Virtual Reality. Schauspiel Dortmund and CyberRäuber create an immersive, interactive virtual space based on the production “Die Borderline Prozession” by Kay Voges.
Whereas the three-hour play aims at overwhelming the audience with the concurrency of inconcurrent events, by employing acting, setting, text, and music, this VR experience is a tale of recollection and transience: walls and textures are in an advancing state of decay. In the background there is music and text, videos of scenes that might have taken place in these rooms, scenes from the theatre production showing life in all its range in contrast to the transience of the virtual world.
Designed for the virtual reality, “The Memories of Borderline” establishes a new hybrid art form: the connection of fine arts and media arts, gaming and performing arts. It explores the possibilities of theatre in the context of new technology and paves the way for novel narratives: the users become their own narrators.
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Director: Kay Voges & CyberRäuber
Germany, 2017
The headshot kill has a prominent place in representations and imaginations of violent death in Hollywood cinema and video games. Seemingly influenced by this, Q&A forums like Quora and Reddit regularly feature questions about the experience of getting shot in the head with a firearm. The answers written by survivors give a diverse range of visceral, yet colourful accounts of shock, surprise and pain. Many of the answers – the vast majority of which are written by men – suggest a sense of authority and bravery from the side of the narrators, while others (often anonymously) disclose vulnerability and trauma. Characterized by the particular negotiation between public and private performance of online forums, these threads give insights into the ways in which people’s continued occupation with the physical body in relation to violence and (fear of) death is mediated and processed in a digitally networked culture.
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Director: Dani Ploeger
Netherlands/UK/Germany, 2018
In Shalenny’s VR work the viewer goes beyond the horizon on a compressed forty thousand kilometers journey around the world. A game of chance, the journey is the outcome of a line drawn from a bridge and further across the world, taking place in the dead of night, where fuzzy silhouettes of people tear along through desolate landscapes, fleeing into gray blizzards and shadowy forests. Based on watercolors by the artist, one setting replaces the other as the ghostlike figures cross birch forests, oil fields, abandoned churches and oceans in a limitless universe.
Shalenny has long been fascinated by the idea of the bridge in his works, taking the bridge as a starting point for imagining a way of escaping the ongoing crisis in the land where he resides. Or as he expresses it: “The idea of escaping is unconscious, it sprouts and becomes a young tree. Every morning I go to the yard with an axe and hack it at the root, banishing the wrong thoughts. The next morning it grows above me twice, its rustling leaves talking to the wind, which have already been everywhere.”
Mentally extended to infinity, the bridge like the horizon is set between two places, the scene of arrival and the point of departure. All horizons disappear in space, and yet the strong conviction that there is a better world beyond the horizon lives on.
Seen in the light of the current global refugee crisis the infinite bridge seems like a symptom of our times, or, a cure for an escape attempt. The construction of a bridge allows one to access the other shore with ease, to solve the gap between longings and goals and dreams, which else remain distant.
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Director: Nikita Shalenny
Ukraine/Denmark, 2018
“Summation Of Force” is a virtual reality moving image artwork created by internationally renowned photographers Narelle Autio and Trent Parke in collaboration with filmmaker Matthew Bate. Made entirely in their own backyard and featuring Trent and Narelle’s two young sons Dash and Jem (two of Australia’s most talented youth cricketers) this work plays out as a dreamscape, where the backyard becomes an epic sports arena in which hopes, dreams and anxieties emerge.
Since the 1980’s when video became commonplace, technology has become vitally important in the development and coaching of elite sport. Artists such as Muybridge and Francis Bacon have all studied the idiosyncratic game of cricket, whose vagaries of chance, luck and skill most accurately mirror that of life itself. Moving from the innocence of childhood the work examines the motion, biomechanics and beauty of athletic pursuit to comment on the high-tech industry that now accompanies the multi-million dollar careers of many elite sportspeople, that are far removed from their suburban beginnings. Electronic timing devices, slow motion capture, computers that measure force, trajectory and acceleration are shaping our athletes and evolving sport. The artists have re-created their own sports arena, laying a professional standard pitch and hand building sports science machinery to put their sons through a series of training rigors – to try and understand what it takes for a human to become an elite sportsperson. Trent Parke was himself a professional cricket player – putting down the ball for a full-time career as Australia’s only member of the illustrious Magnum Agency. He later spent 5 years touring with the dominant Australian cricket team of the 90’s – capturing some of the most iconic sports images we have seen in our media. Blending real life with fantasy, this unique artwork from two visionary photographers in collaboration with award winning filmmaker Matthew Bate (Shut Up Little Man: An Audio Misadventure), is a unique look at sport and the suburbs, exploring ideas around loss and innocence, physics and motion and sport as science and religion.
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Directors: Trent Parke, Narelle Autio & Matthew Bate
Australia, 2017
To commemorate the second anniversary of the death of Alan Kurdi, the three-year-old Syrian boy who drowned while attempting to reach Greece in 2015, the author Khaled Hosseini, a UNHCR goodwill ambassador, has written “Sea Prayer”. This imagined letter is written in the form of a monologue, delivered by a Syrian father to the son lying asleep in his lap, on the eve of their sea crossing to Europe.
Hosseini is the author of “The Kite Runner”, “A Thousand Splendid Suns” and “And the Mountains Echoed”. “Sea Prayer” is the first narrative animated virtual reality film created using “Google Tilt Brush”, a tool for painting in a 3D space with VR. Using this tool, the Guardian’s in-house VR team, in collaboration with the acclaimed VR artist Liz Edwards, has brought Hosseini’s sensitive imagining of this letter to life.
Narrated by the Bafta-winning actor Adeel Akhtar, who takes the role of the father, Sea Prayer reflects on the city of Homs, a devastated war zone where he grew up and which he is being forced to leave behind with his son. Hosseini’s piece also meditates on the dangerous sea crossing that lies ahead.
“Sea Prayer” is accompanied by a score specially composed by Sahba Aminikia, an Iranian-American contemporary classical music composer, and performed by the US-based string musicians Kronos Quartet and the musical saw player David Coulter.
People continue to attempt this journey, many losing their lives in the process. Since Alan’s death, at least 8,500 refugees and migrants have died or gone missing trying to cross the Mediterranean Sea.
This piece was made in collaboration with the UNHCR.
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Director: Liz Edwards
UK, 2017
Silence just might be on the verge of extinction and acoustic ecologist Gordon Hempton believes that even the most remote corners of the globe are impacted by noise pollution. In “Sanctuaries of Silence,” join Hempton on an immersive virtual reality journey into Olympic National Park, one of the quietest places in North America.
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Directors: Adam Loften & Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee
USA, 2017
Street artist RONE creates stunning large-scale portraits of women’s faces. They can be found adorning soon to be forgotten spaces, acting as a commentary on gentrification and the masculine realm of street art.
The 360° film and interactive VR art gallery takes the viewer inside Rone’s world: we follow him into the rarely-explored spaces in which he works (an abandoned paper mill, a house set for demolition, a crumbling theatre), and learn about his unique philosophy on art and life. The VR experience also takes the viewer into a Rone exhibition and inside his studio, giving them a front-row seat to the artistic process behind Rone’s epic murals.
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Director: Lester Francois
Australia, 2018
