This week, as part of a new series, we present a list of selected contemporary artworks, shown through film. The following shorts show a number of immersive artworks, where viewers become protagonists through technologies such as VR, holography, and digital projection.
1. Infinity Room (2015)
The immersive environment ‘Infinity’ was created by Refik Anadol. As part of the artist’s ongoing ‘Temporary Immersive Environment Experiments’, which explores audio/visual installations through the use of the state of immersion, the artist is transforming awareness of the physical self by immersing the viewer in an engrossing environment, often artificial, creating the illusion of a non-physical reality.
A radical effort is made in this project to deconstruct the framework of this illusory space and transgress the normal boundaries of the viewing experience. Modern algorithms transform the flat cinema projection screen into a three-dimensional kinetic and architectural space.
The experiment relies heavily on light to blur and connect the boundaries between the physical and virtual realms. There is a threshold between the simulacrum space created by the projection technology and the viewer’s actual space. Immersive virtual environments and their effects on the embodied person are investigated in the experiments. Based on the presented framework, the experiments intend to explore the relativity of perception and how it shapes our perception of our surroundings.
This project approaches the medium as a way of escaping into a disembodied techno-utopian fantasy, but also sees itself as a way to return. To enable us to perceive ourselves and the world around us anew, we need to release ourselves from our habitual perceptions and culturally biased assumptions about being in the world.
2. ORIENS (2017)
ORIENS is an audiovisual installation, completed by Cao Yuxi in 2017. With its giant dimensions of 30m x 14m x 14m, ORIENS immerses the audience in an extradimensional universe beyond human perception.
3. Frontier Within (2019)
Through a combination of immersive installation and web experience, Frontier Within creates a living, breathing, interactive portrait of the body by capturing the participant’s circulatory, respiratory, and nervous system data.
4. Archive Dreaming (2017)
Using machine learning algorithms, artist Refik Anadol searched and sorted 1,700,000 documents within SALT Research collections. Interactions between multidimensional data found in archives are translated into immersive media installations. As part of The Uses of Art: Final Exhibition, Archive Dreaming is user-driven, but when idle, it “dreams” of unexpected correlations between documents. An architecturally immersive space is created from the high-dimensional data and interactions.
After receiving the commission, Anadol became a resident artist at Google’s Artists and Machine Intelligence Program, where he worked closely with Mike Tyka and explored cutting-edge developments in machine intelligence in an environment that brought together artists and engineers. He developed Archive Dreaming during this residency to transform SALT Galata’s gallery space on floor one into an all-encompassing environment that intertwines history with the contemporary, challenges immutable notions of archive, and uses machine learning algorithms to destabilize archive-related issues.
Light and data are used as materials to create a temporary immersive architectural space. The radical deconstruction of the framework of an illusory space will transcend the standard boundaries of a library and conventional flat cinema projection screen in order to create an archive visualized with machine learning algorithms as a three-dimensional kinetic and architectonic space. Using images of 1,700,000 documents, SALT Research will train a neural network to create an immersive installation with architectural intelligence that reframes memory, history, and culture in museum perceptions for the 21st century using machine intelligence.
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