Submerged VR Poetry, 2016
VR experience for Mobile VR
Three sequences of images are placed in a 3D environment centered on the Caribbean Mermaid ‘Riva Mumma’ and her world of water and mystery. Enveloped in this contemplative piece, the viewer sees text rising from the water and is prompted to interact with it in order to keep reading. Surrounded by the sounds of nature, this ephemeral audio-visual blend offers an immersive experience in the liquid and fantasy space of the screen.
Submerged is a poetic VR re-interpretation of my experimental single channel video from many sides (2016) commissioned single channel video with sound (10min.) for the Davidoff Limited Art Edition 2016
Words by Kylie Szymesko from her short story Mami Wata,‘A Matter of Depths’ coll. (2014), Canada
Unity 3D development: Ben Swinden & William-Alexandre Thibault, Canada
Original Video Cinematography: Ivan Herrera, Dominican Republic
Video post-production, editing and sound: Olivia Mc Gilchrist
Country of production: Dominican Republic + Canada (2016)
IMAGES
VIDEO LINK
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Artist Statement:
Visually and thematically, I’m looking at water and submersion as an immersive device on the threshold of contemplative experience and embodied interaction. I’m concerned with new forms of immersive visual storytelling and how they function for a creative expression that subverts the reality of racial, social and gender based categorization, classification and discrimination from non-Western spaces like the contemporary Caribbean and it’s global diaspora. I’m inspired by live performance, poetry and water/submersion as immersive platforms on the threshold of contemplative experience and embodied interaction, at the intersection of spaces for high art and popular entertainment. I’m drawing on traditional storytelling, YouTube comments, and video installations to design VR experiences and environments where the lines between user experience and co-creation are blurred. The Post colonial experience of dual, hybrid or mixed identities is considered here as a useful framework to examine the debates around the hegemony of a ‘western’ conception of the body, currently confronted with Virtual, Augmented and Mixed realities’ hybrid experiences of presence.
Biographical note:
Born in Jamaica (1981) to a French Mother and a Jamaican Father, we left the island when I was four and I returned to live and work there between 2011-2014. Since then, I’m exploring translocation and my mixed European-Caribbean cultural identity across the different spaces I live and work in. By juxtaposing parallel realities through photographs, video installations and VR, elements of the ‘exotic’ are re-appropriated, and remapped to evoke the complexity of hybrid identities in the ‘new world’. I completed my Master’s in Photography at the London College of Communication in 2010. In 2014-2015, I took Concordia’s Graduate Certificate in Design and Computation Arts. I am taking an Individualized PhD in Arts, Education and Immersive Technology at Concordia University, Montréal, Canada.
If you are interested in exhibiting or viewing this artistic VR experience, please send an email to us.
CATEGORIES