Benjamin Busch
Scanning the Horizon: An Immersive Archive, 2022
VR experience for Valve Index Kit (native) and HTC Vive Pro 2 with Valve Index Controllers
Queer spaces arise out of an urgent need for physical places that go beyond the dominant cis-heterosexual mode of spatial production. These places represent both a negation and an opening: they are spaces of necessity, of refuge, but they are also places for utopian projection, for performing how life could be and how, in many ways, it already is. Historically, these bars, clubs, cafés, cinemas, and community centers have been overlooked as important parts of a common cultural heritage. Therefore, the memory of many of those that no longer exist today is only fragmentary through archival materials. With his interactive VR installation, Scanning the Horizon: An Immersive Archive (2022), Benjamin Busch maps out spaces significant to Berlin’s various queer communities. Since 2021, he has visited more than thirty spaces and scanned them using the digital imaging technique of spatial LiDAR scans. The three-dimensional point cloud VR maps of legendary bars like Ficken 3000, the party series Gayhane at SO36, and cultural institutions such as Kino Moviemento and Sonntags-Club, are enhanced with field recordings and audio interviews with their operators, alluding to the many untold stories to which these spaces are home.
Part I, 2022, with Ficken 3000, SO36 × Gayhane, and Sonntags-Club
Part II, 2023, with Kino Moviemento × XPOSED × Pornfilmfestival
Duration: variable (10 – 30 min)
6DOF interactive VR Roomscale.
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VIDEO LINK
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Benjamin Busch (*1987) is a US-American visual artist living in Berlin. First trained as an architect, he received his M.A. in Spatial Strategies in 2017 from the Weissensee Academy of Art, Berlin. His artistic practice centers on spatial production and engages multiple formats, including VR, 3D scanning, video, photography, installation and sculpture. He draws from a classical training in architecture to engage, from a queer perspective, the social production of space as a convergence of its perceived, conceived and lived modalities. He was a 2021–22 participant of BPA// Berlin program for artists, and from 2018 to 2022 he co-directed the artistic project space The Institute for Endotic Research (TIER). His artwork and writing have appeared in artist monographs, edited volumes, journals and magazines, and he has exhibited in Germany and internationally.
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