Oral histories in VR, deep learning, and bike riding through a virtual world
A weekly digest charting developments across live performance, technology, and the emerging Metaverse
New Forms and Audiences
Secret Garden by Stephanie Dinkins at Sundance Film Festival 2021
Secret Garden is an immersive web and VR experience in which audiences wander through a spatialized floral estate and encounter oral histories spanning generations of Black women. The work will be presented as a part of the 2021 Sundance Film Festival New Frontier web platform together with ONX Studio in New York from January 29 - February 3.
Tech and the Metaverse
DALL·E: Creating Images from Text
A few weeks ago we highlighted the evolution of AI as a co-creator. DALL·E brings this even further. This neural network is an extension of GPT-3 and offers intriguing possibilities for generating images from only text descriptions.
David Baszucki of Roblox, who we've highlighted in previous posts, discusses the Metaverse as a human co-experience utility and how 2021 will usher in virtual worlds for not just gaming but for entertainment, education, and work. Similarly, Jonathan Vlassopulos, Global Head Of Music at Roblox, says that virtual concerts will change the way fans engage with music.
Entangled Histories
The Legible City by Jeffrey Shaw (1989)
This week we're looking back to Jeffrey Shaw's 1989 The Legible City, an exhilarating experience combining the physical effort of cycling with a virtual navigable environment. Visitors rode a stationary bicycle through a simulated representation of a city that was constituted by computer-generated three-dimensional letters that formed words and sentences along the sides of the streets. Using the ground plans of actual cities—Manhattan, Amsterdam and Karlsruhe—the existing architecture of these cities was completely replaced by textual formations written and compiled by Dirk Groeneveld (from Jeffrey Shaw: Legible City, 02-11-2015, Archive of Digital Art).
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Part aggregator, part independent journal, Scenospace delivers a digest charting developments across live performance, technology, and the Metaverse. Scenospace is delivered every week to your inbox.