Expanded Realities is a virtual exhibition to celebrate digital art, interactivity and new media that launched as part of Open City Doucmentary Festival 2020. I attended several talks and films screenings including 2020: State of Exception, Worldbuilding in VR and A Space Journey.
2020 State of Exception was created by Merijn Royaards and Henrietta Williams: “sets out to connect viewers across digital space into an experiential understanding of our own bodies and our place within the surveilled city”. The film starts with scenes from London at the start of the Covid-19 lockdown and captures the eerie city streets - birds can be heard chirping juxtaposed against the police helicopter that is enforcing the lockdown. The viewer is encouraged to actively experience the work by following the onscreen instructions to reinforce the message “We are together apart”. The banishment of the citizens resonates through separation, isolation and lack of freedom but as Giorgio Agamben concluded in his work, the state of emergency could not last and the need of the people to reclaim the space through their civil rights and the Black Lives Matter protest would prevail.
Paisley Smith gave a talk entitled World Building for VR in which she outlined her worldbuilding process, honed from a workshop that she runs on the subject, and discussed the impact that it has on the creation of storyworlds and the narrative. She decribes world building as a new way to tell stories that can be acheived by coming up with all the details of the storyworld. Once the shell of the world is created it is possible to imagine the people living in the world and this can be used to solve problems in the physical world by examining different perspectives that can exist in a future world. She presented her golden rules of world building: keep going, say yes, trust and have fun! Then using Homestay, a VR piece about greiving, she outlined how the world building approach helped to tell such a personal marrative, inspired by a Japanese reflecting garden that echoed the story and rooted the experience. The challenge is that VR can be limitless, go on forever, and so there is the need for creative boundaries. She presented a lo-fi plan of the world with all the key elements arranged and stressed the importance of trying out early ideas. The interaction element of the story was also carefully considered as initially the participant can touch the leaves but as the experience continues this ability fades and the goal was to play with the frustrations of the audience by being reflective of the greiving process and never having clarity or answers.
I also joined Arkivet for a A Space Journey, designed to be: “an interactive scenography that invites you to embody, translate, move, and be moved by your immediate surroundings”. It gave me the opportunity to rediscover my tiny flat in a new light by looking at the space from a different angle, record the sounds that have irritated me for years then when replaying these in a different space discovering that I do have an affinity with them, and creating my space imprint. Wall Wall Wall Bookcase Table Sofa Floor Lamp Radiator Window Desk TV Chair Sink Corridor!
