Contemporary Art and Virtual Reality: New Conditions of Viewership (original) (raw)
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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.
ART AND ITS RELATIONSHIP WITH TECHNOLOGY: VIRTUAL REALITY
Journal of Modern Education, 2019
This article focuses on specific questions of the use of computers in art while historicising the relationship between art and technology, specifically reflecting artistic processes designed for virtual reality, such as the works Rising by Marina Abramovic, Rainbow by Olafur Eliasson, and Phryne by Jeff Koons. Keywords: art, technology, virtual reality
Body Space and Technology, 2020
The most recent emergence of relatively inexpensive VR technologies has received an enthusiastic attention from the entertainment industry, visual and multimedia artists, and academia. The world of computer gaming is thriving with the new VR platforms and the number of VR games is multiplying exponentially. Similarly, quite a few research projects have been funded in order to explore the potential of the immersive technologies in disciplines as wide and different as health care, nuclear decommissioning and nonfiction immersive documentaries. Similar to the advent of its various digital predecessors at the end of the last century, the encounter with this highly interactive and immersive technology has stirred up the discussion about the nature of the medium and its relation to its predecessors. A particular interest seems to be placed in the narrative possibilities of the medium. Parallel to this shared enthusiasm, however, one can also easily sense equally shared disappointment with the current state of affairs when it comes to the artistic climaxes delivered in the VR medium. The voices from both the entertainment industry and creative academia are clearly dissatisfied with the rather rudimentary narratives presented in the most of VR games, as well as more artistically ambitious immersive experiences. The medium which claims the highest technological level of immersion still struggles to keep its audience truly immersed in its fictional realities. In this article I argue that the answer to this challenge might come outside of the world of immersive interactive gaming, and that the key for understanding the nature of immersion might come from the realm of theatre. My study of Complicite’s performance The Encounter demonstrates that this work manages to achieve the level of immersion unconceivable for any existing VR experience. The key elements for this success are the profoundly relevant subject matter (the narrative based on Petru Popescu’s Amazon Beaming), ingenious use of binaural immersive sound, and extraordinary story-telling performance delivered by Simon McBurney. In other words, it is the combination of the performance’s intertextuality, the multimediality of its means of expression and the intense presence of its narrator/protagonist that accounts for extraordinarily immersive viewers’ experience. If the medium of VR is ever to achieve a comparable level of narrative and formal complexity, it needs to break away from the vacuum of the games-logic based interactivity and shift towards a more intertextual, multimedial and narratorial aesthetic.
Perception and Poetics of VR Documentaries
As virtual reality (VR) headsets like Oculus Rift, Samsung Gear, Google Daydream View, HTC Vive, and other devices begin to enter the marketplace, documentary filmmakers are using the new medium to record events and tell stories. VR is a distinctively different medium than cinema as it generates a 360-degree view of an environment. Proponents have described VR as an immersive experience, one that approaches reality much more than traditional cinema. However, VR remains a mediated experience. The gulf between VR and real experience opens up opportunities for developing an aesthetic of the medium. While audiences have experienced cinema for over a century, only recently have scholars begun to understand how we perceive moving images. Cognitive film studies and the burgeoning field of neurocinematics have examined how the brain responds when perceiving sequences of moving images and sound. Likewise, understanding how viewers perceive VR is a first step to defining its aesthetic. Both cinema and VR hack into our senses that had evolved within a natural environment. More than sight and sound, VR also engages our vestibular and proprioceptive senses, but limited haptic feedback, the fixed camera position of 360-degree video, and the absence of interaction beyond directional gaze prevents a fully immersive experience. How might documentary VR authors use these limitations to construct narratives and convey meaning, as opposed to merely presenting experiences? As more documentarians tell stories in the VR environment, new aesthetic traditions will emerge. A systematic study of the perception of VR can help determine how those traditions will develop.
There has been a lack of discussion concerning virtual reality as an expressive medium. It is essen- tial to emphasise the aesthetic dimension of virtual reality in order to develop the medium as a powerful artistic mode of expression. This thesis examines how head-mounted display-based virtual reality can be used for artistic expression, focussing on the aesthetic pleasures of the medium. Pioneering first-generation VR artworks are reviewed through the scope of artistic exploration, and four key aesthetic pleasures in VR experience are proposed: immersion, agency, navigation, and transformation. The demonstration of VR aesthetics is investigated through the qualitative content analysis of four contemporary VR installations. The study reveals following findings: (1) the coherence of a virtual environment is more crucial than a realistic representation of the physical world in inducing a sense of immersion; (2) the degree of agency is inverse in proportion to the degree of authorship in VR experiences; (3) placing constraints on participants’ movements can bring about a strong emotional impact; and (4) the participant’s attitude and behaviour changes according to the given identity in a virtual environment. It is suggested that the capacity of virtual reality is not currently used to its full extent when it comes to artistic manifestation. It is therefore the responsibility of artists, developers, and researchers to establish the language of virtual reality as an artistic medium for the future production of VR expe- rience.
Far from paradise: The body, the apparatus and the image of contemporary virtual reality
Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, 2017
The contemporary popularity of virtual reality devices such as the Oculus Rift has links not just with earlier eras of virtual reality technology, but with recurrent discourse surrounding the moving image and spectatorship. The articulation of the Oculus Rift in public through YouTube 'reaction' videos and media moments such as the Oculus Rift Time magazine cover of 2015 links contemporary virtual reality to early cinema discourses of credulous spectatorship, strenuous specta-torship and the cinema of attractions. Through these comparisons, this article argues that the 'image' of contemporary virtual reality technology is not that of a simulated exotic paradise enabled by the apparatus, but the apparatus itself, the body of its user and that body's gender.
Virtual Reality is a hot catch phrase in pop culture, mass media, and academics. Modern Western culture seems taken with the idea of a total technology of representation. The idea of VR is to technologically 'trick' the mind so that it perceives the body as existing in another place. Such a technological proposition has caused a glut of speculation and commentary on the future of computers and communication technology. This project is a critical reaction to this popular cultural interest, a philosophical discussion of idealized VR and the culture that conceives of it. VR proposes a method for technologically extending the individual mind from the body and uniting social minds in electronic space, a separation of mind and body. The metaphysical and epistemological implications of this proposition are discussed in relation to the VR 'Ideal Type'. This analysis seeks to examine what the fundamental implications of an ideal VR system are, how this technology proposes to alter our perception of reality and existence, by asking key philosophical questions: How does VR restructure our environment and perceptions of reality? Does improved communication technology mean better or more democratic human communication? Does VR extend our comprehension of knowledge? And finally, does VR dehumanize or enhance our humanity? In examining these issues, the body of this project is an ethical proposition for analyzing VR, with the end of policy formation ultimately in mind. In examining ideal VR, this project also more generally seeks to critique advancing communication technology and the breakdown of meaning in the modern hyperreal world.