Lone Wolves Stick Together: Research as a Journey to an Aesthetic Understanding of Immersion and Participation through VR and roleplaying (LARP)
(2024)
author(s): Nadja Lipsyc
published in: Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences
This research explores the artistic and critical potentials of using tools from live action roleplaying (larp) to create narrative VR experiences. In particular, it unfolds the conception, physical play and VR play and production of the live action roleplaying (larp) Lone Wolves Stick Together. Inspired by the film Stalker (1979) by Tarkovsky, Lone Wolves Stick Together stages the immersive environment as an omniscient Sphynx-like character that pushes the players to question one another and to introspect. By using larp and video game design knowledge conjugated to cinematic aesthetics, this research project seeks to honor the creative and narrative potentials of immersion and participation. As such, between 2018 and 2023, this research took the form of classic chamber larps, immersive theater experiences, scenography installation, VR larps (including two other projects: The Space Between Us and Ancient Hours) and a final multimedia installation. The artistic methods rely on principles of environmental design, explored physically through production design and ambisonics, and virtually through a highly reactive virtual environment. The research method is based on a constructivist approach where we experiment to find an answer, not the truth. Here, experimentation is not conceptual but aesthetic: knowledge is lived and felt through artistic experience. Centred around VR and within a film and new media context, this research also develops a reflection on the industrial and technological influences on the creative process and their friction with artistic-research.
Editorial ART RESEARCH ENVELOPE #5
(2023)
author(s): Ruth Anderwald, Leonhard Grond, Alexander Damianisch
published in: University of Applied Arts Vienna
The publication Envelope offers insights into ongoing PhD projects by candidates in the PhD programme PhD in Art at the University of Applied Arts Vienna in an innovative format. The major thrust of “Envelope” presents content supplied by doctoral researchers based on their individual artistic research and provides insights into ongoing work processes. These visual and textual traces reveal the state of the Art within its ongoing research processes. This open format seeks to reflect on experiences through exchange, as well as document relevant developments in the field of art and research.
Participating projects:
Margit Busch: A garden for a fish (Supervisor: Virgil Widrich)
Andrew Champlin: Technique Concerns: Ballet Practice Against the Western Archive (Supervisors: Ruth Anderwald + Leonhard Grond)
George Demir: Ancestral Junctures: on the expansion of ancestral mythologies (Supervisor: Hans Schabus)
Cristiana de Marchi: Casting a shadow. On disappearance, emptiness and the haunting power of absence (Supervisor: Judith Eisler)
Jošt Franko: The Migrating Image (Supervisor: Gerhild Steinbuch)
Barbara Graf: Stitches and Sutures (Supervisor: Barbara Putz-Plecko)
Joseph Leung: Post-digital Angst – An Arts-Based Research on the Manifestations of Angst in the Digital Milieu (Supervisor: Gabriele Rothemann)
Conny Zenk: RAD Performance – Driving Voices of Resistance (Supervisor: Ruth Schnell)
Feel free to zoom in on each poster for ensured readability.
Futurity by Documentary Means – Reimagining Labour in the Climate Crisis
(last edited: 2024)
author(s): prerna bishnoi
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
For Artistic Research Forum, October 2023
Breaking Circles
(last edited: 2019)
author(s): Sunniva Storlykken Helland
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
The project 'Breaking Circles' is matriculated in the field of social design - an area within the design field that has renewed itself in recent years. Social design is user oriented towards vulnerable and exposed groups within society.
Serving a sentence in prison is often associated with a range of penalties. Norway has only one penalty; denial of freedom. The inmates have the same rights as the rest of society, and are supposed to take part of it. The Norwegian Correctional Service’s unofficial slogan reads: ‘better out, than in’ meaning that rehabilitation overcomes penalty. The inmates have both the right and a duty to work, getting educated or attending amendment programs. The goal of their work is to qualify for working life after prison.
Having to go to prison will without a doubt be a personal crisis for anyone, and can lead to loss of jobs, housing, personal economy and social network. Inmates could benefit from building professional networks to avoid seeking out old acquaintances in criminal networks after prison, heading into criminal relapse. Having worked with design projects in the western region of the Norwegian Correctional Service, I have seen the vast areas and systems within prisons and the service that are untouched by design strategy. Design has considerable potential to help inmates benefit from their surrounding systems, both within prison and outside. I aim to use social design to ease inmate’s transitions to becoming potential employees through their work within prison.
To be able to do that, there are several problem areas to address: the content of inmate’s work in prison, inmate’s tools of sentence progress, barriers between prison and society and the lack of established professional networks to prevent criminal networks taking over after serving.
Using graphic design and visual communication in social design can contribute to a dawning interest in design and creative practice to prevent recidivistic crime and social marginalization. Breaking Circles is a project with a strong emphasis on design experiments through field work in a real-life context: prison.