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.
Dear _____, Please Imagine my Birthday
(2019)
author(s): Harold Hejazi
published in: University of the Arts Helsinki
How much of our sense of identity is filtered through social memory—the memory of others and our own? This is a reflection on a performative birthday which attempted to transplant the artist’s community from Victoria, Canada to Helsinki, Finland. Through the medium of larp, the performance explored the ways in which the self is socially produced and sustained through interaction, memory and community. In so doing, the larp offered a self-portrait in which the story of a self was produced collectively.
Larp Practices in VR
(last edited: 2023)
author(s): Joffe
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
Exploring the affordances of Larping in virtual reality.
