Virtual Reality as an Artistic Medium: A Study on Creative Projects Using Contemporary Head-Mounted Displays (original) (raw)

Finding the message : exploring the new conventions of VR experience

Since 2014, a new wave of Virtual Reality (VR) development has been on the rise, calling for more artists to utilize this new technology in creating art works. However, there is still room for improvement in both the technology itself and its application in art creations. Firstly, the lack of clear definitions in VR results in many problems. Usually, the term 'VR creators' is used to address all of VR game producers, 360 filmmakers, and VR experience designers. This prevents the 'creators' from clearly defining the realm of their roles, thus the communication between them becomes less efficient. This inefficiency in turn prohibits the establishment of design patterns, forcing artists to acquire technical skills. This, in most cases, intensifies the difficulty of transdisciplinary collaborations, which are usually seen in big-budget projects promoted by big companies or famous studios. Due to the hybrid nature of this new medium, the outcome of the artwork is hard to predict. Participants' experiences can vary widely based on their decoding performance. What is more, there is a big chance that the work will not receive credit as artworks but will be criticized as frivolous toys. This paper builds on my experience of creating a thesis project, Captive Memoirs, in which I explore the multiple dimensions of designing an VR experience. Starting from the theoretical study and analysis of various artworks, I attempt to define, for further reference, the design elements that a VR experience is composed of. Through the presentation of this thesis, an operational system is established that investigates the design conventions of VR experience. This work also examines the relationship between the audience and the interactive art installation to investigate why the audiences' interaction is the key to VR experience. Above all, rethinking the creative practice of VR based artworks reveals the inspiration for new art forms and creates the opportunity to question the new standards of art.

Between Real and Virtual-A Study on the Artistic Potentialities of Virtual Reality Systems

2020

Just as photography and film went through periods of experimentation and doubts between scientists and artists until they were consolidated as artistic media, virtual reality headsets (VR) will also have their natural time until they find their own ways of artistic creation. Although experiments with VR systems are still subject to uncertainties among artists in relation to their authenticity as a form of artwork creation, it is possible to perceive that the technology presents potential to bring new aesthetical possibilities, by its elements of immersion and interaction. On the other hand, as this is a recent digital technology, it is necessary to explore its totality to understand its creative limits. Based on some examples, this work promotes a brief discussion about the aesthetical and technical potentialities that VR systems can offer artists in the creation of aesthetic and immersive experiences.

Contemporary Art and Virtual Reality: New Conditions of Viewership

This article aims to respond to the lack of studies on the relationships between contemporary visual arts and VR, focusing on the role of "storytelling" and identifying what distinguishes VR art projects from other contemporary uses of VR, namely the criticism that they make of the VR medium itself. In the last five years, VR has developed a new language based on a specific visual grammar that has allowed for new forms of narration to arise. Visual artists have been attracted to VR in search of new modes of production and have exposed the negative impact of technology on our perception of reality, uncovering new mediated ways of seeing and distanced interaction with the world around us. The first part of the article will be dedicated to discussing Canadian artist Jon Rafman's View of Pariser Platz (2016) and American artist Jordan Wolfson's Real violence (2017), two of the first Oculus Rift-based art installations that developed a metalinguistic commentary on how VR, although promising immersion, produces, in fact, alienation, homogenization, brutalization and the loss of empathy. The article will continue with a discussion on the recent rise of tech companies that aim at producing contemporary artworks based on VR technology: Acute Art (London), Khora Contemporary (Copenhagen), and VIVE Arts (Taiwan). This is a new and expanding field that is changing the ontology of artmaking and redefining the artist's role, mainly in light of the cooperation with technicians and programmers.

On the Aesthetics of Virtual Reality

The contemporary psychic mechanism for interpreting the world opposes two essential domains - that of The Real and that of Illusion. From this domain emerges similar oppositions of positive and negative, the legitimate and the illegitimate, the subject and the object. The hypothesis of the present text is to suggest that this measuring of the world in terms of rational oppositions is untenable, particularly given the threat, in this age of transparency, of its absolute fulfillment. Human interaction and meaning necessarily requires Evil and this excess of sociality and socialization which emerges from the language of hyper-reality becomes increasingly insufferable. From this state there (re)emerges a new moral conception - that of symbolic exchange. VR becomes first the road of escape from rationality and immerses us in a new system of symbolic exchange which reconstitutes Evil in relational terms. That is, Evil provides a context for a 'scene'. VR begins as a hopeless response to the contemporary world of over-socialization, self-consciousness and impossible exchange and in this, deploys a new system interpreting human interaction in the world itself.

Reflections on an Immersive Virtual Reality Exhibition

This paper aims to report the experience and challenges of the research group Laboratory of Front Poetics (LabFront, CNPq/UEMG) in exhibiting an immersive virtual reality installation during events and festivals of digital arts in Brazil. In this article, questions are raised regarding traditional exhibition processes and those where digital technologies are used. Although our focus is on the Brazilian context, similar difficulties and problems in exhibition design can be seen in other places, such as Latin American and European countries. We will base the discussion on our experience of exhibiting Olhe para você (2016) [Look at yourself], an immersive virtual reality work developed by one of the teams of the research group LabFront.

Virtual Reality and Aesthetic Experience

Philosophies, 2022

The problem of aesthetic experience in a virtual environment could be reformulated as: what can we learn about aesthetics from the perspective of ‘aesthetic experience in virtual environments’, given the specific nature of such an environment? The discourse goes in circles, because it is always from theories elaborated in the field of the so-called ‘real’ that we develop the difference, but it is a process typically philosophical, that, on the other hand, can make sense only if it can be shown that the virtual is an existent being that has an ontological structure of its own. The ontology of this strange object–event, and of its relationship to space–time, must therefore be addressed: what are the conditions of identity for a virtual body? What are its limits? In what sense does it have borders? Also, its specific temporality and its connection to human and computer memories are arguable dimensions that deserve analysis, as they directly affect an ontology of the virtual body, the d...

Travels through the imagination: Future visions of VR and related technologies

YVR2001, December, 2001

The research question driving my own research is the following: Which varying modes of interactivity add to the experienced significance of and engagement in, a virtual tourist environment? Do inbuilt evaluation mechanisms compare favorably to more traditional feedback mechanisms when gauging engagement in an interactive virtual environment? This research question is a direct result of an extended analysis as to which factors are hindering virtual environments. In this paper I argue that VR (or, as I refer to it here, Virtual Environments), before it can go forwards, needs to address several issues that have prevented widespread dissemination of its potential. The issues that needs to be addressed are: ¨ Accessibility, which includes terminology and classification, and collaboration between related disciplines especially between designers and those that evaluate the psychological effects of virtual presence on the participants. ¨ Interactivity, between the virtual actor, environment, object and task; social interaction; and messaging between actors. ¨ Dynamic histories, with annotation; as well as augmentation between fact fiction and imagination. After discussing what I think needs to be done, the paper ends by describing a virtual environment prototype using inbuilt evaluation mechanisms to gauge the effect of various forms of interactivity on user engagement. The findings will hopefully be of particular interest to virtual heritage, cultural tourism, and archaeological or even anthropological digital simulations.