Immersive film festival, art-making and AI, and proto-VR from 1975
A weekly digest charting developments across live performance, technology, and the emerging Metaverse
New Forms and Audiences
There's still a couple days left to visit Sundance Festival's New Frontier platform. The program showcases 14 VR and new media projects all housed in a custom-built immersive, interactive environment. Performances include 7 Sounds, an immersive live-streamed audio-video work by Sam Green exploring the universal influence of sound; and Tinker, a live unscripted performance inside a fictional workshop by Lou Ward.
This online panel event organized by the Creative AI Lab and NYU Digital Theory H-Lab asked: what new aspects does the technical framework of machine learning bring to art-making? And how can artists contribute to new thinking around AI research and development? A comprehensive reader that brings together writing by the panelists including Leif Weatherby, Nora Khan, Joanna Zylinska and Murad Khan can be found here.
Entangled Histories
Myron Krueger, Videoplace (1975)
This week we’re looking back to Videoplace, a two-way installation shown at the Milwaukee Art Museum in 1975 and funded by the National Endowment for the Arts. Installed between two separated rooms, the work used projectors, video cameras, special purpose hardware, and onscreen silhouettes of participants to create an interactive environment. Participants encountered their own image projected onto a screen in front of them, as well as the projection of other participants in a second room, and vice versa.
They could move their image around on the screen by moving themselves physically in the space and could resize, rotate, and change the color of their image and the other participant’s image, as well as interact with virtually represented objects. The most important aspect of Videoplace was the back and forth response that the work set up in discontinuous space, an expressive co-presence and sharing between strangers.
Videoplace serves an important early prototype of what would eventually be called virtual reality and sets the tone for the emergence of interactive art and a thinking about artistic practice in relation to the Metaverse.
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Part aggregator, part independent journal, Scenospace is a weekly digest charting developments across live performance, technology, and the Metaverse. Scenospace is delivered every week to your inbox.