Film & Video (Film & Video)

Living Distance by Xin Liu is a VR work and two-channel video based on a real mission in which the artist’s wisdom tooth was sent to outer space and back down to Earth again. In the VR work, users play the role of the tooth, journeying from the mouth to outer space, with a poetic narration by Liu. The piece is exquisitely rendered, with deep blacks that make the experience especially powerful on a Vive Pro.

Advanced Technology (Advanced Technology)

View of Harbor by Jon Rafman mines the latent cultural imaginary surrounding climate change and society’s collective death drive. In contrast with other recent works that aim to use VR or AR to visualize the impact of climate change, Rafman’s work instead presents the rising sea as an almost anthropomorphized foe, within which strange human-like bodies lurk as the viewer is swept into a kind of watery hellscape. This strong element of fantasy leads the viewer to wonder what type of wish fulfillment is at play—what desire for the museum to be inundated, for the existing social order to be washed away by the deluge?

Painting (Painting)

The Fifth Quarter might have taken its mysterious inspiration from the eponymous Stephen King story collated into the Nightmares & Dreamscapes collection. Various vanishing points and interior perspectives, like in another painting dated the same year called Continental Breakfast , create a complex matrix in which motifs, shadowy or geometric forms coexist to further confuse the map of this space. A disturbing yet alluring virtual reality composed of a medley of seemingly abstract designs is depicted through digital and painterly means.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The work BRB is a 30 min. journey in the new game world of Second Life (“SL”). Consistent with Segal’s work with the projected image, this video was shot using a virtual in-world camera, with the footage later being transformed by a software custom designed by the artist.

Advanced Technology (Advanced Technology)

The Wooden People is a 360º virtual reality film series comprising seven episodes. It is written and directed by artist Nao Bustamante and its cast includes notable Los Angeles-based artists Gabriela Ruiz, rafa esparza, San Cha, Markus Kuiland-Nazario, Ron Athey, and Dorian Wood. The work also features a musical and sound score by Nick Hallett and costumes by OLIMA.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

For Immersion , Harun Farocki went to visit a research centre near Seattle specialized in the development of virtual realities and computer simulations. One of their projects consists in using virtual reality (environments created to simulate this world) for therapeutic reasons for soldiers suffering traumas after the Iraq war. The double projection creates a parallel between animations and testimonies by soldiers reliving their mission, the explosions, gunshots and ambushes, their fears and their guilt.

Advanced Technology (Advanced Technology)

The VR play Meat Growers: A Love Story by Rindon Johnson centers on two meat growers who work together in a meat processing factory in the year 2100. The setting is a post-Green New Deal Napa Valley where there are no more paved roads, trees abound, and all the strip malls have been turned into food forests and meat growing plants. The protagonists seem to move through their day automatically, yearning for each other, as the viewer acts as a friend and confidant, silently bearing witness to their desire.

Photography (Photography)

Since 2007, Cao Fei has radically focused her work on Second Life, an online space that virtually mimics “the real world” and includes everything from the expression of ideas to economic investment. Referring to China’s modernization and its capitalist and utopic visions, RMB City explores the ways in which global communication impacts imagination, values, and ways of life. By appropriating virtual reality, Cao Fei opens up a new frontier in the field of art production that surpasses conventional materiality and invites collaboration and exchanges with her public and clients.