culture – Page 13 – Augmented & Virtual Reality Confabulation

January 21, 2019

From red pills to red, white and blue Brexit: how The Matrix shaped our reality

Twenty years after the release of The Matrix, its prescient vision of a virtual world continues to mirror events in real life

The Matrix has barely started when a phone booth is demolished, left as a smashed pancake of glass and metal. It was a prophetic touch. Payphones were still everywhere in western cities when the film came out in March 1999. By the time of the first sequel four years later, they were already half-vanished, replaced by a private army of Nokias and Motorolas.

But now The Matrix is a relic too, a quaint slice of 90s nostalgia about to celebrate its 20th anniversary. “1999”, the recent song from Charli XCX and Troye Sivan, features wistful lyrics (“Those days, it was so much better”) and cover art in which the millennial pop stars wear the black leather costumes made famous by Keanu Reeves and Carrie-Anne Moss as they battled the machines enslaving humanity. Yet for a relic, it never slipped far from view – still a familiar reference in a world divided between internet and IRL (in real life), its characters endlessly circulating in memes and gifs, often as vehicles for the acrid politics that define our 21st century.

To ‘redpill’ is now a verb, opening the eyes of far-right recruits to hated oppressors – feminists and people of colour

January 10, 2019

One perfect shot: the unsung power of cinematography

Cinematographers can have as much influence over a film as a director. But will prestige TV and declining ticket sales at cinemas put their craft at risk?

Cinematography is one of the most mysterious aspects of film-making. The American Society of Cinematographers turned 100 this month and, though last year’s Oscar for the category drew attention after the first nomination for a female cinematographer, and Twitter users reguarly share examples of “One Perfect Shot”, the art of “painting with light” is little understood.

Cinematographers are responsible for photographing films, but in practice their job is more complex. The skill of the cinematographer, or director of photography, is to combine visual artistry with technical knowledge and a certain amount of people management. “Maybe as many as 80 people on a movie come under your direct command,” says Bill Butler, the Oscar-nominated cinematographer who worked on classics including Jaws and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. “Next to the director, it’s the cinematographer who is really in charge of everything, from the costume you wear to the makeup. You do a lot more than just take meter readings.”

There will be more and more advances in the technology and the way people view films, and I love it

December 11, 2018

The 11 best games on PlayStation VR

From immersive shooters to psychedelic Tetris and gothic fairytales, here are the virtual reality games you should be picking up

The familiar game of high-speed block organisation, but enveloped in psychedelic visuals and sound. VR isn’t strictly necessary, but it wraps the game’s astonishing visuals – glittering forests, neon cityscapes, constellations of lights that move like whales – all around you, helping you sink into the trance-like state of concentration that gives the game its title. The cumulative effect is quite emotionally overwhelming. As a fringe benefit, if you turn out to be one of the players who reports crying at Tetris Effect, the headset will help hide your tears from anyone else in the room.

November 21, 2018

Ralph Breaks the Internet review – virtually impossible to enjoy tiresome arcade game re-run

The sequel to Wreck-It Ralph is an overstuffed but weirdly pointless exercise in tech worship that fails to include much that actually connects with the audience

Wreck-It Ralph, fictional star of a fictional 80s arcade game, is back for another exhaustingly pointless romp in the frenetic and jeopardy-free world of virtual reality. Only this time he’s not wrecking, he’s breaking, an entirely different concept. It is destruction for winners, not losers, like Kim Kardashian’s bottom, or the Beatles breaking America, or that man in the Bois du Boulogne breaking the bank at Monte Carlo.

This headspinning, Ritalin-fuelled sequel to the 2012 film is somewhere between Ready Player One and The Emoji Movie, summoning up a zero-gravity spectacle of dazzling colours and vertiginous perspectives, a featureless and inert mashup of memes, brands, avatars and jokes. Some of these gags are pretty good: like the fairytale princesses who gather round the heroine to explain that a life-changing moment is always accompanied by “staring into some water”. Some other gags aren’t quite so fresh, like a gamer being called “Babe-raham Lincoln” – stolen from Wayne’s World – and a nerd superfan asking pedantic questions at a convention — stolen from Galaxy Quest. And the incessant and eerily unsatirical product placement is enough to give you a migraine: especially the complacent Disney cross-promotion.

November 19, 2018

Welcome to the jungle: experiencing the Amazon in psychedelic virtual reality

VR artist Lynette Wallworth returns with a film that brings the transcendental experience of Brazil’s Yawanawá people to life in vivid colour

I am deep in the Amazonian jungle, somewhere near the Gregório River. My vision is affected by a hallucinogenic tea called Ayahuasca, referred to by the locals as Uni. A huge and majestic old tree towers in front of me. A patch of bright psychedelic colour appears in my vision and moves with my gaze, as if projected from another plane of existence. Before I have properly come to terms with this striking tableau, my position changes. I realise I am now inside the tree.

This is a scene from Awavena, the new virtual reality film from acclaimed artist Lynette Wallworth. My actual location is Carriageworks, Sydney, where this impressive work had its Australian premiere on Friday as part of Create NSW’s annual 360 Vision virtual reality and augmented reality event. Awavena is showing there until 9 December.

I told my people, ‘I met this crazy woman who has a big vision. I think we can do something together’

October 19, 2018

Back from the black: should Amy Winehouse and other stars be turned into holograms?

The decision to turn the artist into a virtual reality experience has divided fans. Is she being vividly celebrated, or ghoulishly pushed back on stage without her consent?

It is difficult to say which image of Amy Winehouse has lingered loudest and longest – wild-eyed and desperate on a street corner in Camden; scuffling with a fan on stage at Glastonbury in 2008; or perhaps as she was portrayed in Asif Kapadia’s 2015 documentary, heaved on to a plane unconscious in the summer of 2011 to play what would be her final show in Belgrade. Maybe it is better to remember her performance at the Mercury prize in 2007 singing Love Is a Losing Game: her face gentle, her voice burnished, looking quite overwhelmed as the evening’s host, Jools Holland, told the rapturous crowd: “I’ve worked with a lot of people and I’m telling you, she has one of the best voices of anybody of all time.”

It has been announced that Winehouse will return to the stage once again in 2019, touring the world in hologram form. Winehouse is not the first artist to receive the hologram treatment – there have already been such incarnations of Tupac Shakur, Maria Callas, Michael Jackson and more. But the decision to turn Winehouse into a hologram, seven years after her death from alcohol poisoning, has divided many. For some this is a celebration of a great and much-missed musician. Others argue that an artist who loathed touring and hated fame should be allowed to rest.

I don’t want you to think that this is all about money. It’s about letting people know what made her tick

September 20, 2018

Israelis experience Palestinian home life in virtual reality

‘The under-layer is very tragic,’ says artist whose living rooms expose deep divide

An art exhibition in Jerusalem that gives Israelis the chance to experience a Palestinian family’s living room – by wearing virtual reality goggles – has laid bare the entrenched separation of two societies that live side by side but, increasingly, worlds apart.

The Israel Museum, where the exhibition is being held, is less than two miles from Arab neighbourhoods in Jerusalem where thousands of Palestinians live. And it is only six miles from the West Bank village where the family who agreed to be filmed for the project live.

September 11, 2018

Gastronomic review – high-flying, fine-dining theatre

Norwich Theatre Royal
Audiences experience a taste of how the 1% travel – and eat – in Curious Directive’s ambitious show

It took years of experimenting for the Wright brothers to get airborne. So it’s not too bad a sign that Gastronomic, set aboard a plane flying from Beirut to London, doesn’t quite take off.

The company Curious Directive aims to blend theatre with both dining and augmented reality (AR), a technique that overlays the real world with digital imagery. An audience of 40 are fed a five-course taster menu while the narrative unfolds around them, but technical issues for the performance I saw left us without the AR element, which meant we didn’t see some planned “microscenes”.

August 31, 2018

‘Screaming nightmare’: William Shatner boldly goes into VR

Star Trek’s Captain Kirk voices concerns about virtual reality after simulating a walk on Mars

As Captain Kirk in Star Trek, William Shatner took us to places “where no man has gone before”, with stories that foreshadowed the invention of the mobile phone and tablet computers. Now, in real life, the actor is exploring virtual reality – but he wants the entertainment industry to be aware of its potential detrimental impact on vulnerable minds.

Shatner told the Guardian: “The use of technology to affect our minds is so powerful now that we need to be on guard in the future.”

August 30, 2018

Spheres / 1943: Berlin Blitz review – VR becomes reality in Venice

★★★☆☆ / ★★★★☆
A cosmic trip produced by Darren Aronofsky and an immersive Lancaster bombing raid were highlights of the film festival’s virtual reality strand

The virtual reality section at Venice is growing at an almost exponential rate: two years ago it was low-key, notable mainly for a demure Sunday-school retelling of the life of Jesus. In 2018, it is a substantial exhibition featuring state-of-the-art tech and an almost overwhelming range of entries, some of them “full body” concepts in which audience members suit up for a complete immersion. Interestingly, the vocabulary is still in a state of flux: are they “projects”, “installations”, “films”? The festival has intriguingly repurposed a building on a once deserted island to house the event: the Lazzaretto Vecchio, home to a 16th-century plague hospital which has now been imaginatively converted into an exhibition space.

Perhaps the biggest film in the competition is Spheres, written and directed by artist and film-maker Eliza McNitt and produced by Darren Aronofsky. It’s a freakily cosmic three-part VR series that reinvents the medieval concept of the music of the spheres. The spectator floats through space, and planets and heavenly bodies loom up hugely. The VR sensors on your hands allow you to “touch” them, perhaps plunging you inside the planet – a mysterious, ambient wash of fiery red or cool blue. Or touching will elicit its enigmatic music. The first part of the film is an introduction to this vast arena; part two is narrated by Jessica Chastain and is about black holes; the third part is narrated by Patti Smith and is about the cosmic origin of music.