Category: VR/AR Studio

VR/AR Studio

Endless VR – a sensual essay-dream about identities in process

Since 2016, Wojciech Puś has been making Endless – a sensual combination of image, light and sound that creates a poetic essay-dream about identities in process. The work has taken diverse forms – from cinematic fiction to cinematic performances and casual situations. Its essence is an informal community of performers with different social backgrounds, gender identities, nationalities or migration statuses from Chile, France, Mexico, Poland and Ukraine. The tangle of their personal stories, together with fragments of literary works, films, diaries and dream records, creates a mosaic warp, which Puś situates in categories of queer abstraction. This aesthetic utopia entails a change in thinking about gender transformation, extending the experience of transformation to the most universal, existential experience of an individual.    

Wojciech Puś – filmmaker, author of light installations and interactive objects, set designer. His post-emancipatory, analytical works refer to the sphere of queer spirituality and intimacy through their sublime cinematographic character. The artist’s works can be found, among others, in the collections of Filmoteka, the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, Bunkier Sztuki in Cracow, as well as in private collections in Poland, Germany and Italy. His films have been presented at, among others, the New Horizons International Film Festival in Wrocław and the Artists’ Film Biennial at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London. He is an assistant professor at the Cinematography Department of Łódź Film School.    

Wish You Were Here – an anti-documentary that breaks the rules of VR 

VR promises to take you “inside,” it seeks to create a sense of being “there”, to be able to enter someone’s life and even to simulate being someone else. This is what is known as immersive storytelling. But to what extent can we really look through someone else’s eyes, and above all, how much are we really prepared to see and feel? How much empathy and willingness to empathise do we have in ourselves? In Wish You Were Here, we meet Aneta, who is 36 years old and has been diagnosed with breast cancer. From the window of her house she can see a walnut orchard, which is slowly being replaced by a new housing estate made up of blocks of flats. Wish You Were Here is a classic documentary that, thanks to VR technology, allows you to look behind the scenes of the making of the film. It is both an anti-documentary and breaks the rules of VR, depriving the viewer of the illusion of intimate contact with the protagonist.

The image is not intended to imitate, but to be treated as a tool to influence viewers’ physical reactions. A good example of this is the scene with the graphic ball. Its purpose is not to just present an image, but to move the body of the viewer, who will follow it with their eyes, and consequently their head, neck and whole body. Director Michał Stankiewicz is primarily interested in how images can affect the mobility of viewers’ bodies, and thus evoke emotional states. The narrator’s voice, which appears in the “experience,” is treated as framing the camera movement, but also as an opportunity to apply layers that are invisible to the eye. How the voice speaks and puts accents will also resonate in the viewer’s body.

The viewer is always a partner of the director’s, a co-creator. That’s why in his works he allows the viewer to observe himself, to focus on his feelings. In Wish You Were Here, this observation of impulses coming from the body is the essence of the experience, the content of Aneta’s transfer. The viewer’s body becomes the medium, the heart of the transfer, while the viewer’s individual perception is a random element characteristic of generative art. 

Michał Stankiewicz – works in the field of performing and visual arts. He is inspired by performance, post-conceptual art, cognitive science, but also magic and folk art. In designing experiences, he looks for random events and places that cannot be directed. He has taken part in Polish and international festivals, including the Theatre Olympiad in India, AltoFest in Naples, Performance Arcade in New Zealand, CAOS in Turin, and the College Cinema VR Biennale in Venice. He likes to think of his work as preparing dinner for friends or stepping into an icy river together.   

Pilot 9/11 – the story about coming out of trauma

Pilot 9/11 presents the events of September 11, 2001 from the unique perspective of military pilots who followed the hijacked passenger planes to prevent the tragedy. The assessment from their point of view sheds new light on the perfectly familiar images. The cramped cockpit of the plane contrasting with the boundless expanse of New York is the perfect environment for VR recreation. Although we are almost in the centre of events, we remain locked in the cockpit, like powerless observers. How do you remain fully focused and decisive while seeing desperate pleas for rescue and watching – without being able to help – the horror of scenes taking place just a few hundred metres away? Yet what happened at the World Trade Center is not, despite appearances, the main focus. Pilot 9/11 is a twenty-minute story about coming out of trauma – the wider, national one, and the subjective, personal one.    

Norman Leto (born Łukasz Banach) – painter, director, new media artist. His first solo exhibition took place at the Centre for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle in Warsaw in 2007. In 2009 and 2010, he completed his autobiographical novel Sailor and a full-length film under the same title. In 2012 Leto began work on Photon, his second feature film, which premiered at the international documentary film festivals CPH:DOX, Copenhagen 2017 and HotDocs, Toronto 2017, and had its Polish premiere at the 17th IFF T-Mobile New Horizons in the main competition. In 2017, Leto began work on the script for his new film Pilot 9/11, about the 9/11 terrorist attack as seen from the unique perspective of a real military pilot who tried to prevent the tragedy.   

 

Simple Songs about Death – a technological meditation on death

Situated between a simulator and a virtual sculpture, the VR experience aims to break social taboos concerning the dead body. The creators present the process of dying in its natural cycle, transferring it from the real tabooed space to the synthesized virtual environment. During a technological meditation, they invite viewers to reflect on mortality and passing.

Maciej Czuchryta and Marta Wieczorek – a duo involved in directing and designing virtual and theatrical scenery, level design. As artists, they are interested in issues related to the dematerialisation of stage design and the impact of new technologies on viewers’ perception, juxtaposing the latest technological trends with traditional stage design.

The world premiere of VR Control Negative dir. Monika Masłoń at Dok Leipzig!

The Western culture of self-optimisation is based on the idea that one can control all aspects of life. This VR experience subjects us to a psychological experiment, confronting us with feelings such as frustration, helplessness, stress, rage and grief to show: Control is an illusion. Step by step, we are led from physical activation to contemplative perception. (Lars Rummel, curator of immersive media programme)

The work is part of the exhibition Extended Reality: DOK Neuland

18–23.10.2022 Museum of Fine Arts (MdbK) Leipzig

Tues, Thur – Sun | 11:00–18:00

Wed | 12:00–20:00

Visit the website for more information.

Deep Dive will be presented at the Belfast XR Festival

The Belfast XR Festival is part of the Belfast Film Festival which runs from 3 to 12 November 2022.

The XR programme will be presented on 9th November in The Black Box in Belfast.

Lost on the wild side of a river, where fears and hopes blend with reality, Magda, a young woman, is fighting for her child and facing the most painful loss of her life. Deep Dive creates a sensual and emotional world to tell a wandering tale of two people and the shared trauma yet to be faced.

For more information visit the festival website.

VR Nightsss at the Camera Action Festival in Łódź

VR Nightsss by Weronika Lewandowska and Sandra Frydrysiak will be presented the Camera Action Festival at the Film School in Łódź.

October 13–16, Szklarnia Gallery, New Media Building

Nightsss is a virtual, erotic poem in which the audience is invited to an interactive experience of poetry and dance. The starting point for the experimental VR animation was a slam poem by Weronika Lewandowska. The artist uses sounds characteristic of the Polish language, creating onomatopoeic landscapes that cross language barriers. To create the artist’s experience, she was inspired by a research project devoted to the perception of dance and movement in virtual reality, which she carried out at the SWPS University while writing their doctoral dissertations on art. Nightsss is the first Polish VR production that premiered at Sundance – the most important festival of independent cinema in the world.

To read more follow the link.

 

 

 

Control Negative – the exercise in loss

Monika Masłoń’s project Control Negative is an exercise in loss. In this interactive installation, the viewers are invited to participate in a process during which they get to know the mechanisms of illusion, train in the lack of control and influence, observe what happens when they lose what they are used to. Using VR technology, the author attempts to put the viewer in a state in which strong emotions – such as frustration, helplessness, anger and sadness – reveal the basic human mechanisms, including the illusory conviction of being able to control one’s life. The unreal world of the experience – a negative version of the real world – is a kind of training room for getting to know yourself and your emotions better. The user is led through consecutive chapters of the piece, which allow for a gradual transition from activity to contemplation.   

Monika Masłoń – a graduate of the W. Strzemiński Academy of Fine Arts in Łódź. She defended her diploma in 2008, in the Photography Studio under Prof. Grzegorz Przyborek and in the Photography and Video Studio led by Prof. Konrad Kuzyszyn. In 2011–2016, she was a doctoral student at the L. Schiller Polish National Film, Television and Theatre School in Łódź, where, under the supervision of Prof. Józef Robakowski, she completed her doctoral dissertation See You Again. She is involved in artistic activities, mainly through realizations based on audiovisual material.   

Dead City – an interactive opera experience

Dead City is an interactive experience that draws on Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s opera of the same name about the fate of a Flemish city and its inhabitants, who are living with a cult of the memory of the past. In Krzysztof Grudziński’s version, it is a city of the pandemic era, empty and lonely, but full of digital life. The poetic narrative, based on the original libretto, is accompanied by singing, contemporary music and travestied elements of the original composition. The visual layer draws upon the style of vaporwave and gifs.

The plot and libretto are based on the opera, written by Erich Wolfgang Korngold in 1920. In the original, from a century ago, the action took place in Bruges. The contemporary Dead City is a pandemic-stricken Warsaw. Empty, depressing and nostalgic. Paul, the main character, is in mourning for his recently deceased wife, and visits places that were important to their relationship. We peek inside their home, visit their favourite cinema Iluzjon, go on a date at the Palace of Culture.

We pass Rajkowska’s palm tree, a symbol of their first vacation, and walk to the Powiśle train station where they met. We admire the city skyline from the Intercontinental Hotel, and walk to Zbawiciela Square. The dark depths of the Vistula river, by the Świętokrzyski Bridge, is where they parted. Paul dissolves and penetrates the morphing black space. We hear the voice of his beloved Maria. She bids him farewell with the words: “Everything is a memory, nothing dies, because there is nothing. Be calm, be calm. Nothing dies, because there is nothing and yet everything is.” In the alternative version, the main character is Maria.

The users are guided by a narrator who resembles our inner voice. At some point, the users become the hero of the opera. Depending on which character they chooses at the beginning, they are either Paul or Maria. The users can move through the scenes/levels, using a technique of smooth movement (continuous movement). They follows the narrator, an internal voice placed in their head. The voice leads the users to specific locations where, by interacting with certain objects, they activate holograms and snippets of music. In this way, the viewers discover the plot.

Krzysztof Grudziński is a director, screenwriter, producer of games, films and music videos (including bAranovski, Agim, Natalia Nykiel), virtual production manager and narrator, and a professor at the Warsaw Film School. He won the Studio Munk program 30 Minutes, and produced the feature film Magdalena. He is the creator and producer of video games: Apocalipsis: Harry at the End of the World, Aida, This is the Zodiac Speaking, Barnfinders VR, and Poopin. He has been nominated and awarded at the KTR, YACH, ARS iNDEPENDENT, Fryderyki, Cinemaforum, and Pixel Heaven festivals, among others. He was also a finalist at the Papaya Young Directors competition.

More on the making and screenings of Dead City.

VR Dead City during (long) weekend of immersion in the STUDIO

Pre-premiere screenings of Dead City will be presented during (long) Weekend of Immersion at the STUDIO Theater.

Dead City was directed by Krzysztof Grudziński in the vnLab VR/AR Studio.

June 17 – June 19 (Friday–Sunday) 2022

Dead City is a narrative experience with elements of singing, contemporary and opera music, based on the poetic text of Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s libretto of the same title. In pandemic-stricken Warsaw, the protagonist travels to the most important places in the city, saying goodbye to his deceased wife.

Friday, June 17: 15:00, 15:45, 16:30, 17:15, 18:00
Saturday and Sunday, June 18–19: 15:00, 15:45, 16:30, 17:15, 18:00, 18:45, 19:30, 20:15

More information on the event website.

Admission based on any ticket to the Weekend of Immersion, prior booking recommended