More you might like
Ephémère (1998) - Char Davies - 16 min.
(from article ‘An Intense Dose of Virtual Reality’)
“Once again, Char Davies is leaving people speechless. Visitors to ‘Ephémère,’ Davies’s new work of virtual-reality art, exit the installation unable to communicate, as if they had been in another world. Which, in a way, they were. ‘People were being quite emotionally overcome,’ Davies said in a telephone interview a few days after the work’s June 26 premiere at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, ‘but I don’t really have anybody’s response because none of them could talk.’ As further evidence of Davies’s power to create a computer-generated environment that is as intensely involving as it is aesthetically effective, visitors are reporting that their 15 minutes in ‘Ephémère’ seem to pass in two or three, even though they must wear a clunky headset to be plunged into the simulated 3-D cosmos.
Davies, who is based in Montreal, is among the few artists working in virtual reality, a medium usually found in theme parks and game arcades, where paying customers can help defray the hefty development costs and low-tech museum executives don’t have to sweat over complex equipment. At its best, VR is an immersive experience that momentarily replaces one’s surroundings and can give a heightened sense of consciousness; conversely, it can feel like a gimmick that will never transcend its inherent artificiality.
Feminist and queer-or estranged-politics in digital environments use this meeting of a collectivity of media (by definition multimedia) to shock us, as a means of social critique and commentary, and to engage us in conversation. Using the mainstream media’s tools against itself, feminist Virtual Realty artists Charlotte Davies and Brenda Laurel and Rachel Strickland incorporate everyday sensations and make them strange and new through startling juxtapositions that affect us on the level of sensation. This is a synaesthesia so tactile that it stings the eyes, ears and mind simultaneously. Situated knowledges like these are Donna Haraway’s call for a feminist ‘embodied objectivity’ (189) that allows for a ‘particular and specific embodiment’ with a physically grounded perspective providing truer insights (190). To this end, Laurel and Strickland and Davies all set out to create exploratory environments that alter the way we inhabit our physical bodies.”
“I expect the use of drugs along with VR to radically increase,” virtual reality expert and investor Peter Rothman told me. “The combination of psychoactive substances and particularly cannabis with VR seemingly is a match made in heaven,” he wrote in an article titled “Yes You Should Get High Before Using VR” for H+ Magazine.
In fact virtual reality and psychedelics have been intertwined from the beginning: Mark Pesce actually created the original Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML) while tripping on LSD, as he describes in a 1999 interview with the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, MAPS. (This isn’t a rarity; the role of mind-expanding drugs in problem solving and early Silicon Valley inventions is well-documented. Even Steve Jobs famously described LSD as one of the most important things he did in his life.)
Usually the comparison is made by describing VR as a sort of electronic LSD, an alternate way of expanding your consciousness. During the cyberdelics era—where cyberspace, psychedelics and rave culture coalesced near the end of the 20th century—hippie counterculture icon and psychedelics advocate Tim Leary famously called VR “the LSD of the 1990s,” a comparison the tech has yet to shake, for better or worse.
We also hear a lot about VR’s therapeutic potential, including for treating drug addiction, and a 2013 study looked at whether certain compounds could augment virtual reality psychotherapy for treating PTSD and found that chemically-enhanced participants showed greater improvement in PTSD symptoms and treatments for sleep, depression, and anger expression.”
Google is significantly stepping up secretive efforts in the potentially lucrative virtual reality arena.
Halocline.Systems Vol. 0: The Demo
Game Outline:
Halocline.Systems (currently in development) is a point-and-click/choose your own adventure/FMV sandbox game with a ‘post-humanity,’ Utopian theme set during a distant, ambiguous future. It is equal parts a virtual-vignette exploratory digital art gallery as it is a ‘Rites of Post-Reality Passage,’ prepared to help guide those who may perhaps find themselves lost, confused, and overwhelmed during this dawning ‘Age of Exponential E-Awareness.’
It is a world designed to generate and sustain a collection of dreams experienced by a new evolving (club) culture, and many of the most emergent quantitative pathways have still remained out-of-phase with the cycle…. So take this dive through the depths of pure endless digital serenity as Halocline.Systems expands its harmonious horizons, pouring from their world, to YOURS. Expect, and immerse oneself, Vol 0.-III. (each released subsequently by year, starting 2015 with Vol 0.: The Demo), and any further updates, information, and game concepts/inspirations/*virtual-vibes* will be posted here on PostHumanWanderings. All interests, support, and networking of any (*positive!*) kind are greatly appreciated. I hope we all can make our (virtual) dreams come true for the majority of our waking lives. The phase awaits for us all.
Interests/inspirations include: transhumanism, metaphysics, virtual reality, eastern mythology, infinity, abstract computer graphics, Phantasy Star series, the nexus, post-humanity, future architecture, modern interiors, self-awareness, vaporwave, Sega Saturn, Sega Dreamcast, nonlinear concepts, space colonies, tech documentaries, visual novel games, the Kabbalah, algorithms, DS9, augmented reality, new age culture, ambient music, ambient gaming, video game music, playlists/mixes, video art, trance, techno, Space Channel 5, 90’s club culture, 80’s & 90’s anime, girl power, cyberpunk, quantum physics, hotels, Japan, utopia, pavilions, dreams, DMT, hypnagogia, cryogenics, digital after lives, future fashion, PSX, robots, cyborgs, future love, noosphere, demoscene, FMV gaming, PC Engine, SNES RPG’s, and 共感覚.
e n j o y f r e e d e m o h e r e:
PC, MAC + Linux compatibility
4GB
07/31/15
m u s i c:
07/31/15
k e e p w a n d e r i n’
A Silent Virtual Reality Review : Oculus Rift Demo - Sightline
view as part of ‘Echo:Visions Through The NEXUS’ playlist
“one moment you might find yourself next to an unfolding (?) dream
the next second, you are in a vast forest….”
She says that the platform is “almost more intimate than real life” and finds it exciting in general, citing its “crazy panoramic” abilities.
Life 2.0 - Trailer | OWN Documentary Club | Oprah Winfrey Network
“Life 2.0 follows a group of people whose lives are dramatically transformed by the virtual world Second Life. They enter a new reality, whose inhabitants assume alternate personas in the form of avatars - digital alter egos that can be sculpted and manipulated to the heart’s desire. The film is an intimate, character-based drama about people who look to a virtual world in search of something they are missing in their real lives.”
Full Movie HERE
Google Earth VR — Bringing the whole wide world to virtual reality
https://vr.google.com/earth
Welcome To Mixed Reality
“2015 is going to be remembered as the year we entered an entirely new world, a world today known as Mixed Reality.
What is Mixed Reality? In short, Mixed Reality is the world which we now inhabit where real and virtual objects co-exist and can causally influence each other. In Mixed Reality persistent virtual objects can be created, seen, and manipulated and they exist and are perceived as integrated with the real world.
Together with the Internet of Things where environmental objects embed computational elements, sensors, and connectivity, Mixed Reality will radically alter the way we interact with and think about the world.
Reality as we know it just ended.” (read more)
Osmose (1995) - Char Davies - 16 min.
“Real-time video capture of immersive environment ‘Osmose’, during a fly-through performance at the Musée d’art contemporain, Montréal, August 1995.“