Artistic concept: Kata Mijatović
VR programming: Alexander Giesbrecht
Technical advisor: Marco Strobel
Sound: Katharina Bär
Post-production: LAVAlabs Moving Images
Project coordinator: Ivana Družetić
The interactive VR installation The Field was created in collaboration with artist Kata Mijatović and the project MARTA (Mixed Reality Kunst im öffetlichen Raum) at the University of Applied Sciences in Düsseldorf (Hochschule Düsseldorf, Faculty of Media).
The Field is a virtual version of the online project Archive of Dreams /www.arhivsnova.hr/, realized in 2013 as the central work of the exhibition Between Heaven and Earth (curated by Branko Franceschi for the 55th Venice Biennale). To date more than 2 200 dreams in different languages have been collected in the Archive - an online domain where the visitors can record their dreams in a textual form. Thanks to a wide global response, a sort of dream pool has been created where numerous introspective and hermetic dream inscriptions testify the ability of the human mind to unconsciously create worlds beyond the control of the conscious self. The starting point of the interactive VR installation The Field is to make visible this phenomenon of creating/constructing dream worlds. Dreams - which emerge as products of bio-virtual reality created by our unconscious - are here paradoxically placed in the field of the so-called ´real´, technically produced virtual reality created by the conscious mind.
The virtual scene is a ploughed, muddy field in a foggy and rainy autumn morning, above which billboards hover all the way to the horizon. They display selected dreams from the Archive that visitor can read while walking through the field. The perplexing sense of presence in this 'reified' virtual world of dreams (dual virtuality) is enhanced by the fact that the only thing originating from reality are actually the texts from the Archive of Dreams.
Mixed reality medium in which The Field is realized is often characterized by a fusion of sensory information that come from real and virtual surrounding simultaneously. In this case, it functions not only to evoke an exceptional physical experience, moreover, it takes the body on a journey through different dimensions, literally realizing the very symbolism of the project.
The 3-year MARTA project provides interdisciplinary collaboration, tools and production environment for creating art in mixed reality (combining virtual and augmented media, kinetic installations, projection mapping, motion capturing, etc.). The project is funded by the European Fund for Regional Development and EFRE.NRW and led by the Hochschule Düsseldorf (Mixed Reality and Visualization Team) in collaboration with companies tennagels and LAVAlabs Moving Images and the NRW Forum, one of the most important exhibition spaces for photography and digital and pop culture in the region. (https://mixedrealityart.de)
On view 4.11.2019. 10:00 a.m. - 6:00 p.m. & 5.1.2019. 10:00 a.m. - 2:00 p.m.
