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.
Data Holds Your Truths. The Avatar Complex: I trust your gargoyle id more than I trust you.
(2024)
author(s): Megan Annette Irusta Cornet
published in: Royal Academy of Art, The Hague
The Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, 2023
BA Photography
Within this piece of writing, different styles of writing have been approached as a performance strategy, a guise we humans willingly and unwillingly commit to every day, online and offline. The overarching themes this text seeks to tackle are alienation and escapism; what I think are the prominent can of worms which ooze from the Internet. Double-edged swords; beautiful and horrifyingly ugly. Alienation to oneself as well as alienating others through the digital sphere. With serious regard to the importance of avatar customisation as a form of expression, yet also acknowledging the destruction within it, it is also the very thing which is actively dislocating us from the IRL (in-real-life). The core to understanding who you are online, how you present yourself online, compared to who you are behind the screen. The text’s leading objective is to hypothesise a world where humans are given the option (highly recommended) to extract our online data to make more of a truthful analysis of who we really are. The prevalence of how capitalistic structures only feed alienation more. If the future consists of post-human and/or transhuman existence, by transmitting our data to gargoyle avatars, creatures which will take the form of one’s avatar, gargoyles are said to protect what they serve. A new gargoyle is designed by your data alone. Data anthropomorphism, the Avatar Complex.
Light from aside: A screenwriter’s perspective in virtual reality
(2023)
author(s): Cecilie Levy
published in: Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences
This PhD project in artistic research by Cecilie Levy investigates the language of spatial storytelling in virtual reality through artistic research. Drawing on screenwriting practice and theory, as well as creative documentary approaches such as room-scale virtual reality design, the conceptualisation and partial production of the experience Finding Frida is central to this investigation. In its final form, this single-user, room-scale virtual reality experience will be approximately 20 minutes long; it is intended for general audiences, including those who are unfamiliar with virtual reality.
Beyond the reconstruction of a personal narrative – that of forgotten artist Frida Hansen’s life and art – the experience seeks to combine linear storytelling devices with spatial ‘dreamscapes’, giving the spectator access to the protagonist’s private memory world, through representational spaces.
A vertical slice from the VR experience was presented publicly at The Norwegian Film School and at Qvisten XTND in Oslo, June 2023. The vertical slice is a test-scene in VR that will serve as an illustration for the virtual reality concept, giving an impression of transitions, interactivity, and spatial storytelling. The test can be viewed individually in the VR Lab at the NFS (Norwegian Film School) in Oslo and lasts approximately seven minutes per viewer.
An essay, available at this page, presents the conceptual and creative groundwork for the work-in-progress storytelling in Finding Frida. The essay also seeks to convey insights from a writer’s point of view of the hurdles and challenges of transitioning from temporal to spatial storytelling in virtual reality – and the aligning of narrational and stylistic choices in an experiential, technically complex and innovative form. An appendix provides samples from the script at different stages of development.
HONEYMOON IN POMPEII - work in progress
(2021)
author(s): Sven Vinge
published in: International Center for Knowledge in the Arts (Denmark)
“HONEYMOON IN POMPEII – work-in-progress” is an artistic research project conducted at the National Film School of Denmark. In it, I explore transmediality through the production of a prototype artwork spanning film, literary text, sculpture, and virtual reality all loosely inspired by the archeological technique used to cast the Pompeian victims of the Vesuvius eruption in 79 ad.
I describe my initial inspiration and how I changed my intentions of exploring a consistent storyworld to more abstract associations and themes and the different collaborative efforts in producing the four parts of the prototype (a test not meant for public exhibition). The prototype ended up consisting of:
1) A film representing a foot specialist helping a costumer try running shoes in a sports store but showing an obsessive interest in her feet and crossing her personal boundaries.
2) A literary text consisting of selected passages of Wilhelm Jensen’s short novel “Gradiva” (1902) translated to Danish in which we meet the young archeologist Norbert Hanold and notice his obsession with an ancient bas-relief portraying a young woman walking.
3) A sculpture consisting of four transparent plastic reliefs depicting a walking woman (copies of the bas-relief described in the novel) suspended in a 1x2x2 meter aluminum frame.
4) An erotic virtual reality experience in which the perceiver’s bodily movements affects the virtual world. When moving, the represented scene freezes and vice versa.
We conducted a test of the joint transmedia artwork with a small group of respondents who answered a questionnaire reflecting on their experience. I reflect on the respondent’s answers and propose further questions and themes that may be interesting to explore through artistic research: How does one explore transmediality not necessarily in relation to a consistent storyworld but also relying on abstract characteristics? What are the limits (if any) between mixed media art, transmedia art, and installation art? How can transmediality be explored as either a goal in itself or as a development tool for artists working with particular media in mind? Could it be beneficial to explore transmediality through the metaphor of archeology and how?
Konsept spill
(last edited: 2020)
author(s): Ine Herberg Bolsveen
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
VR spillet har som mål å gi en bedre forståelse for hvorfor universell utforming er viktig.
Non-Duality and Artistic Creation
(last edited: 2020)
author(s): Maja Maletkovic
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
How can metaphysical concept presented in the Vedic school of non-duality (Advaita) be used as a gridline to describe works of artist working with Spirituality as a guiding force of their creation?
Further, how could this concept be re-interpreted into a XR experience?
How can metaphysical concept presented in the Vedic school of non-duality (Advaita) be used as a gridline to describe works of artist working with Spirituality as a guiding force of their creation? Further, how could this concept be re-interpreted into a XR experience?open exposition comments (1)