Chantalla Pleiter, together with Jean-Pierre Rawie, created a virtual reality experience of the poem 'Aa-Kwartier' by the poet Jean-Pierre Rawie. The poem can be found on the colourful city letter card 'Leesbaar Groningen.'
Voor Het Grote Gebeuren maakt Chantalla Pleiter, met medewerking van de dichter zelf, een virtual reality bewerking van het gedicht ‘Aa-Kwartier’ van Jean-Pierre Rawie. Het gedicht heeft een plekje gekregen op de kleurrijke letterenkaart Leesbaar Groningen. In de vr-versie kunt u gedicht in woord en beeld aan den lijve ondervinden.
Het gedicht is een van de vele honderden citaten die een plek kregen op Leesbaar Groningen, de nieuwe letterenkaart van de provincie en stad Groningen die tijdens Het Grote Gebeuren wordt gepresenteerd.
Tenure Track is a postmodernist critique of 21st-century academia in the form of a simulation game. In the vein of satirical games like Cow Clicker—a product of “carpentry,” or a strategy for creating philosophical, creative work, according to its designer Ian Bogost—Tenure Track also borrows game mechanics from popular puzzle simulators like Papers, Please, merging the finite potentiality of a critical text with the lightheartedness and non-prescriptiveness of play. Additionally, the simulation game as a genre harkens back to philosophical toys of the 19th century, such as the thaumatrope, the purpose of which was demystification through wonderment. The proposed poster would include imagery from the game, as well as links to interactive components (gameplay footage, demos) and brief descriptions of the mechanics and concept of the game.
Developed in Unity for desktop and VR over the past year, Tenure Track visually consists of a 3D re-creation of a nondescript office, viewed from a first-person perspective, with every object in the space being manipulable. The goal of the game is to achieve tenure by completing research, grading papers, and communicating with students and administrators. Much of this “work” is mediated through a variety of simulated digital platforms, which are accessed via a desktop monitor and a mobile phone. The centering of platforms underscores the degree to which they are essential to what constitutes labor. Post-pandemic, this can be read as referencing a potentially obsolete “platform”: the physical office.
As the player performs a litany of menial tasks over the course of a series of seconds-long days, they are interrupted constantly by notifications and knocks at the door. Over time, this produces a simulacrum of the frantic yet mundane administrative role many modern-day academics find themselves “playing” as they strive for the promised land of tenure. The sequence of predefined yet somewhat open-ended steps in the tenure process lends itself to this kind of gamification, which resists the interpretation of a prescribed process as fair or logical. The many small but cumulatively important decisions players make imparts a feeling of decision fatigue common to most knowledge work, playing with the assumption many outside of academe have of the professoriate as belonging to an exceptional, noble profession. What is not known until the game’s conclusion is that, once a player reaches one of several possible “endings,” the days continue to loop continuously.
While the game rewards literacy of both games and academe by subverting the former and reifying the latter, arguably the most satisfying interactions are the ones that are, in reality, the most disruptive (dropping the mobile phone and cracking the screen) or least salient (disposing of empty beverage containers in a recycling bin). Those who misunderstand the tenure track job as a stairway to heaven, or even as fundamentally different from other types of white-collar jobs, stand to see it in an uncanny light.
As we approach the one-year anniversary of the first confinement measures in most countries, COVID-19 has been a defining factor of our lives through 2020 into 2021. Due to the pandemic, all our lives were drastically changed; not simply by the losses and inevitable pain that comes with the disease, but also by the way in which it completely shifted the way in which our lives were organized. Where activities were once separated between the “inside” and the “outside” there is now only the “offline” and the “online,” both confined within our own household. Work and education are done remotely when possible, and socializing has abruptly become a virtual experience. Even attempts at socializing “in real life” must always be monitored by strict rules of social distancing and the wearing of a mask, which are marked by an absence of physicality. As a way to cope with such a situation, people have found ways to transfer their social lives online. How many Americans have celebrated Thanksgiving or the Winter Holidays on Zoom with their families in 2020? As we moved into an online social space, I found it interesting to look around me and see the reaction of my fellow students, teachers, or friends. Some of them could hardly adapt to the sudden need for technology, which they had never been comfortable using. Others lamented the lack of genuine human interaction that came with meeting people by pure chance; in the Zoom era, all is scheduled, after all. These reactions struck me in different ways, as all I could see was my acquaintances suddenly walking into a lifestyle that I recognized as my own and describing it as a living hell.
In this paper I want to engage with the ways in which online interactions can provide an alternative to social contact, especially in terms of physicality. Specifically, I want to focus on how video games offer ways to circumvent the frustration of distance and virtuality in order to offer new approaches to thinking about physical interactions. This paper will be based in great part on my own experiences as an online gamer, interacting with friends living across the world, and having to find ways through gaming in which one could find intimacy, physical contact, and at times eroticism. My argument is that while all media can offer some form of erotic or intimate interaction with its content, gaming, and especially online gaming, can push those boundaries further through a process of incarnation and transposition of the self into an avatar. This paper starts with the ways in which a player can interact with non-player characters and find solace in the virtual intimacy provided by said characters. This paper will address how an online interface allows for a different physicality through the control of an avatar. Finally, I want to discuss the specificities of VR socializing when it comes to experiences of virtual physical interactions.
The Hollow Reach is a choice-based virtual reality (vr) experience built on becoming posthuman to overcome the trauma of emotional and physical loss. What at first appears to be an adventure game turns out to be an exploration of psychological and physical recovery, not a retreat from reality but a coming to terms with it. In this interactive puzzle game, virtual reality offers a space of recuperation through adaptation and prostheses. In this piece, the player progresses from the human to the post-human only by letting go of their notions of what is and is not under their control to encounter a life augmented and transformed by the digital.
Meet Me At The Station is a surreal and lyrical 10 minute experience for for 360 cinemas, domes, virtual reality headsets. A scientist is trapped in the future due to a time-travel accident. His only hope is to travel through dreams, but dreams can also turn into nightmares.
A literary virtual reality production by Studio ZZZAP based on a non-fiction work by Dutch-Ukrainian author Lisa Weeda about the MH17 plane crash in 2014.
ROZSYPNE is een literaire non-fictievertelling, gebaseerd op een werk van de Nederlands-Oekraïense schrijver Lisa Weeda. In ROZSYPNE brengt Studio ZZZAP je terug naar de zomer van 2014, het moment waarop het gewapende conflict stevig op gang kwam. Je stapt de wereld van de oude Nina binnen. Zij probeert zo goed en kwaad als het gaat haar dagelijks leven op de rit te houden. Nina vraagt je een moment mee te draaien in haar huishouden, aan de vooravond van de MH17-crash.
Het dorp Rozsypne is de plek waar Nina opgroeide, naar school ging, verliefd werd en haar eigen huis bouwde. Ze kent alle mensen uit het dorp, heeft haar dagelijkse route naar de lokale supermarkt en thuis zorgt ze voor de gewassen in haar tuin. ROZSYPNE is een literaire non-fictievertelling en is gebaseerd op INDEXEN VOOR VERWIJTBAARHEID (De Revisor, 2016): een kort werk van de Nederlands-Oekraïense schrijver Lisa Weeda die in 2016 een van de deelnemers was aan de schrijfresidentie van deBuren. Haar werk is een reactie op de soms eenzijdige, Westers georiënteerde verslaggeving rondom de MH17-crash en de huidige situatie in Oost-Oekraïne, waar vrij weinig aandacht voor is in Europa.
Voor de realisatie van ROZSYPNE werkte Studio ZZZAP samen met jonge Oekraïners, die het land als geen ander kennen. Het team reisde begin 2018 af naar het platteland rondom Kiev, waar zij de leefomgeving van lokale bewoners vastlegden en digitaal in kaart brachten. Het team gebruikte daarnaast materiaal van familieleden van Weeda, die in het oorlogsgebied wonen, en deed uitgebreid achtergrond- en beeldonderzoek. Tijdens de research ontdekten de makers ook dat de naam van het dorp Rozsypne in het Oekraïens verstrooid betekent; een vertaling die op meerdere niveaus van grote betekenis is in het verhaal.
De vier makers van Studio ZZZAP delen het sterke geloof en ervaring in cross-overproducties, waarin het verhaal centraal staat. Daarvoor zetten zij hun uiteenlopende expertises in. Voor de uiteindelijke installatie werkten zij met photogrammetry, motion capture en 3D sound design. ROZSYPNE kenmerkt zich als virtual reality-installatie door de ruimtelijke vorm: als deelnemer beweeg je vrij op een oppervlak van vier bij drie meter en kan je soms interageren met fysieke objecten. Het verhaal ontvouwt zich langzaam om je heen.
'C.a.p.e. Drop-Dog' puts you inside two short stories by Tonnus Oosterhoff: 'Drop' and 'Dog'. Through the VR-glasses you are transported to another time and space. While you walk around, the story devolops. The uninterupted process of watching, reading, listening, and walking gives the impression that you are in two different worlds at the same time. In 'Drop' you eavesdrop on a disturbing conversation about somebody you don't know. Or are they talking about you? In 'Dog' you are addressed by cats and dogs. Or are you one of them?
C.a.p.e. Drop-Dog plaatst je in het hart van twee kortverhalen: Drop en Dog. Door de VR-bril waan je je in een andere ruimte en tijd en terwijl je wandelt, ontwikkelt het verhaal zich. Het ononderbroken proces van kijken, lezen, luisteren en verplaatsen geeft het gevoel om in twee verschillende, maar parallelle werelden tegelijkertijd te zijn. Bij Drop vang je verontrustende gesprekken op over iemand die je niet kent. Maar is dat wel zo, hebben ze het niet over jou? In Dog spreken katten en honden met je. Of ben je een van hen?
This book introduces an archaeological approach to the study of media - one that sifts through the evidence to learn how media were written about, used, designed, preserved, and sometimes discarded. Edited by Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka, with contributions from internationally prominent scholars from Europe, North America, and Japan, the essays help us understand how the media that predate today’s interactive, digital forms were in their time contested, adopted and embedded in the everyday. Providing a broad overview of the many historical and theoretical facets of Media Archaeology as an emerging field, the book encourages discussion by presenting a full range of different voices. By revisiting ‘old’ or even ‘dead’ media, it provides a richer horizon for understanding ‘new’ media in their complex and often contradictory roles in contemporary society and culture.
This dissertation explores the relationships between literacy, technology, and bodies in the emerging media of Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR), and Mixed Reality (MR). In response to the recent, rapid emergence of new media forms, questions arise as to how and why we should prepare to compose in new digital media. To interrogate the newness accorded to new media composing, I historicize the literacy practices demanded by new media by examining digital texts, such as video games and software applications, alongside analogous “antiquated” media, such as dioramas and museum exhibits. Comparative textual analysis of analogous digital and non-digital VR, AR, and MR texts reveals new media and “antiquated” media utilize common characteristics of dimensionality, layering, and absence/presence, respectively. The establishment of shared traits demonstrates how media operate on a continuum of mutually held textual practices; despite their distinctive forms, new media texts do not represent either a hierarchical or linear progression of maturing development. Such an understanding aids composing in new VR, AR, and MR media by enabling composers to make fuller use of prior knowledge in a rapidly evolving new media environment, a finding significant both for educators and communicators. As these technologies mature, we will continue to compose both traditional and new forms of texts. As such, we need literacy theory that attends to both the traditional and the new and also is comprehensive enough to encompass future acts of composing in media yet to emerge.
Imagine your body literally immersed in a book. The letters of the alphabet, the punctuation marks have escaped the limits of the page. They seem to have an autonomous life, forming clouds all around you. Reacting to your amazed gaze, the letters find their order to form a sentence. You turn around, abstract shapes float: we don't know if they are images or objects. An omniscient voice is speaking to you. Everything gravitates with joy. Above, lines of code scroll like rain curtains: you are immersed in LIVING PAGES. LIVING PAGES is an original poem that is expressed at the same time as it is contemplated. It is a work of virtual reality based on unconscious interactivity. It is a new form that materializes, in real time, the mental images generated by the user and conveyed by words.
