VORTEX. Virtual Reality Experiences and VR Cinema
From The Main Square is an animated, interactive virtual reality experience by Berlin-based Brazilian director Pedro Harres. Created with an international team from 14 countries, the piece creates a compact portrait of social disruption.
Encircling a central square, a new town emerges in all its diversity. A crossroad of stories, buildings, hopes, and conflicts. Social ties and cultures take root, but also animosity towards those who are different. It doesn’t take long for an “us versus them” atmosphere to take over. The viewer is invited to witness the rise and fall of a divided society. A civilization blossoms, with all its contradictions, only to become a danger to itself.
The experience is a production of Film University Babelsberg Konrad Wolf and has been funded by Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg. It is also the only German production to ever enter the Venice Immersive competition at the renowned Venice International Film Festival, where it was awarded with the Grand Jury Prize in 2022.
Nave 0
From 21 to 24 September
22 minutes
No dialogues
VORTEX. Virtual Reality Experiences and VR Cinema
Quantum Bar is an immersive virtual reality experience that offers the possibility of having a real conversation with an artificial intelligence. The project investigates the use of chatbots in social VR environments and raises questions related to the ethics of current AI development.
The artist behind the project, Christina “Xaos Princess”, has a long experience of dynamising communities in virtual environments. In this piece, her team brings to life an empathetic avatar-waiter who is always willing to listen to what the visitors to his bar are thinking. Using the potential of the current ChatGPT3 GPT-3 by OpenAI and hosted in the Neos metaverse, inside Quatum Bar you can have interesting conversations of up to 10 minutes in human language, while sentiment detection is used to steer the lights and colours in the virtual space.
Nave 0
From 21 to 24 September
Variable
Spanish
VORTEX. Virtual Reality Experiences and VR Cinema
Nine Dragons (2018) is Yang Yongliangʼs second work based in Virtual Reality, with which he takes us on an immersive journey with the flight of Chinese dragons.
Led by a whirling pearl, the splendid landscape feasts the audienceʼ eyes through a dragonʼs point of view. However, a misfortune slowly unveils along the way.
This flight of East Asian dragons realizes fragmented memories of their mythological past. The work is inspired by Southern Song painting Nine Dragons by Chen Rong ‒ a masterpiece that marks one of the most classical dragon motif in Asian art history.
Nave 0
From 21 to 24 September
10 minutes
No dialogues
VORTEX. Virtual Reality Experiences and VR Cinema
The Temple of Meat is an immersive virtual universe created by Argentinean artist Juan Le Parc in which visitors explore an ancient temple built from butchered and deli meat. The cow and the pig, two symptomatic and symbolic livestock animals, have been chosen to represent religious and moral food taboos in this dramatised animal tragedy.
Staged in a slow, macabre and mechanical choreography, on the verge of agony and cannibalistic butchery, we hear the automaton clock of the churches screaming in unison with that of the automatic slaughterhouses, announcing the time of production on the assembly line of industrial suffering.
In the second part of this architecture of memory, human animals appear, some old and swollen from obesity, others younger, deformed by rickets. All suffer from malnutrition and their bodies rebel against this injustice by fomenting wars of hunger and satiety. In the middle of the temple, the negotiating table of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council is set for a carnivorous and cannibalistic feast. This is where the last act of this tragic story is played out.
Nave 0
From 21 to 24 September
12-15 minutes
No dialogues
VORTEX. Virtual Reality Experiences and VR Cinema
In the current climate of the Internet we have reached an irreversible state in our social life and inherently the way we think and comprehend our reality. To investigate this phenomenon, Iranian artists Ali Eslami & Mamali Shafahi decided to create a virtual identity called nerd_funk, which exists on Instagram and follows a portion of contemporary digital culture.
Through the lens of this profile, the user will set out on a interactive journey that represents an archive of collected moments, composed and directed on the basis of nerd_funk‘s Instagram stories feed. The experience will be a confrontation of the user with different sets of curated social media content.
By providing an alternate hyper-reality, the artists attempt to compare and thus better perceive our current state of existence in social media.
Nave 0
From 21 to 24 September
Chapters 1 & 2 (16 minutes)
No dialogues
VORTEX. Virtual Reality Experiences and VR Cinema
In 1964, Arthur C. Clarke, co-writer of Stanley Kubrick’s on 2001: A Space Odyssey, revealed his vision of the future.
Back in those days, the visionary humanist scholar was already talking about how advances in technology and satellite communication would transform our conception of physical space, stating that it would be “possible to have a world in which we can be in instant contact with each other wherever we are. We will be able to contact our friends anywhere on Earth, even if we don’t know their actual physical location. Possibly in 50 years’ time it will be possible for a man to run his business from Tahiti or Bali as well as from London”.
Revisiting the signal transmitted by the first cathodic images, the virtual reality experimental film I Saw the Future by François Vautier literally plunges us into the sound and visual matrix at the heart of this achive by C. Clarke: predicting the existence of the Internet.
Nave 0
From 21 to 24 September
6 minutes
English
VORTEX. Virtual Reality Experiences and VR Cinema
Eggscape is a revolutionary Mixed Reality multiplayer game that lets you build worlds, go on adventures and play with funny characters in a shared space layered over your actual surroundings. The user controls a little egg character surrounded by all kinds of dangers, which can survive and defeat evil Lego-looking robots with various skills such as kung-fu, parkour and basketball.
Up to four people can play in the same space, collaborating and performing team tasks, which makes it even more fun to play. Eggscape combines art direction, creative storytelling and innovative gameplay. This led it to being awarded the Special Jury Prize in the Venice Immersive section of the Venice International Film Festival 2022. With hilarious characters and unconventional situations, this game will make you laugh and forget that you’re wearing a headset.
Nave 0
From 21 to 24 September
20 minutes
No dialogues
VORTEX. Virtual Reality Experiences and VR Cinema
Robert Seidel is interested in pushing the boundaries of abstracted beauty through cinematographic approaches, as well as ones drawn from science and technology. His projections, installations and experimental films have been shown in numerous international festivals and museums such as the Palais des Beaux-Arts Lille, Art Center Nabi Seoul, ZKM Karlsruhe and MOCA Taipei. His work was honored with various prizes, including the KunstFilmBiennale Honorary Award and the Visual Music Award.
The VORTEX section of L.E.V. Matadero will show two of his audiovisual experiments around artificial intelligence: HYSTERESIS, which intimately weaves a transformative fabric between Robert Seidels’s projections of abstract drawings and queer performer Tsuki’s vigorous choreography, and TOUHA, experimental music video that explores abstract landscapes distilled from latent space. Both of them, accompanied by the music of OVAL.
