Event
VRE22 – Virtual Reality Experience – Extended Edition
Virtual Reality Experience (VRE) is an international festival of interactive and immersive digital arts conceived and curated by Mariangela Matarozzo.
The fourth edition finds in MEET the ideal place to present the 2022 programme: a selection of 20 works from 13 countries ranging from VR Cinema, VR Exhibitions, AR installations to all those works created by artists experimenting with new digital languages and immersive technologies for the realisation of their artistic projects. An overview of the most current and “inspiring” works on the international XR scene and a focus on young Italian talents are the focus of this edition.
VRE starts in Milan and spreads across Italy thanks to the collaboration with universities and cultural institutions. Bologna, Potenza and Palermo are cities where the exhibition of works is present.
The exhibition will be open until 30 October.
The Selection
An Domhan
By Gaëtan Le Coarer
France, 2021 (running time: 3’ – 15’)
MIXED REALITY IMMERSIVE EXPERIENCE
An Domhan is an XR experience, mixing virtual and augmented reality through the adaptation of an Irish Celtic legend entitled The Tragic Death of the Tuireann Children. Users embody the main characters of the legend. In a black and white, contrasting and abstract universe, users are immersed in a quest combining revenge and redemption. The augmented reality user has the power to interfere with virtual reality.
Diagnosia
By Mengtai Zhang, Lemon Guo
USA, 2021 (running time: 33’)
VR IMMERSIVE EXPERIENCE
Diagnosia portrays Mengtai’s memories of being incarcerated in a military-operated Internet addiction camp in Beijing in 2007, where internet addiction and other youth issues were treated as a severe mental disorder with sometimes violent means. The work discusses how societies can create or manifest pathologies as a tool for social control.
Cosmic-Atomic
By Christopher Boulton
USA, 2022 (running time: 10’)
VR IMMERSIVE EXPERIENCE
Cosmic-Atomic synchronizes the short film Powers of Ten with its ancestors/descendants, placing the viewer within a 360 degree kaleidoscopic ring of mirrored ascent/descent. The Artwork compresses the sixty years of scientific imagination that preceded/followed Eames’ vision and invites you to feel them all at once.
I and Thou
By Martin Romeo
ITA, 2022 (running time: 3’)
VR IMMERSIVE EXPERIENCE
The artwork explores the connection between man and artificial intelligence, on the abandoning of the world of experience in favor of relationships. “Thou” is defined without limits, it is abstract, it is compared to a god that we can find in virtual reality because of its infinitive creative potential.
Ramondino’s Apologue Extended Reality Film
By Matilde de Feo
ITA, 2021 (running time: 7’)
AR EXPERIENCE
Ramondino’s Apologue is an animated portrait in augmented reality dedicated to the Neapolitan writer Fabrizia Ramondino and to the universal themes dear to her: motherhood, sea, island, home. Opera is the second chapter of Napoli Tre di Tre, a cross-media trilogy designed to tell the story of the metropolitan city of Naples.
Gold Environment
By Chiara Passa
ITA, 2021 (running time: variable)
AR EXPERIENCE
Gold Environment recreates an ontological vision of the place by speculating on human perception, where the machine creates a generative object-oriented gold texture in continuous transformation and develops all around the viewer. Get ready to enter a hybrid world, another dimension but simultaneous to the IRL one!
Cosmogonic
By Pawel Szarzynski
POL, 2022 (running time: 8’)
VR IMMERSIVE EXPERIENCE
Cosmogonic is the first VR experience inspired by the Polish science-fiction writer Stanisław Lem—known for investigating humanity and social justice through visions of faraway planets and mechanical beings of Actinuria. An adaptation of a 1965 short story by Lem, Cosmogonic speaks to today’s world, where populism and disinformation threaten democracy.
On the morning you wake (to the end of the world)
By Mike Brett, Arnaud Colinart, Steve Jamison, Pierre Zandrowicz
FRA, UK, USA, 2022 (running time: 42’)
VR IMMERSIVE EXPERIENCE
On a regular Saturday morning in January 2018, as Hawaiian citizens went about their daily routines, the entire state population received an SMS from the Hawaii Emergency Management Agency, which read: BALLISTIC MISSILE THREAT INBOUND TO HAWAII. SEEK IMMEDIATE SHELTER. THIS IS NOT A DRILL. As cellular communication networks collapsed and panic took hold of the population, 1.4m people came to understand the real nuclear threat.
Childhood Revisited
By Hsin-Chien Huang
TWN, 2021 (running time: 10’)
VR IMMERSIVE EXPERIENCE
The VR short film Childhood Revisited inspired by an old photograph of the Hakka village Wugoshuei in Wanluan, Pingtung reconstruct the scenes of everyday life in the past through the latest virtual reality technology to allow the audience to get a glimpse of the environment, buildings, landforms, natural landscapes at that time.
Madame Pirate Becoming a Legend
By Morgan Ommer, Dan-Chi Huang
TWN, 2021 (running time: 15’)
VR IMMERSIVE EXPERIENCE
A grandma narrates an extraordinary bedtime story to her granddaughter. The untold story of Cheng I Sao, the greatest pirate of all times. In a lawless world, overrun by roving ships and ruthless men, a girl propels herself from a life of forced prostitution, to command the largest and most successful pirate fleet in world history.
The Starry Sand Beach
By Nina Barbier, Hsin-Chien Huang
FRA, 2021 (running time: 15’)
VR IMMERSIVE EXPERIENCE
This Starry Sand is called Baculogypsina sphaerulata, a particular species of Foraminifera, and is the protagonist of a local legend about the North Star, the Southern Cross and a mythical sea serpent… The experience is divided into three parts: the legend, the underwater forest and the exploration of the Earth’s ancient geological memory, back to the birth of the foraminifera 400 million years ago.
Dragzina
By Nikita Shokhov
USA/RUS, 2021 (running time: 10’)
AR
Dragzina is a holographic queer performance. The scene shows eight drag and queer artists, thinkers, and activists from Moscow who express their identity in spectacular creative practices. Wearing exotic self-designed costumes, shoes, and hairdos, they dance, joke, and tell us their stories. The LGBTQIA+ community is often disoriented within heteronormative spaces, and this work reverses that dichotomy by disorienting the audience.
When The Heart Tightens
By Lea Dedola
FRA, 2022 (running time: 8’)
VR IMMERSIVE EXPERIENCE
The player wakes up in a house of particles inside which he will relive his most significant memories. The artistic research will concern the creation of emotional environments in “3D pointillism”, a visual style will adapt precisely to the cardiac variations, because it allows us to “dissolve” the figurative elements into dots which will then re-materialize into other figurative forms.
Lustration VR – Series 1
By Ryan Griffen
AUS, 2022 (running time: 28’, 4×7’)
VR IMMERSIVE EXPERIENCE
Lustration is a 4 part multi-strand animated series following a group of characters whose stories are mysteriously intertwined both in the real world and afterlife. As these characters’ stories unfold and intersect, we discover the lengths that some will go to in the name of love while uncovering a conspiracy so vast it has affected every facet of our existence… and the next.
Theatrum Radix
By Marlene Bart
DEU, 2022 (running time: 10’)
VR IMMERSIVE EXPERIENCE
Theatrum Radix is a transdisciplinary virtual reality project that stimulates a transdisciplinary, surreal dialogue on the role of objects in scientific and artistic discourse by considering both their historical connection and contemporary perspectives on encyclopaedic knowledge architectures and the presentation of natural and artistic artefacts.
Repetition Redundancies
By Mohsen Hazrati
IRN, 2021 (running time: 30’)
VR IMMERSIVE EXPERIENCE
Repetition Redundancies is a work in Virtual Reality that immerses the viewer in a visionary cinematic flow. Immersive environments follow one another, creating a multidimensional experience that questions the ambiguity of language and our interpretation of the world. In Repetition Redundancies each immersive environment represents a unique point of view, a fragment that describes the whole.
Star-Stuff: a way for the universe to know itself
By John Desnoyers-Stewart
CAN, 2021 (running time: 8’)
VR IMMERSIVE EXPERIENCE
This hybrid VR artwork brings two people together remotely with the aim to give users a new perspective on themselves, humanity, and the Universe free of superficial characteristics that divide and bias us. Floating in space, your hands are transformed into a myriad of constellations while stars emanate from your heart, orbiting your body in a mesmerizing cosmic dance.
Webby’s Wonder World
By Nataliya Velykanova
FRA, 2022 (running time: 16:40’)
VR IMMERSIVE EXPERIENCE
Webby’s Wonder World (WWW) is an artistic journey into the eccentric world of the Web: an immersive and fun video game-like experience for newbies and young generations, showing the positive aspects of the web but also its dark sides. It is a conversation about the impact of our digital activities on our offline lives that will hopefully trigger a greater public awareness around ethical issues on the internet and the future metaverse.
Goliath: Playing with Reality
By Barry Gene Murphy, May Abdalla
UK, FRA, 2021 (running time: 25’)
VR IMMERSIVE EXPERIENCE
Goliath: Playing with Reality follows the true story of a man with schizophrenia. He is taken into a psychiatric hospital where he spends several years mostly in isolation. On his release, he finds connection through playing online multiplayer computer games. Combining candid conversations, mesmerising animations and tactile interactions, enter Goliath’s world where you slip between real and unreal worlds.
Eva & Eva
By Alessandro Asciutto
ITA, 2021 (running time: 10’)
VR IMMERSIVE EXPERIENCE
Eva & Eva is an ode to nature, femininity and life inspired by the biblical myth of Adam & Eve. The story explores the themes of original sin, dualism, sorority and women empowerment. The purpose is also to question the original symbol of Eve as the first sinner and temptress of evil. The story of this VR project reinterprets the myth of Genesis by featuring original scenes with new contemporary notes.
Surfacing
By Rossella Schillaci
ITA, 2020 (running time: 20’)
VR IMMERSIVE EXPERIENCE
Surfacing immerses the viewer in the daily lives of mothers and children living in prisons and correctional institutions through a magical journey from the iconic Panopticon control system to the newest soft-care institutions. The protagonists tell – in a profound and poetic way – stories of pain but also resilience and hope.
