Weekly Writing
Week 1
From my perspective, VR is now transiting from an additive form to an expressive form. Sometimes, creators use VR as a medium for a certain expression as a tool derived from earlier technologies. For example, utilizing VR in computer games to provide a more lifelike and interactive gaming experience, which proves to be a successful business model. In contemporary society, more and more creators exploit VR's own expressive power and let VR become its own meaning. With the rapid development of computer technology and new media, it is an inevitable process of moving away from the formats of older media and toward new conventions in order to satisfy the need for a more immersive and realistic experience.
I Love Bees was an alternate reality game (ARG) that served as both a real-world experience and viral marketing campaign for the release of developer Bungie's 2004 video game Halo 2. AR is utilized as a tool for expressing the gaming world. According to Janet Murray in Hamlet on the Holodeck “Ch 3: From Additive to Expressive Form”, AR plays the role of an additive form.
Murray's four principle properties of digital environments are procedural, participatory, spatial, and encyclopedic. The former two words basically refer to interactive, and the latter two refer to procedural and participatory. In one word, digital environments are immersive. Among the four principle properties, participatory is the one I consider the most important. To some extent, VR fulfills participatory, and in contrast, in other ways, it fails to achieve.
With virtual reality headsets or multi-projection environments, realistic images, sounds, and other sensations are generated to simulate the user's actual presence in the virtual environment. A person using a virtual reality device is able to look around the artificial world, move around in it, and interact with virtual features or objects. This kind of interaction matches the participatory. Users are engaged with activities and circumstances that they might meet in real life. And more importantly, doing things they can't manage to do in the real world, providing more sense of participation and engagement for them.
However, real human interaction is lacking in the VR environment. In the majority of VR experiences, users are interacting with robots, AIs, and artificial environments instead of human beings. As social animals, human beings might feel lost in the virtual world and feel disconnected from the community and the world, thus making users feel less participatory.
Week 2
Hito Steyerl, Virtural Leonardo's Submarine
The background music also plays an important part in the immersive experiences. In the beginning, viewers are surrounded by distant sounds simulating the deep sea, making viewers feel like they are deep under the ocean. Then, there are some rhythms and cheerful notes. The voice-over speaks of technology, power, corruption, art, and warfare, topics that the artist has explored thoroughly. Nowadays, there is more and more 3D exhibition, providing free access for viewers all over the world to enjoy and explore the exhibition at any time. I have noticed that this exhibition is built on Unity, so I look forward to building a similar one in the future. The disadvantage is that the presentation of the virtual exhibition is not smooth probably due to the device network or the website itself, and it is more like watching a video than an exhibition. The ability to interact with the keyboard is nearly unusable, making it difficult for users to explore themselves.
Ian Cheng’s Life After BOB is an episodic anime series built in the Unity game engine and also presented live in real-time. BOB (“Bag of Beliefs”) is an experimental AI installed in the nervous system of a 10-year-old daughter, Chalice, by her father Dr. Wong , a neural engineer. Although this cartoon is very short and only one and a half minutes, it really shocked me and made me watch it again and again. The question from the father to the daughter appeared on both sides in the short film, representing the part of Chalice influenced by BOB and the part of herself, forming a clear front-to-back contrast. Lighting, color, and sound effects create a surreal atmosphere with a strong sense of technology. Meanwhile, the distorted pictures and fast-switching scenes show Chalice's doubts about himself. Where is the value of her life? If her original human nature is not as good as BOB, what else can she do in life?
Life After BOB: The Chalice Study | TRAILER
How VR affects Memories and Dreams
VR should have an enormous influence on memory and dreams.
VR should highly improve memory with more ecologically valid simulation in VR, providing better transferability of knowledge learned in VR due to cue dependency. Memory itself can be manipulated or more strongly influenced by VR. Therefore, VR can be applied to learning situations to help students memorize and interpret knowledge better. Interaction in the VR experience can also strengthen the generation effect which improves the encoding part of memory. In simple words, people are more likely to remember information they generate or relate to than that they simply receive and attempt to memorize.
VR also has a positive influence on dreams which are considered a side effect of memory consolidation due to strong stimulation. Sleeping and dreams may break the bound in your brains and put things together, producing more creativity and more thoughts.
Week 3
Becoming Dragon, 3 Minute Documentation
Once clicking to open the video, the narration's electric sound effect makes the audience immerse in this virtual world.
Becoming Dragon questioned whether a year of "real life experience" before undergoing gender-affirming surgery was necessary and could be replaced with a year of 'Second Life Experience'. During the performance, the artist lived for 365 hours immersed in the online 3D environment of Second Life with a head-mounted display, only seeing the physical world through a video feed, and used a motion capture system to map her movements into Second Life. The installation included a stereoscopic projection for the audience. Her voice is also a virtual dragon's voice processed by the computer, which can be heard in the video.
In my opinion, one of the most amazing things about the VR experience is that it provides a realistic experience without having to actually do it in real life. This provides the user with a great opportunity for trial and error. Not only can we be entertained and have fun from VR, but we can also get to know ourselves better by experiencing different lives.
Environmental Storytelling - Scout Expedition Co. - Immersive Design Summit (2018)
The environment is where the experience takes place. The environment can be the carrier of the story, or the story itself, just like environmental storytelling.
The environment contains a lot of details, such as a symbol on the table, light, and shade, cleanliness, texture, and so on. These can contain a large amount of information, which can be efficiently recognized and processed by the human brain in just a few seconds, which enhances the experience of viewers in the following ways: spatial stories can evoke pre-existing narrative associations; providing a staging ground where narrative events are enacted; embedding narrative information within their mise-en-scene, or providing resources for emergent narratives. While storytelling can convey a lot of information, focus and guidance can make the presentation of the story clearer and more prominent. It is mentioned in the video that the audience is more inclined to read a letter than a shelf of books, and the light guides the audience to explore the next place when the audience is stagnant.
Reasonable use of scenes, props, colors, lights, paths, and other elements of storytelling can make the audience have a more immersive experience where the audience can enjoy the fun of exploration. For commercial purposes, environmental storytelling is very suitable for games, especially decryption games, allowing the audience to feel the thrill of a more realistic experience.
Week 7
Young Women Sitting and Standing and Talking and Stuff (No, No, No)
April 21, 2015 2 hour performance for A Curious Blindness at the Miriam & Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery in NYC with performers Joiri Minaya, Victoria Udondian, and Ilana Harris-Babou.
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video and bicycle workstation, dimensions variable.
Installation for "Sick Time, Sleepy Time, Crip Time: Against Capitalism's Temporal Bullying," Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts Project Space, 2017
A curious blindness reflects a moment captured by eighteen early- to mid-career artists who engage with the complex climate of race and identity politics. The artists are influenced by ideas of portraiture, seriality, and the consumable that evoke the ways in which the body of color has been objectified and abbreviated through time. Several dark-skinned minority women wear helmets with screens projecting their eyes in videos of eyes lighter than their own skins, and the direction of their eyes is different from the actual. The viewer is not only the audience of the art but also a part of it, the final step in its artwork. None of the artist's artworks are presented in the traditional form of VR headsets, but rather the screens, the visual medium, are given shapes, colors, materials, or substantial meaning, thus combining installation art and VR. The artwork called ffffffffffffoooooooooooouuuuuuuuuuurrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr is also an example of this kind of combination. As the image shows, there is a contrast between the bicycle workstation and the saturated and distorted screen images, addressing the politics of health, disability, and care.
Italy's Invisible Cities
BBC ONE
https://scanlabprojects.co.uk/work/italys-invisible-cities/
Dream Life of Driverless Cars
New York Times Magazine
https://scanlabprojects.co.uk/work/dreamlife-of-driverless-cars/
Although ScanLAB is not as interesting and artistic compared to other VR works, I really appreciate the realistic scenes and countless details it builds in VR. Viewers can enjoy the documentary-like high quality, see the murals up close, look down on the entire estate, and even penetrate the walls to understand the structure of the buildings and wipe away the dust covering the floor with their hands.
In addition to the documentary VR project for the BBC, ScanLAB's Dream Life of Driverless Cars embodies the charm of a high-tech city through abstracted urban architecture and fluorescent lines. Background music and narration also help the audience to enter the scene, and sound effects that match the theme can immediately bring people into the world of the project.
Such VR projects are supported by advanced high-precision 3d scanning equipment, which unfortunately is not much of a reference for making our own VR art, but I as an audience member really enjoy being able to bring a VR headset and immerse myself in the experience and explore the unknown.
Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino
Is there a city that stood out, or that you found especially memorable? Why? Does any city remind you of a city you have lived in or visited, and if so, in what ways?
Trading city 2, Chloe, reminds me of Shanghai, the city where I grow up.
In Chloe, everyone is a stranger. When they see someone, people imagine conversations, caresses, and tears - but they never speak or look at each other. Marco Polo describes a scene in which several people are gathered together and something invisible runs through them. Other people arrive. When people eventually get together to take shelter from the rain or listen to music in the square, the inhabitants of Chloe seduce, meet, and revel in doing or saying nothing.
Due to the reform and opening up, Shanghai has taken the lead as a window of communication with the world and has actively developed faster than other cities in China. As a result, Shanghai also brought together talented people from all over the country, but most Shanghainese tended to keep social distance from others, which was a sharp contrast to other cities in China at the time where people are related to each other to some extent. Shanghai people tended not to get to know their neighbors, not to chat with pedestrians on the road, and to socialize only to satisfy the need for solitude at the moment, not to make friends. But this does not mean that Shanghai people are indifferent to each other, they quietly care about each other and give birth to a helping hand when you need it. People are restrained in their relationships with each other. While there is communication between people, working together, talking, and something flowing between them, an exchange of glances, like lines connecting one character to another, these lines are weak and fleeting, just like at Chole.