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

 

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

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

“Proxima” is a spatio-temporal loop, a search for the infinite. It is a vision, as an echo to the poem of Charles Baudelaire “The Abyss”. We are a prisoner between the two unknowns that are birth and death, in the immensity of the world, between our disproportionate impulses of Eros and Thanatos. Each second brings its share of illusions. We think we can grab the glimmer that would tell everything, explain everything. But it moves away ever more, and when it comes to rest at last, it delivers nothing of its intention, or about what would be on other side. This shirking light represent that feeling of total frustration we have, sensing that, this infinite world, we could almost grasp it. At least we have this illusion within ourselves.
But is this world real or deceptive? What is what we are looking at? “Proxima” puts in abyss cinematic VR, a technology which plunges us into a virtual sphere, in a mesh of triangles upon which moving images are mapped. Our actions trigger these images and their eternal renewal gives us the illusion of grasping a real world. With a headset over the eyes or eyes wide open out in the open, does our sight go beyond the big sphere of atmosphere in which we are immersed?

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Director: Mathieu Pradat

France, 2017

This first Virtual Reality production by artist Jonathan Meese and his mother Brigitte Meese is a journey into the heart of the “tyranny of art”. In Meese’s virtual studio we witness the creation of a 360° total artwork of the future: The sleeping artist is dreaming wonderful, inspiring dreams. Then his mother enters the room, brings coffee and urges him to start painting. Another mother Meese comes in, then another, then another… and the artist, in a creative frenzy, is painting, because “art is simply getting started, and at once you’re greater than Picasso” (Jonathan Meese). While Clouzot’s famous movie “Le mystère Picasso” (1956) is portraying the creative act on a two-dimensional screen, the spectators of “Mutter und Sohn” are in the midst of events and enter its enigma. The white studio turns into a multidimensional screen. Several mothers comment on, rate and provoke an oeuvre that is a reflection on Alfred Hitchcock, Anthony Perkins, Richard Wagner, and Joseph Beuys. It leads to the inevitable conclusion that everyone is an artist, at least behind these VR glasses.

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Director: Jonathan Meese

Germany, 2018