The immersive NYC art exhibition featured some truly creative virtual reality installations.
The Moving Images immersive art fair has officially shut its doors to the public, but not before blowing the collective minds of hundreds of New Yorkers with an impressive gallery of single-channel videos, single-channel projections, video sculptures, immersive media, and other larger video installations. The exhibition featured the best and brightest in experimental new media, which naturally included several artists utilizing virtual reality for their innovative projects. From an interactive tour through the winding corridors of the human brain, to a giant cube that combines the virtual with the real, here are a few of the coolest virtual reality installations we were fortunate enough to experience.
WORLD AND PLACE EVAPORATING
By Christopher Manzione & Seth Cluett
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In what had to be the most physically jarring of all the projects on display, World And Place Evaporating was a unique project that utilized actual reflective surfaces to warp your perspective while in the virtual world. Using the HTC Vive and a wall of silver rectangles, this installation was all about playing with points of reference and altering how your brain processes its surroundings. After putting on the headset and launching into a lush digital forest, I turned around to see the same wall of reflective rectangles standing in front of me, creating an interesting warped perspective as they reflected the tall trees and tangled vines. It was almost like a pack of Predators were surrounding me. Lets just say if anyone came up behind me while in the experience, they were getting a swift horse-kick to the chest.
However as I explored the abstract woods I noticed that one rectangle surface was different. Instead of reflecting the various trees and leaves in my virtual world, it actually projected a reflection of myself within the real world. Using the built-in camera on the HTC Vive headset I was able to view myself back in reality, standing inside the Waterfront Tunnel space. It was really interesting watching myself with a headset on while still engulfed in a virtual forest.
From there I was able to walk around the designated space and interact with different orbs that transported me to various locations. One orb played with my perspective even further by instantly transporting me face down mere inches away from the surface of an icy river. Hovering parallel with a running stream and seeing the trees shoot from the earth perpendicular to myself was an incredibly odd sensation, which according to the artist was the primary intent of the piece:
“World and Place Evaporating examines layers of reality that both dissipate and reveal, shifting orientations that become incursions on our comfort, and the ever shifting framing of our point of reference that highlight the narratives we tell ourselves about what we’ve done.”
LATTICEDOMAIN_VISUALIZE
By Brenna Murphy
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Having already won the 2016 P3 Post-Photography Prototyping Prize for her first VR piece, StrandScape_Nexus, Brenna Murphy is no stranger to using virtual reality in her installations. This time the experimental artist sought to build on the hyper-dimensional theme with LatticeDomain_Visualize. The slightly-disorientating experience had me standing beneath the center of several continually spinning hollow cubes within what can only be described as a ‘dream-like’ plain of existence. The outlines of said cubes, as well as the floor and various other objects, were all wrapped in beautifully colorful and mind-numbingly eclectic designs. Seeing these various patterns rotate around me in synchronization as I walked through the hectic scene was almost hypnotic.
Brenna Murphy has said, “I work deeply in both virtual and physical realms, weaving elements from one into the other. This strengthens the pathways between realms , revealing inherent parameters and underlying structures.”
PRIMAL TOURISM: ISLAND
By Jakob Kudsk Steensen
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Source: VR Scout