Literatuurmuseum
Prins Willem-Alexanderhof 5
2595 BE Den Haag
Netherlands
During the meeting at Saturday 13th of December 2014 at Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam four teams present their work they made for the project ‘Literature at the screen’. This program was supported by the cooperation between the Netherlands Literature Foundation (Nederlands Letterenfonds), Foundation for Stimulating Creative Industry (Stimulerings Fonds voor Creatieve industrie) and the research department of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam.
(source: Apvis.nl)
Aaron Pease reviews Manual DeLanda’s philosophy of the virtual.
‘Zonder Handen’ (No Hands) is an immersive 360° installation in which you can experience the philosophical poem ‘Zonder Handen’ written by Micha Hamel for and about the experience of virtual reality. Studio APVIS director Demian Albers visualized this poem in an Oculus Rift environment.
‘Zonder Handen’ is part of Literature on Screen. This is a program in which digital designers and writers jointly develop narrative productions for the tablet or smartphone and centers on the creative interaction between the author and the designer.
(Source: http://apvis.nl/zonder-handen/)
Het is niet ingewikkeldals we in woorden voelennoemen we het gedachten
En als we zonder woorden voelenheet het een gevoel
‘Zonder Handen’ – Micha Hamel
Paisley Livingston on Stanislaw Lem and the history and philosphy of Virtual Reality.
The technologies and speculations associated with “virtual reality” and cognate terms (such as “cyberspace”) have recently made it possible for scores of journalists and academics to develop variations on a favorite theme - the newness of the new, and more specifically, the newness of that new and wildly different world-historical epoch, era, or Zeitgeist into which we are supposedly entering (and on some accounts, have already entered) with the creation of powerful new machines of simulation. The innovative powers of the machines of virtual reality are so extensive, it would seem, that they are even supposed to be able to achieve the extraordinary feat of revitalizing that tired journalist genre, “gee-whiz” scientific reporting. “Gee whiz,” one can now read, “you just put on a data glove and don the head-mounted display helmet, and step right into a whole new world where the old reality - and even the tired, old-fashioned notion of reality as such - gets replaced by the non-existent reality simulated by the machine. You can fight battles and have sex with people who aren’t anywhere near you, or who never even existed. Why you can actually, I mean really, interact with an illusion!”
"Nightmares for Children" is a found-footage virtual reality installation with a fractional backbone and original soundscape created for Oculus Rift with touch. The viewer will be inmersed in 360 video with VR assets and 2D video overlays and will navigate through a series of dreamy horrors in different emotional registers using the intuitive Oculus touch interface. The piece allows for a very small child's voice and infant storytelling to sound fully, but at the same time is crafted as a mediattion on the imagery in children's dreams and what it might trigger in the adult imagination.
“Nightmares for Children” is a found-footage virtual reality installation with a fictional backbone and original soundscape created for Oculus Rift with touch. The viewer/reader will be immersed in 360 video with VR assets and 2D video as overlays and will navigate through a series of dreamy horrors in different emotional registers using the intuitive Oculus touch interface. The piece allows for a very small child’s voice and infant storytelling to sound fully, but at the same time is crafted as a meditation on the imagery in children’s dreams and what it might trigger in the adult imagination - the authors’ hands are apparent in the way the sometimes banal horror of the dreamscapes extends and escalates. “Nightmares for Children” also constitutes an e-lit experiment in the Rift guided by the premise that personal VR headsets enabling immersive electronic literature might constitute ideal dream machines. Tech requirements: we will bring a laptop and Oculus RIFT.
(Source: ELO 2017: Book of Abstracts and Catalogs)
VR novel for Oculus Rift
Sheila Carfenders, Doctor Mask & President Akimbo is a novel translated into virtual reality (for Oculus Rift) – a political fable of robots, sex work, hallucinogens and the consequences of power. The viewer is transported through mental hospitals, taxis, hotels and palaces mostly on rails, but with some space to explore the scenes in sandbox mode, enabling an encounter with hundreds of archival photographs and pencil sketches and found audio from across asia. The narrative – disturbing and comical and haunting and revelatory – is encountered through the spoken word of a single narrator.
Experience the troubling, bizarre and absurd life of Sheila Carfenders, a 22-year-old mental patient who is abducted by her abusive San Francisco psychiatrist, Doctor Mask. With the Oculus Virtual Reality system, go with Doctor Mask as he takes Sheila to an impoverished Asian country decaying from a violent insurgency. The Mask hopes to build his own experimental psychiatric institution after making deals with the corrupt regime’s delirious leader, President Akimbo.
Sheila’s fate?
Unexpected amid a coup.
The characters’ three-dimensional models are built on structural skeletons, and the game environment is undermined and rendered uncanny through the use of hundreds of documentary photographs from Ehrlich’s personal archives.
With Oculus, you can explore the labyrinth of Sheila’s struggle and innocence, her psychiatrist’s brutal behavioral techniques, and the realpolitick of an American-backed coup against a deranged dictator. All of the people — including Sheila Carfenders, Doctor Mask, President Akimbo and the story’s other characters — are derived from interviews, events, documents and composites of real individuals. With Oculus Rift, you can explore the labyrinth of Sheila’s struggle and innocence, her psychiatrist’s brutal behavioral techniques, and the realpolitick of an American-backed coup against a deranged dictator.
(Source: Artists' statement)
Built at the Augmented Reality Lab at York University under the direction of Caitlin Fisher
Written in Unity for use with Oculus RIFT glasses, Cardamom of the Dead is a literary VR environment - the user wanders through a virtual environment filled with a vast collection of things a narrator, heard in voice-over, has hoarded over years (decades? centuries?). The environment is filled with debris and stories and the piece is ultimately a meditation on collecting as madness, consoling practice and memory palace.
(Source: ELO 2014 Media Arts Show)
Within an enclosed darkened room, the image of Beyond Manzanar's 3-dimensional space is projected onto a large, wall-sized screen. The life-sized image fills your field of view and gives you a feeling of immersion within the virtual space. A joystick mounted on a pedestal in the middle of the room allows you to move your viewpoint at will through the virtual space. Speakers mounted on either side of the screen provide stereo sound. Although only one person at a time can control movement in the space, others can watch and share the experience. We have combined techniques of computer games and theater design to create a highly symbolic, often surreal environment with a poetic reality stronger than photorealism. The mountain panorama that defines the Manzanar site forms a constant backdrop for shifting layers of superimposed context. Open doors lead viewers through spaces that react to their presence, shifting between home and prison, between paradise and wasteland, to investigate Manzanar as a layering of contradictory and complementary images and emotions for two groups of immigrants. Archival photographs of Manzanar Internment Camp alternate with paradise gardens constructed from ancient Japanese scrolls and Persian miniature paintings; images of the immigrant American Dream alternate with media images of betrayal and hatred. Sound is also an important mechanism to set the emotional and cultural context: The constant moan of the desert wind or the cool burbling of water from a fountain; the scream of war jets or a woman singing a love song. The virtual space is sensitive to your presence, shifting context around you to change your emotional relationship to the space. If you follow an open road, barbed wire appears to block your path. If you enter a dark barrack you may find yourself in a pavilion overlooking a paradise garden - that disappears when you try to enter it, as if you suddenly awake from a dream.