Project Info
Date

January - April 2019

Role

Artist, Developer & Researcher

Video Documentation

Ritual Vitality on Vimeo

Exhibition Galleries

Black Gallery @SJSU, Root Division

Virtual Reality | Video Projection | Installation | Sound

Ritual Vitality

An immersive media art installation that visualizes an alternative reality in between the real and virtual realms

Ritual Vitality alters perceptions of the surrounding environment through digital manipulation as it takes the viewers into a virtual reality mirror world. The environment utilizes VR, video projection, and sound.

Installation Details

  • ● Due to the dynamic colors of the suspended acrylic sheets, the reflections resemble iridescent holographs.
  • ● The suspended sheets are a physical boundary, dividing the space into a passive “real” zone, and an “active” virtual or digital zone.
  • ● The VR Headset is tethered to the wall and cords are hanging from the ceiling to make it safer for the viewer to experience room-scale VR.
  • ● The back wall and the phone on the left show live camera views from the exhibition space, the middle phone displays a digital performance using screen recording and video collage, and the phone on the right shows a prerecorded video of the same space as if it is replaying the memory of the participant walking in.
  • ● Right across from these screens, there is a recursive feedback loop of physical input from the camera to a digital output (VR software: Unity). This projected live video is a third-person point of view. It’s basically the perspective of the virtual camera in Unity looking at a plane displaying the mounted camera’s view, therefore it loops infinitely.

Process

● Wearable technology like VR, has allowed me to focus more on the idea of technology as a bodily extension, and finding ways to literalize screen-based interactions we have into spatial experiences.
● What’s consistent for every iteration is the Camera perspective which shows the back of the participants upper body: a top down isometric point of view. Sort of like a third-person gaming point of view. I chose this angle because it makes you feel like you’re playing yourself as an avatar in the virtual environment.
● Before installing my work, in order to visualize how it would be laid out, I make 3D architectural mock ups in SketchUp. What makes this work so site-specific is that everytime I display the work in a different place, the architecture needs to completely change for the user to feel like their inhabiting a simulation of the place they are in.

More Showings

As part of SJSU MFA Thesis Exhibition, I displayed this project at Root Division Gallery in San Francisco. With this experience that’s slightly disorienting and trippy, I want to focus on the collapse of virtual and material worlds where digital connection results in a disconnection from our immediate surroundings.

Exhibition Flyer