Showcase of immersive work consisting of 29 pieces across the city of Sheffield. I visited 3 venues and experienced the following pieces:
Venue: Site Gallery. Gondwana. Durational VR experience. Rainforest immersion, simulating 100 years of climate change, starts to die when people are not interacting. ROZSYPNE. Immersive VR piece in east Ukraine. Quiet village disrupted by war and then the explosion of flight MH17. Set amid a field of sunflowers (that vary in colour from bright yellow to red to reflect the mood change, i.e. suffering and death). Story focused on Elderly Nina’s house, the walls peel back then the user is teleported onto the crashing plane as the air masks drop down. Ends with a broken part of the fuselage strewn in the sunflower field.
Venue: Kommune. Kubo Walks the City. Free roaming VR installation, multi user, 1930 Seoul. What to do not entirely clear but once you realise that you need to walk into puddles to advance the experience it becomes easier. B&W illustrative style. Story builds as the user moves around. Surreal and unnerving trying to avoid walking into other participants. Challenges the notion 'suspension of disbelief' especially when walking onto the tram or over door thresholds (really had to convince myself that I was still just on the floor!).
Venue: VR Library @ Workstation. The Tell Tale Rooms. Artworks, memories and dreams of Eden Kotting. Interactive 360VR featuring a Pyrenean backdrop and photogrammetry scanned interiors of: “The Room of Memory, The Room Of Nostalgia, The Room of Make-Believe, The Room of Hope, The Room of Forgetting, The Room of Confabulation..” 3D memory heads move around and add dynamism to otherwise static rooms. Plays with scale. Mirror, reflected the memories/ photos/ video footage? Wall pictures and key objects come alive with video footage… Disarmed. Satire. Hand tracking. Players are your hands until they complain about being overworked, then the giant upper arm pops down and clones multiple arms. Initially control is welcomed and the extra help is successful but then becomes out of control and none knows which arms are clones, which are real. Apathy sets in and individuality is replaced by similararity. Ironical but also extremely fun to control multiple arms!! Child of Empire. “VR experience of the 1947 Partition of British India”. Powerful, gripping, superb. Impactful start, layered graphics to support the opening narrative and story setting. Hands interaction although not entirely clear how to use and when. Conversation across a game, embodiment of 2 survivors as they remember their experience (Hindu Indian had to migrate from Pakistan to India, Muslim Pakistani had to go the other way). Flashbacks to 7 years and what they experience, set in those environments. Birds eye view of a burning village, model scale, could this be used for Joinville? Monoliths. Three northern Womens stories about the landscape, 'what it means to come from it, live in it and belong to it'. Beautifully poetic, lovely illustrated style. The first the northern landscape, illustrated flowers and a hare, second on a bus with a moving exterior and misted up windows with the key elements of the story, the third on the shore line with a portal to the real world rather than just memory. On the morning you wake (to the end of the world) Ran out of time to see, 45mins, long queues (suggest booking time slots for such a long experience as people were not prepared to wait). About the Hawaii missile strike false alarm in 2018.
