I am someone who finds VR and virtual 3D media difficult to grasp, while I have worked on it before in classes it is quite difficult for me. It isn’t what I usually do in my own work but seeing this fantastic artist have a solid grasp after a relatively short time seriously gives me hope that I, too, can create work like this. I truly appreciate the visual craft she has in creating spaces that incorporate type, video and game attributes as VR spaces. The aesthetic values she plays with are also super, super interesting to me! I also really appreciate how dynamically she weaves many conflicting concepts to create a characterless virtual space that inserts you, as the player in this space. I also think it was really awesome to hear her relationship with assets and how she, as a creator works through modelling, scripting and designing spaces. This is a lot of labor and hearing an artist talk about this, it made it into a very real relationship to me.
Student Area
marimonda – LookingOutwards05
For my looking outwards assignment I chose this video regarding Marina Abramovic’s VR work. I am familiar with Abramovic’s previous work but not in any particular detail (mostly stuff regarding her collaborations with Ulay) and this is the first time that I hear about her work in VR. The reason that this project was of particular interest to me is because it really showed me an application of VR that had less to do with living in a digital space, and with applications of games or artistic tool (I saw at least a good 5 or 6 videos that focused on modelling or drawing in a 3D space).
This piece right here is one of the pieces in the set that truly focused on approaching VR from a performance perspective, in a way. I really appreciate VR as an approach to fine art, as an effective form of conveying a concept and allowing a person t0 experience what you as an artist consider. It seems like a really elaborate space for conceptual work and I think that’s what’s so fascinating to me about this project by Abramovic.
marimonda – UnityEssentials
RECEIPTS: I am just putting my process under the cut, its not comprehensible but it’s proof I did the tutorials <3
junebug-PhazeroVideo
I found her work and background super interesting. As she brings in her experiences in traditional art like installation, she likes to incorporate the idea of moving around space, whether it be in real life or in gameplay. Something I found interesting about her practice is that she loves the idea of creating awe, wonder, and imagination within her audience – reminding us of our childhood and nostalgia – and yet the content of her works draw from a lot of trauma and violence. This intentional dichotomy really drew me in. I really liked her description and symbolism in one of her works, “Breathe”. The imagery and the history she was drawing on in this game was super intriguing to see how she morphed it to abstractly visualize it in the piece. As she was talking about her project, “Artifacts”, it really reminded me of my class with Isla Hansen, Sculpture After the Internet, and how the internet can be considered a form of space, full of history and archaeology.
tale-LookingOutwards-05
Pearl is a VR animation film that tells a life story of a girl name Pearl through the consecutive events that occur in, with, and around the car. The audience always stays inside the car and sees various people come and go. As the film progresses, Pearl’s childhood scenes interweave with the current moments, which not only conveys the idea that her memories have shaped who she is now, but also that she perhaps is reminiscing her childhood, which many people would/could relate to.
What impressed me the most about this is that this short animated film is the piece that showed me what VR can give that no other medium can. I’ve watched many videos and read many articles that state VR will be the new, ultimate, revolutionary medium, yet words by itself didn’t really meant much. I think this film has made an exemplary usage of VR in storytelling. The story of this film is great, and the producers have made a great choice of using VR to convey the story, as it matches well with the closeness/personal feel of the film.
tale-PhazeroVideo
I’m very motivated by that she self-taught herself and made all those works on her own. One thing that interested me was her choice of not developing/using a character — she explains that often times creating a character also delivers an unintended message or an alternation of what she meant to say to the audience, which I never thought of before.
junebug-LookingOutwards05
DeepDream VR – Waterfall
This work was part of a bigger experiment – Google’s DeepDream program. This program uses a neural network that transforms the ordinary footage you feed it into a surrealistic, psychedelic, dream-like landscape. Just watching it on my laptop was so mesmerizing, I cannot imagine how it would look like using a VR headset. It really reminds me of those psychedelic drug trips that TV shows/entertainment depicts. This project just caught my eye because in my own work, I love to play around with iridescent/multichromatic materials to play around with reflection and refraction, and although the textures/materials used in this digital piece isn’t reflective, the overwhelming amount of colors in the video really makes it seem like it is.
mokka- Looking Outwards 05
Das Is – Virtual Reality Therapy
Better Look at the project on Chelley Sherman’s website
Das Is is a piece where the audience is in a space where they have lost their sense of “being” and/or “thingness” but still being able to communicate with the space. Chelley bases this idea off of the therapeutic process called EMDR where you reprocess traumatic imagery. Basically, her project allows the player/user to explore an afterlife shifting through space through portals as their very own disembodied self. To give some background, Chelley Sherman often studies neuroscience and psychoacoustics and utilizes them in her artwork.
What I particularly like about this work is the fact that the player/user is put in a position where they feel like they are physically confronting death and the idea of mortality. They travel across this surreal landscape containing these diverse planes of memories and sensory fragments(audio, visual).
mokka – Unity Essentials
Here are my receipts!!(Warning: MEsSY)
Watch completion proof:
Learning about GameObjects (Empty) and assets creation:
I played around with the sample models AND some downloaded 3D models/materials from free model websites. Played around with shortcuts.
Learning about Prefabs: Office Books
Using ProBuilder
Bouncy Ball Physics 😀
FPS Controller
Adding Colliders
Adding Audio
(There is also outside environment sound but I felt there were too many screenshots already)
AudioMIxer
Lighting
Particle System
– From here, everything started freaking out; I became overwhelmed
Toad2-LookingOutwards04
Blackberry Winter (2019) by Christian Mil Loclair is a project that generates human poses based upon human poses to show motion. This project really interests me because of the human yet unhuman quality of the images. I really love how the shiny ceramic contortions loosely form a human figure and how upon first glance, it’s hard to tell what the shapes are, but if you spend a second to observe what the figures represent, you can pick out a human shape. Additionally, I like how the shattered/hollow nature of the figure’s limbs further highlights how ephemeral movement is and creates a feeling of one motion blending into the next.