Anna Pompermaier: Meet Me Halfway
VORTEX. Virtual Reality Experiences and VR Cinema
September 22-25
Nave 17. Matadero
Meet Me Halfway is a multi-user extended reality experience created by Italian artist, architect and engineer Anna Pompermaier that explores the potential and implications of architecture across realities.
By creating a micro-performative hybrid environment, the project speculates on the future of how we will live together, investigating alternative meeting places and communication strategies inside a phygital garden of encounters. A phygital space is a place explorable between the virtual and the physical, claiming that the digital is not only an expansion of the actual but believing in a synthesis of both. Atoms and molecules are merging with bits and bytes, and we, the inhabitants and designers of the future domains, must research the technology that will be part of our upcoming everyday reality and interpersonal interactions.
Several exploratory objects create the physical stage of the public participatory XR performance and guide the users through the experience, both as a digital and physical matter to touch and engage with. They become the tactile tools of the immersion, technologically embedding the virtual into our naked organic intelligence.
The project was developed at ./studio3, Institute for Experimental Architecture, University of Innsbruck.
Financed by the European Union-NextGenerationEU, through the Public Aid subsidy for the promotion of the video game sector and other forms of digital creation within the framework of the Recovery, Transformation and Resilience Plan of the Ministry of Culture.
