On Thursday, 4 June, the third VRHAM! Virtual Reality & Arts Festival will start as the digital edition VRHAM! VIRTUAL. The festive opening with guests from Hamburg and all over the world will take place in the virtual Museum of Other Realities and will be streamed live on the VRHAM! YouTube channel.
Ulrich Schrauth, Artistic Director of VRHAM!: “After exciting weeks and months we are looking forward to our first virtual festival edition. By moving into virtual reality we can reach an international audience even more and offer a broader platform to the VR artists. What we are also trying to do with the virtual edition is to transfer the complete experience of a festival into digital space – an experiment we are happy to embark on”, says Ulrich Schrauth, Artistic Director of VRHAM!
Dr. Carsten Brosda, Hamburg’s Minister for Culture and Media: “At a festival called ‘VRHAM! Virtual Reality & Arts Festival’, the experiment of letting the festival take place anyway despite the Corona pandemic restrictions, but virtually, seems appropriate. But this does not reduce the challenge in any way and it is impressive in what short time ‘VRHAM! VIRTUAL’ was set up. It’s great that personal exchange is also integrated into this project, after all, every festival doesn’t live from the artwork alone. The fact that the virtual museum’s doors are open to a global audience – without any distance regulations or visitor limits – means that the festival’s reach can also be extended. This special situation once again gives the festival the potential to bring VR to a wider audience.”
The welcoming words of Hamburg’s Minister for Culture and Media, Dr. Carsten Brosda, and a keynote speech by Tea Uglow, Creative Director Google Creative Lab Sydney, about the momentary interruption of our normality and how this is the breeding ground for new learning processes and exciting experiments like VRHAM! VIRTUAL, will be followed by this year’s VRHAMMY Awards ceremony, with Daniel Opper from the ZEIT Stiftung giving a welcoming address. The international jury (Liz Rosenthal, Kay Watson and Jesse Damiani) will award the prize of 5,000 euros to one of the 18 international VR works in this year’s artistic program. Afterwards, the virtual exhibition with artists from all over the world will be opened in the museum and the public will for the first time have a look at the virtual venue, which has been reconstructed by INVR.Space. The evening ends with music, (virtual) drinks and digital dance.
VRHAM! Virtual will take place digitally until 7 June 2020. The entire festival program can be followed from home at the Museum of Other Realities with VR glasses, and a large part of the artworks can also be experienced via the Magenta VR app. Streamed museum tours, video footage, 360° films and interviews with the artists as well as all panels, workshops and live formats including the opening and closing, will be streamed on the VRHAM! YouTube channel from 4 to 7 June 2020.
