In Far inside, the visitor experiences life with schizophrenia. In this spatial experience you feel the lost of control on reality. The original interviews with Ton are the red line in this installation to give an impression of reality through his eyes. Writer Karin Anema describes how Ton battles his psychoses to get his life together in her book ‘ Today I will buy all colours’.
De belevingswereld van iemand in een psychose is nauwelijks invoelbaar; ook niet voor degenen die elke dag met ze werken. Tijdens deze Virtual Reality workshop ervaar je de beangstigende denkbeelden, visuele hallucinaties, en de impact op het leven van iemand die langdurig psychotisch is geweest. Het is tegelijkertijd een illustratie van controleverlies en angst.
“I am Ton. My whole life I searched for a true connection with somebodyto share my thoughts and feelings. I’ve had psychoses, which manifestedthemselves visually in fears and delusions. After this, a second periodcame which opened an unconsciously reservoir filled with an endlessflood of all kind of data, names and places. The psychoses repeated themselves.In contact with other, there still seem to be a gap between them and me.
It took more than thirty years to bring outside and inside closer together.I took controle of my fears by painting and ordening. An outsider mightnotice some oddity but I am capable of living a normal life, despite the social isolation.”
Standalone artistic VR-installation that entails a 10 minute immersive experience for the Oculus Quest and Vive Focus Plus. It consists of drie chapters which each have their own interactive form.
Standalone artistieke VR-installatie van rond de 10 minuten voor de Oculus Quest en Vive Focus Plus, die uit drie hoofdstukken bestaat, welke elk hun eigen interactievorm hebben.
“De woorden beginnen langzaam, als wingerds, uit het lichaam los te kronkelen en te zweven door de ruimte. De letterslierten maken zich los, en vormen een wiegende ring van zinnen en zinsfragmenten die gaandeweg enige samenhang vertonen. Door deze woorden vast te pakken, kun je een verhaallijn activeren. De ruimte transformeert naar gelang de inhoud van de woorden die je hoort op je hoofdtelefoon.”
Standalone artistieke VR-installatie van rond de 10 minuten voor de Oculus Quest en Vive Focus Plus, die uit drie hoofdstukken bestaat, welke elk hun eigen interactievorm hebben. Samenwerking met dichter Micha Hamel, met wie reeds twee vergelijkbare installaties succesvol zijn geproduceerd.
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
Everyone at this party is Dead/Cardamom of the Dead is one of the first lyric literary works for Oculus Rift. It is a complete but expanding work (Cardamom of the Dead is the larger suite of stories) containing about 30 small narrative worlds, explored in a sandbox. You enter the piece standing at the edge of a island and in the middle of a soundscape of a party taking place, with guests being named: these were the guests of my 21st birthday and they are now all dead. What follows is a fictionalized narrative, at times semi-autobiographical, at other times entirely made-up. You are urged to explore houses and stones and artefacts spread across the terrain of the island at skewed scales - like a dreamscape. Addressable objects are signalled by tear-shaped signposting and will propel you into a different environments in order to access and bring to light three longer narratives of the dead woven through the work: 1) a story of a sudden illness and a meditation on euthanasia and family stories on this theme; 2) a coming-of-age story of sex relating to a murder; and 3) a meta-theme of collecting - objects, memories, digital artefacts - as a consoling practice: most of the images and soundscapes here are from my family archives. (Source: http://collection.eliterature.org/3/work.html?work=everyone-at-this-par…)
There are many immersive e-lit works that require more than the affordances provided by a screen and a keyboard to experience. These get displayed rarely and even when they do get shown, they are often shown poorly, either due to a lack of facilities (CAVES are rare and expensive), lack of curation and context (a series of random technology demos does not an exhibition make), limited audience (4 at a time in a CAVE or one at a time with an HMD means that the number of people who can experience the piece is limited), rushed experience (when cramming 8 demos into a 4 hour slot with 5 pieces each most people spend more time waiting around in the dark while someone furiously clatters away at a command line trying to get the piece to launch than actually experiencing them). There are many works in this category (Rettberg/Coover’s recent works at EVL’s CAVE 2, years of output from Brown University’s CaveWriting program, various spin off projects from that which happened at University of Louisiana Lafayette/LITE 3D, some of the output of Manifest, AR members such as Patrick Lichty, Jeremy Hight, myself, etc.) I wish to show them at ELO in Bergen, as many of these works have been rarely seen in person at all, much less outside the USA, and they don’t translate well to traditional documentation techniques. (Holding a camera over someone’s shoulder while they wave their hands at blurry double images and then writing a paper that says “No really, it’s awesome in person. Trust me” seems to still be the state of the art.)
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)
