At.
The Lacuna Shifts is a spatio-poetic VR Experience, is a volatile room that keeps changing around its guest – shifting in scale and mutating its architectural features – while revealing traces of poetic narratives.
Loosely inspired by Lewis Carroll’s Alice books The Lacuna shifts combines sound, text and imagery into an alternate surreality. Disembodied, the viewer’s gaze becomes the only instrument of connecting to this space – it leaves traces, activates and builds structures. Instead of travelling through a world the world shifts around the spectator, at times covertly behind the back, sometimes in plain sight. The Lacuna’s architecture rejects its passive role as a trusted, immutable shelter and permits a physically impossible experience of poetic space and a reflection about the fragile relation of the beholder to her/his environment.
Through the procedural nature of The Lacuna shifts you cannot enter the same room twice. Each viewer will experience a different “journey”, manifesting different aspects based on her/his behaviour and the world’s own erratic character. Similar to current walking-simulators and narrative-exploration-games the virtual space becomes a mysteriously unpredictable parallel world in an area between deceiving spatial perception, acoustic hallucinations and hermetic wordplay.
DEPART is Leonhard Lass and Gregor Ladenhauf. Their core endeavour is the conception of poetic, audiovisual immersions. Deeply rooted in the digital they explore the ritualistic character of algorithms and venture deliberately into the uncanny – creating unique moments that are coined by formally rigorous and profound aesthetics.
DEPART work in a poetic tradition: They strive to subvert languages – not just literal, word based languages but languages as symbolic systems in general (involving sounds, images, algorithms, gestures, objects, etc.). Through subtle manipulation of their specific grammars, intentional short-circuiting of their reference networks and slight shifts of perspective they aim to trigger internal landslides of consciousness. As their modus operandi they employ generative processes and realtime simulation to construct hermetically “believable worlds”, transitory sandboxes of synchronicities bordering on the surreal, which evoke a virtual immanence. They love surprises.
