Interactive VR artwork
Skeleton Conductor XR Art
Premiere 2020
CONDUCTING YOUR OWN VISUAL AND SONIC WORLD
“I FELT LIKE A WIZARD FROM DISNEY’s FANTASIA”
“STEPPING INTO YOUR OWN PAINTING WAS AMAZING “
“IT WAS AN INSTRUMENT , ONLY YOU PLAY IT WITH YOUR BODY”
Skeleton Conductor XR Art is a movement based, single user XR art experience where the user is in a key position in the virtual creative exploration. The 6DoF VR enables a particular embodied situation where the real-time mapped gestures and movements of the user are the key ignitors and conductors of the experienced audiovisual feedback. The progression of the interactivity score offers complex sonic properties and visual sculpting to induce attentive physical engagement and the dramaturgical journey allows one to reflect on their aesthetic sensibilities. Skeleton Conductor emphasises the users felt experience and multi sensorial awareness and the sense of lived presence – it stimulates self-reflectivity through an open ended, improvisatory creative act.
The artwork has screened in various VR, film, media and art festivals and events:
Premiere at Altered festival, Chicago USA, Oct 2020 - Winner of Audience Awards
Finnish premiere, Helsinki XR Center, Nov 2020
2021: Side Step festival, Zodiak - Center for New Dance, FI; Moovy - festival, Köln GR; Altered festival, Chicago USA, Open City Documentary festival, London UK; Embrace festival, FI;
2022: Ateneum Modern Art Museum FI; Moovy -festival, Köln GR; Helsinki Dance House FI; Alt; ered festival, Chicago USA; Uniarts/Tutke; Kehä-festival, OuluFI
2023: FinFringe, Turku FI,
Upcomming in 2024: part of Virtual Art Touring program in 3-5 cultural venues in Finland.
The Skeleton Conductor XR Art is a 12-minute virtual artwork with two distinct scenes, experienced individually through a computer-based virtual device. The viewer/experiencer/spectator sees the virtual world through the VR head-mounted display from 1st person perspective and interacts with the world through moving handheld controllers and trackers attached to the feet. The 6DoF[1] VR allows the detection of body movement around the body sphere and in space.
The starting scene The Cave is a nod towards Plato’s Allegory of the Cave[2]. The scene starts from a black void, with few ‘drops’ coming towards you from the distance with a change of direction and slow evaporation after hitting an invisible ‘bubble like’-surface around the user. Upon reaching out and touching the surrounding surface, a ‘bubble’ inside which the user is located, the hands and feet release tonal sounds and emit swirls of particles. By moving in the environment user ‘paints’ the environment visible revealing the cave-like surroundings. The particle mass generated through the user’s movement has a unique swarming and gathering locomotive quality of its own, yet its colors and motion patterns are still effected by the spatiality and effort of the user’s movement.
The main soundscape in The Cave is organic and granulating sounds with a change of pitch and tone according to spatial location. Feet releases a low-pitched, drone-like sound mass with randomised subtle variations in tone and pitch. The environment holds additional hidden ‘sound pockets’ which reveal new sound dimensions in the space. The multiple sonic layers feed the perception and imaginary interpretation; the world of pluralities is revealed through dynamic variations of physicality. The main objective of this scene is to establish a sense of connection to the space and direct attention to the qualities of the interactive feedback loop. The elemental detachment of narratives, body representation, and gamified task-and-reward systemisations usual in VR may cause bewilderment in the user which is a key factor in recognising their authorship and sensitising perceptual awareness.
The following scene titled The Symphony is a wide and open scenery in which an undulating particle field spreads out to a far distance from about waist height. The particle mass is again responsive to the user’s movements; absorbent to hand controllers and diffusing from feet trackers. The slowly evolving particle landscape can be sliced, shaped, and scattered through movement and the modes of particle interaction intensify over the duration of the scene evolving towards the end enabling a throwing of particle clouds further out into space. The dominant sound is a string instrument emitting sound according to movement velocity, with a change in pitch according to partiality in the vertical plane and with a subtle change of scale on the horizontal plane. The overall soundscape is harmonic and symphonic in tone allowing chord formation through the activity of multiple trackers. Interactivity mapping becomes more complex and variant during the scene with additional movement-to-sound mapping parameters, allowing a full symphonic sound with variant tonal and ambient sonic layers playing simultaneously.
[1] Dof refers to degrees of freedom for the user in a particular VR device. The 6 dof Vr differs distinctly from 3dof VR, also referred to as 360° VR, by affording to track of the participant’s direction of body motion distinct from the direction of gaze and allowing freedom in spatial movement, within the parameters of a defined play area. The distinct qualities of VR are touched on in several papers and online articles e.g. Laurel, Brenda. “What is Virtual Reality?” Medium.com. https://medium.com/@blaurel/what-is-virtual-reality-77b876d829ba#.ipvf6s8t7.
[2] Plato’s Allegory of a Cave in “The Republic” dating back to B.C.E. 375 is one of the most well-known stories about how people acquire knowledge about the world, beauty, and justice.. The Allegory of the Cave uses the metaphor of prisoners chained in the dark to explain the difficulties of reaching and sustaining a just and intellectual spirit.