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Play, download and edit the free video [Official trailer] What homes are made of: The Architecture of Displacement (2021).

Official cinematic teaser video of the debut VR experience created entirely in lockdown.
Director & writer: Lucija Ivšić
Production: Lucija Ivšić
VR development: Lucija Ivšić
Sound design: Lucija Ivšić
Music: Lucija Ivšić aka Živa
Teaser video director: Lucija Ivšić

What homes are made of: The Architecture of Displacement is a room-scale interactive virtual reality experience that questions the role history and memory play in the construction and perception of our physical presence, identity, and future formation. In this VR work, visitors can experience Ivšić's Melbourne home, constructing itself both as an everyday, ordinary apartment and as the artist’s entire intimate universe and storage of memory. By being asked to take off their shoes before putting on the headset, the participant is being subtly initiated and invited to explore rituals present in the artist’s home, symbolically represented through a pair of house slippers that are commonly worn in all Croatian homes. Once the viewer has the headset on, they find themselves in the artist’s Melbourne apartment, enriched with recorded real-world sounds, where they can freely explore the apartment by either physically walking through it, or by teleporting. The way this experience evolves further as the accumulated result of each visitor’s unique and unprescribed exploration, and by subtle, continuous guidance by the artist through their memories and rituals, underscores questions of how our perception can be re-constructed when we engage with a place on an emotional level. By exploring the apartment freely, the level of curiosity a participant shows directly determines the duration of the experience and its continuation. Soon after, although still located in the same apartment, the viewer will notice that they are not alone anymore and that a bridge between realities has been established. That is when sounds from Ivšić’s Croatian home appear, where the family welcomes the viewer into their home, invites them to join for their Sunday lunch while her mother goes into detail describing all the food she has prepared.

The meticulous and “accurate” visual model of the Melbourne apartment was created from point clouds generated using a LIDAR scanner. The resulting VR scene, constructed from 78 million spatial points, creates an exact, almost photographic representation of reality, yet adding an obvious dreamlike ambiance. Furthermore, the use of overwhelmingly dense point clouds as a primary visual constituent of entire “worlds” within the experience, can also be seen as a symbolic way of amplifying the generally imperceptible and ephemeral parts of our presence, that are commonly lost within vast amounts of data we are flooded with daily. This work was specifically designed for VR since the dichotomy inherent to the medium allows a possibility to seamlessly blend two realities simultaneously existing on opposite hemispheres (Europe/Australia; then/now; real/virtual), to create a window into the first-hand experience of displacement.
While exploring the apartment – at first glance, a very mundane yet personal place – one cannot hide from the fact that it’s difficult to comprehend the true origin of the sounds and how they synthesize with the visuals. This dichotomy underlines feelings of displacement that are etched and intertwined so deeply in migrant identity. Drawing upon a posthumanist approach to identity, which emphasizes multiplicity, fragmentation, and partiality; this work highlights the emergent and performative aspects of the self and of others; intangible aspects of our heritage that obviously construct our present and shape our identity.

This is Ivšić's debut VR work, made almost entirely during the Melbourne lockdown (the longest in the world). LiDAR scanning and point cloud generation, VR development in Unity that includes coding, design, and animation, as well as sound design, was entirely created by Ivšić alone. Binaural recordings were done by her sister Andrea Ivšić.

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