Theo Triantafyllidis - Staphyloculus

VIDEO DESCRIPTION:

Play, download and edit the free video Theo Triantafyllidis - Staphyloculus.

Staphyloculus (or the paradox of site specificity of virtual realities) is a Virtual Reality piece by Theo Triantafyllidis commissioned by NRW-Forum Dusseldorf. Staphyloculus is an immersive VR experience exploring embodiment in VR and the tension between a player’s awareness of their avatar and actual self. Players in VR applications often lose awareness of their physical body in space, running into objects / walls in the room. Theo and I wanted to engage with this loss of self-awareness in VR through sound design and visual content which reacquainted the player with the tether connecting their physical body and their avatar. Blending a 3D scan of a site in Joshua Tree National Park with a virtual deconstruction of that site, Theo created a taut VR landscape teetering between reality, photorealism and animation. Likewise, I mixed site-specific field recordings with manipulated versions of these to oscillate the player between mundane and alien encounters of the soundscape. Imaginary critters slowly make their way into the desert scene and begin to confront the avatar by clinging to it. Each abstract creature has particularized behaviors and an accompanying sonic character, or personality. To create the sonic character for each figure, I manipulated the calls of Gambel’s Quail and other wildlife native to Joshua Tree. In the timeline of the piece, the player’s experience becomes increasingly mediated, finally collapsing back into the mundane as the user is reminded of their physical presence. In ‘Unreal,’ the exhibit for which Staphyloculus was originally commissioned, the gallery foyer, where the HTC Vive headsets were installed, was rendered and acted as a virtual foyer through which a player could experience each piece. Wanting to continue the meta dialogue this encouraged, Theo and I wanted to highlight the dialectic between someone playing the experience and the experience playing them. While the player acts as a surrogate for their avatar, and acts the part as such, the AI creatures also perform the players in the gallery space, encouraging unexpected movement and a spectacle for others attending the exhibit.

Download, play and edit free videos and free audios from Theo Triantafyllidis - Staphyloculus using RedcoolMedia.net web apps