Ghost Weight Experience, 2021
VR experience for Oculus Rift
Exploring ideas around death, memorialization and photography, this interactive VR experience has been created in collaboration with composer Isa Suarez, writer Veronica B and VR developer Alejandro Escobar. (With actors Jon Lane, Elizabeth Green, Salia Samai- Chow & Nathan Osgood kindly lending their voices). Artz’ focus is on the poetic aspects of our human rituals for remembering and the old- and new-world processes that allow us to retain our connections with the departed. She is intrigued by the fact there is still something of the old belief ‘the camera steals your soul’ about portrait practices; the sense of having been ‘captured.’ From Victorian memento mori to the aspirational family studio portrait and the endless proliferation of smart-phone selfies, images of people continue to exist, long after they are gone. Developed from a previous 2018 installation ‘Ghost Weight’, the work references a range of photographic settings through history, offering new perspectives on and details of its protagonists – a motley vintage group originally immortalised in found photos. The viewer is invited to participate in a playful interactive process, designed as if to enable the possibility of entering a ‘bardo’ or afterlife state as a living person, and thereby achieving what Artz calls ‘ghost weight.’ As operator of the Soulgrapher Animator, which also incorporates a Graflex camera and flash, one can engage with the artist’s digitally altered portraits in a three-room, contemporary virtual setting. (Excerpts Rebecca Geldard for Coleman Project Space).
Versions:
Duration: approx. 12 minutes, three different rooms each visit takes approx. 12 minutes.
Room scale: 2m x 2m, seated on swivel chair for 360 immersions, interactive
360 video VR version: Available via the Radiance VR App:
Credits:
Solo Exhibition Coleman Project Space London, May 2021
Supported by an Arts Council England Lottery grant
IMAGES
VIDEO LINK
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Andrea is a German/ British artist, photographer, and creator of virtual worlds, with an MFA from the University of Leeds and based in London. Her work has emerged out of photography’s expanded field and incorporates site-specific installations, photography, drawing, print, video, and immersive realities. Her recent virtual reality works Ghost Weight Experience (2021) and The Forest of Query (2019) has led to exiting collaborations with writers, composers, and digital artists to bring her Origami-like folded photographic portraits to life in the virtual world. The interactive VR experiences use immersive story - telling, sound and animation to recreate the photographic image in a contemporary setting.
Awards include a commission for Grain Projects, 2020; Arts Council England Lottery grant, 2020; Mac Dowell Colony Fellowship Award and residency at Peterborough, NH, USA, 2018; as well as Ecce and ACE grants. Solo exhibitions at Coleman Project Space, London, 2021; Foyer Gallery, School of Design, University of Leeds, 2019; Collections: Museum of London; Charles Dickens Museum; MFAH Houston, USA and Museum Kunst & Gewerbe, Hamburg.
360 video VR version: Available via the Radiance VR App:
If you are interested in exhibiting or viewing this artistic VR experience, please send an email to us.
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