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Oscar Naby, Assent<\/p>\n Oscar Naby, Assent<\/p>\n
VR artists are blasting beyond traditional electronic media formats into new worlds of first-person empathy, emotion and audience connection. Welcome to \u2018Year Zero\u2019 of our new post-screen cultural landscape.<\/i><\/p>\n
At Sundance\u2019s New Frontier 2015 exhibition, virtual reality has suddenly appeared as a glint in the eye of a future media landscape that eclipses the constraints of screen culture as we know it.\u00a0 Brought on by smartphone consumer tech wars and the resulting plunge in screen and processor cost, the virtual reality platform has been maturing over the past couple years in the hands of Oculus Rift, Google and other silicon giants.\u00a0 Now that the engineers have done their work, artists, filmmakers and gamers are stepping up to define the vocabulary for this new electronic canvas. Content is king, of course, and this momentous occasion is the first time in any of our lives that we are witnessing the birth of a new medium.\u00a0 The breakthrough VR exhibition showcased far and away the best and most diverse collection of new virtual reality cinema and art that has been seen to date. \u00a0<\/p>\n
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Oscar Naby, Assent<\/p>\n
New Frontier featured a selection of live action VR work from Montreal-based directing duo Felix & Paul. Although the new medium is essentially only a few months old, they first put themselves on the map at SXSW in 2014 with their cinematic VR experience \u2018Strangers,\u2019 featuring a live performance by Patrick Watson in a loft in Montreal.\u00a0 One of their next pieces featured Reese Witherspoon and Laura Dern in a breakthrough VR experience placing the audience on a rock inside Jean-Marc Vallee\u2019s psychological, minimalist film \u2018Wild.\u2019\u00a0 In Herders<\/i>, the filmmakers have extracted every trace of their own presence as directors and the viewer is exposed to vignettes of everyday life within a Mongol yak herding family.\u00a0 Paul Raphael explains the technique behind their particular breed of documentary VR filmmaking style: \u201cThe family had to get to know the camera, because it’s such an alien looking thing. We kept telling them, this is a person. Treat this thing like it was a real guest in your family.\u201d\u00a0 You sit there and watch quietly as the father scoops all manners of obscure organs from a giant grey stew onto plates for dinner. You gaze onto the windblown tundra as high-mountain horses trot by and peer back at you, locking eyes.<\/p>\n
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Vincent Morisset, Way To Go<\/p>\n
As VR filmmakers, the move towards invisibility and a radical \u2018hands-off\u2019 attitude towards style creates a quantum-level shift in the intimacy and empathy of audience connection with the digital subjects.\u00a0 Felix Lajeunesse says, \u201cThere’s no room for us as directors there. Virtual reality is not a screen. We love the possibility of putting the viewer ‘somewhere’ and really just being there. And not thinking – oh wow, this is really some great directing.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
The viewer is, in a very real sense, in a state of oneness with the VR experience.\u00a0 Shari Frilot, curator of New Frontier, explains the movement towards total immersion: \u201cStories define who we are and how we understand ourselves and our society.\u00a0 The reason why people are so excited about VR is that there is now a level of immersion that not only captures the logical mind, but speaks to our unconscious sense of being. It puts us in the middle of it and allows us to occupy a sense of presence and a sense of consciousness and becoming, inside the story.\u201d\u00a0 The implications of this new cultural paradigm are profound. We are experiencing a radical shift from the \u2018third-party\u2019 emotional universe of traditional film and television towards a first-person media format like the world has never seen.\u00a0 The diminishing constraints of hardware and a novel realm of expression allow us to steal glimpses into a next generation of electronic culture. The glowing rectangle across the room suddenly appears to lose a bit of its seemingly monolithic lustre.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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Morris May, Perspective<\/p>\n
On the other end of the aesthetic spectrum from Felix & Paul\u2019s live action VR lives Oscar Raby\u2019s heart-wrenching computer-generated VR universe.\u00a0 In \u2018Assent,\u2019 the artist retraces his father\u2019s subjective journey into a living nightmare, as he witnesses the execution of prisoners of a 1973 Chilean military regime. Imbued with a jaw-dropping sense of existential dread, he talks and walks you through his own recollection and recreation of his father and the bloody day – right from his personal artist\u2019s studio through to the virtual hill of the massacre itself. Paired with the 360 degree VR environment, the intimacy of the experience is absolutely unparalleled: \u201cI narrate and speak to the audience in the piece in the way you might speak to a close person. You stop posing and let down your defences and you say – you know what, I am frightened. Like when you were a kid. That\u2019s the tone I was going for.\u201d\u00a0 It\u2019s as close as anyone can get to a walk through Raby\u2019s own mind, a profound picture of a dark closet in the basement his subjective experience.<\/p>\n
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Chris Milk, Evolution of Verse<\/p>\n
The real-world implications of this sea change in media-induced empathy at Sundance\u2019s New Frontiers are radical.\u00a0 Across the board, Sundance\u2019s New Frontier artists revealed a genuinely new generation of work that collapses boundaries.\u00a0 Nonny de la Pena\u2019s \u2018Project Syria\u2019 brings immersive journalism to the table where viewers are invited to experience what it is like to be in an actual, recreated Syrian mortar shell moment via virtual reality.\u00a0 Morris May and Rose Troche’s \u2018Perspective; Chapter 1: The Party\u2019 raises questions about boundaries and complicity in the new medium – putting them in the first-person POV of a drunk teenager raping, then from the POV of being raped. Vincent Morisset\u2019s psychedelic primitivism in \u2018Way to Go\u2019 is an invitation to lose yourself as a kind of stick-figure in a seemingly never-ending landscape.\u00a0 Chris Milk\u2019s \u2018Evolution of Verse\u2019 takes the audience on a dream-like surreal journey from pristine nature through a glorious flock of birds that morph into ribbons and finally into the serenity of a womb.\u00a0 Visual culture has come a long way from its very earliest days. From a primal immersion in the caves of Lascaux epochs ago to the dream-like electronic\u00a0womb of virtual reality, we are free-falling into a future culture that allows us to disappear into our own fantasies. \u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
Text by David Mullett<\/strong><\/p>\n <\/strong>\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n