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Mixed Reality Production
Artists taking the plunge into VR
Yang Yongliang
Yang Yongliang is a contemporary Chinese artist from Shanghai, who creates densely layered black and white photographic collages. These explore the impact of the rapid urbanisation and industrialisation that has swept through China over the past 30 years. He appropriates and subverts Classical Chinese landscape paintings.
From the New World, photo collage, 8000 x 4000mm
Before the Rain, single channel video, 2010
youtube
Eternal Landscape, VR experience, 2017
"When I first came across this technology, I felt that (the effect) in Chinese landscape paintings, which encourage the viewer to leave their mind and walk with the ancients, can be the same in VR. You lie down and let your mind [enter] into the image, traveling in the mountains in your mind. VR can do this. The idea is very similar to Chen Rong’s painting. I will try this. It allows you to live inside a Song Dynasty painting,” he explained.
ARTASIAPACIFIC - OUT OF THE PAST: PROFILE OF YANG YONGLIANG Michael Young 30 May 2018
I love Yang Yongliang's photo collages and videos. I think he employed a team of animators to create the 3D virtual environment of Eternal Landscape. It looks terrific until the deer wanders in, followed by a swarm of goats and a tiger, looking like they've lost their way from Uncanny Valley.
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Mixed Reality Production
Artists taking the plunge into VR
Hayden Fowler
Hayden Fowler's practice explores "the effects of alienation from the natural world on the human psyche and the potentials of non anthropocentric thought in the generation of transformed futures."
New World Order, single channel video, 2013
vimeo
He frequently constructs installations that are like stage sets, for instance the geodesic dome with a resident caveman and post apocalyptic surroundings in Dark Ecology, or the hand made forest of car-alarm roosters in New world Order, so it's not a huge leap to turn to creating virtual landscapes as stage sets for his VR works:
Together Again, (Dingo)
vimeo
Together Again, (Wolf), 2019
Real time performance and VR documentation, Garage Museum, Moscow.
For this performance, the artist shares a cage with the wolf/dingo, depending on whether the performance was in Moscow or Sydney. He wears a VR headset that recreates a virtual wilderness environment based on the local landscape. The wolf/dingo's harness has a tracker on it, making it possible to mirror the movements of the live animal in the virtual wilderness.
"Lamenting the loss of the ancient relationship with the wild, Fowler combines installation, performance and VR to create a work that aims to encourage discussion around trust, empathy, sensitivity, respect and equality between ahumans and animals." Vimeo descriptor.
There would be more equality if the dog and the audience were allowed to wear headsets too! It is a strange set-up, and not particularly engaging for the audience. The man and the dog stuck in a small cage all day is depressing, but probably intentionally so. Looking at the artist using a headset, with his eyes obscured, doesn't foster much of a connection with him. Instead of looking at a small monitor showing only a slice of what he can see, it would be a better experience for the viewer to put on a headset and have a look at the full 360 vista themselves.
Broken Romance, 2019. Kunstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin
vimeo
Headset recording of virtual reality layer.
"Broken Romance immerses the visitor in a hyper-real spatial construction. A large-format industrial steel structure supports a living field of grass and a fledgling forest, although every aspect of its survival feels precarious in the high artifice of this situation.
Accompanying this, a virtual reality overlay transports the viewer to another version of the dystopian landscape - where dust swirls in an apparent vacuum above freshly cut stumps and a bare uprooted tree hovers over the space, radiating loss. An endless flight of white swans passes through this assumed end-time scenario, disappearing towards a murky horizon where the complete nothingness of destruction appears to begin." (Artereal Gallery write-up of Berlin Show, 2019)
This is more successful than Together Again because it is the audience who sees the scenario first hand. The swans are clunky and not very realistic in their movements, which detracts from the effect.
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