This VR virtual poem, built for the Meta Quest platform, uses Walt Whitman's 1855 poem "Eidolons" as a backbone for exploring metaphysics and modernity. Embedded within different environments that Whitman's ideas to historical and spatial reference points, the project seeks to offer users the temporal and spatial environment to think through their own relationship to impermanence and the misunderstanding of reality.
Set up as a virtual art exhibit, this interactive experience links the history of cinema (specifically the early immersive experience of Hale's Tours) with virtuality to think through how AI can aid us in interpreting real and virtual ideas of spatiality. Incorporating AI to builds 3D sculptures using photogrammetry, Hale's Menagerie projects early films on the 3D modeled scenes. Built for PC and Mac, users maneuver through the space using either keyboard/mouse or joystick controls.
This interactive platformer technical demo, built in Unreal Engine, incorporates Live Link Face data from a mobile phone to gauge whether the user's eyes are open. When closed, the engine loads areas of the map that, with the aid of pulsing sound cues, allow for traversal. This is a proof of concept for potential future projects around the use of the human body as a controller.
This interactive digital experimental project places the user as a virtual wanderer, navigating through a digital blizzard (replete with a composed multi-track attenuated audioscape), ALWAYS destabilizes traditional representational practices surrounding dementia and Alzheimer’s Disease through its design, tone and thematic. Users traverse the blizzard guided by a monologue that unravels a multi-tiered narrative spatially located throughout the environment. While users have a range of tools to guide them through the environment (including a flashlight and the trail they leave behind them in the snow), the level design forces them to question the reliability of their senses to successfully navigate the space.
This application represents a foray into interactive critical documentary, in this case looking at the history of U.S. military execution during World War II. As an interesting example of the palimpsestuous negotiation between individual identity, narrativity, and cultural memory, DISAVOWED structures itself through the misremembering of an actual historical encounter. In such a way, it reconstructs a false history of events misconstrued within the memory, put into dissonance with historical documentation of what “really happened” – an execution witnessed by tens of thousands of soldiers, but that seems largely erased from the record. The result is an interplay between the memories of a veteran, the public awareness of Private Eddie Slovik’s execution, and the journey to piece together what is a fractured, unreliable and racially problematic history of the practice of military execution. (CLICK THE IMAGE BELOW TO DOWNLOAD AND PLAY or VIEW A VIDEO EMBEDDED BELOW)
