culture – Page 4 – Augmented & Virtual Reality Confabulation

February 5, 2022

Kaws: New Fiction review – an art show where you brush shoulders with virtual visitors

Serpentine North Gallery, London
This hybrid show of physical and digital works by US artist Brian Donnelly – also viewable in the video game Fortnite – could not be more of the moment

For decades, artists have worked across physical and digital canvases, especially in public installations, where a virtual component can lend a futuristic frisson to traditional works. The current brouhaha about NFTs – digital artworks to which proof of ownership can be bought, assigning currently indeterminate rights to the buyer – makes the Serpentine Gallery’s New Fiction exhibition feel especially of the moment, however. The show (admission free) features physical and digital works by Kaws, AKA the Brooklyn-based artist Brian Donnelly, the digital works viewed via a third-party augmented reality app downloaded on to a smartphone.

Visitors must calibrate the app on arrival; point your phone camera at a QR code outside the gallery and the scene fills with towering, brightly painted figures, including an emaciated Cookie Monster-like character who sits, legs a-dangling, from the plinth above the entrance. Inside, you must again calibrate the app, at which point you wander around the rooms, figuratively brushing shoulders with virtual “visitors” who also form part of the installation. It’s an uncanny feeling seeing virtual characters observe physical works of art (typically, these days, it’s us, the corporeal, who perennially gaze upon the digital), and the sense of discombobulation is compounded by the fact that the exhibit features actual brightly painted bronze statues.

February 1, 2022

Belle review – anime that makes for an intriguing big-screen spectacle

This weird postmodern drama sees a lonely teenager join a virtual world where she becomes a hugely successful singer

There’s some amazing big-screen spectacle in this weird postmodern emo photo-love drama from Japanese anime director Mamoru Hosoda, whose previous film Mirai elevated him to auteur status. Suzu, voiced by Kaho Nakamura, is a deeply unhappy and lonely teenager at high school, who lives with her dad. Her mum died some years ago, attempting (successfully) to save a child from drowning and Suzu can’t come to terms with the zero-sum pointlessness of this calamity: a total stranger was saved but her mother died. Or not zero in fact: while her loss increased the sum-total of unhappiness, the most popular boy in school – a friend since they were little – is tender and protective towards Suzu.

Her life is complicated further when she is persuaded to join a virtual reality meta-universe called U, a glittering unearthly city like a next-level Manhattan or Shibuya. (Presumably entry into this fantasy world needs a VR headset, although oddly this is not made plain.) Participants have their biometrics read and get an enhanced avatar of themselves and Suzu finds that she is now “Belle”, an ethereally beautiful young woman with quirky freckles and a wonderful singing voice. To her astonishment, Suzu finds that Belle is becoming a colossally famous singer – but at the very high point of this meta-success she comes across the Beast, who disrupts one of her concerts: a brutish, aggressive outcast figure loathed by the self-appointed vigilante guardians of U.

January 31, 2022

Manipulate festival review – a wealth of delights for the imagination

Summerhall and the Studio, Festival theatre, Edinburgh
Magical AR miniatures and a dream-like circus drama are among the impressive productions opening this celebration of visually led theatre

No single word can encapsulate Manipulate. The festival’s mix of animation, physical theatre and puppetry defies easy categorisation. The organisation itself opts for “visually led work”. On the strength of this year’s opening weekend, you could also call it a celebration of making something out of nothing.

No more so is this the case than in Acqua Alta by the French duo Adrien M & Claire B. Around a boardroom table, they have arranged a set of large books, opened to reveal pen-and-ink scribbles and simple pop-up structures. Ordinarily, you wouldn’t give them a second look.

Manipulate festival is at Summerhall and the Studio, Festival theatre, Edinburgh, until 5 February. The Chosen Haram is at Jacksons Lane, London, 4-6 February.

January 29, 2022

The metaverse is dystopian – but to big tech it’s a business opportunity

Facebook’s plans to build a $10bn virtual reality world were ridiculed yet the rest of Silicon Valley has serious Fomo and is piling in

Once upon a time, a very long time ago – until Thursday 28 October 2021, to be precise – the term “metaverse” was known only to lexicographers and science fiction enthusiasts. And then, suddenly, it was everywhere. How come? Simply this: Mark Zuckerberg, the supreme leader of Facebook, pissed off by seeing nothing but bad news about his company in the media, announced that he was changing its name to Meta and would henceforth be devoting all his efforts – plus $10bn (£7bn) and thousands of engineers – to building a parallel universe called the metaverse.

And then, because the tech industry and the media that chronicle its doings are basically herds of mimetic sheep, the metaverse was suddenly the newest new thing. This was news to Neal Stephenson, the writer who actually invented the term in his 1992 novel, Snow Crash. “Since there seems to be growing confusion on this,” he tweeted, “I have nothing to do with anything that FB is up to involving the metaverse, other than the obvious fact that they’re using a term I coined in Snow Crash. There has been zero communication between me and FB & no biz relationship.”

January 18, 2022

‘Who’s to say it’s not real?’ Street artist Kaws on creating Fortnite’s first exhibition

The New Yorker has made a virtual art show to take place within the smash-hit game – and a real-life one at London’s Serpentine with a touch of augmented reality. Can it get young gamers into galleries?

For Brian Donnelly – known as Kaws since his graffiti beginnings in 1990s New York – art has always been a communication tool. From street art to vast public commissions, he says, “it’s a chance to create a dialogue”. His desire to bring art to the masses is partly why his work spans collectable toys and streetwear collaborations, as well as paintings and sculptures that sell for millions. His new exhibition will allow him to connect with a large number of eyeballs in, he says, “a new and massive way”. The show, New Fiction, is at London’s Serpentine Gallery, and simultaneously on two free online platforms: the gaming behemoth Fortnite and the augmented-reality (AR) app Acute Art.

With more than 400m player accounts, Fortnite is massive, especially when compared with the estimated footfall of an average Serpentine show (around 35,000). While the uninitiated might dismiss Fortnite as just another shooting extravaganza, players are increasingly spending time in its more peaceful zones, such as creative mode, where they can mooch about the Fortnite metaverse without fear of elimination. “You can hang out with your friends and explore new features,” says Fortnite’s partnerships director, Kevin Durkin. This could mean honing your dance moves but also watching a film or an Ariana Grande concert (as players did in August 2021), or, as of today, visiting an art gallery.

January 17, 2022

‘Virtual reality is genuine reality’ so embrace it, says US philosopher

In his book Reality+ David Chalmers says the material world may lose its allure as VR technology advances

It is hard to imagine humans spending their lives in virtual reality when the experience amounts to waving your arms about in the middle of the lounge with a device the size of a house brick strapped to your face.

But this is where humanity is heading, says the philosopher David Chalmers, who argues for embracing the fate. Advances in technology will deliver virtual worlds that rival and then surpass the physical realm. And with limitless, convincing experiences on tap, the material world may lose its allure, he says.

November 11, 2021November 11, 2021

A whole new world: Disney is latest firm to announce metaverse plans

Entertainment company plans to ‘connect the physical and digital worlds … allowing for storytelling without boundaries’

Heigh-ho it’s off to the metaverse we go – if Walt Disney gets its way. The home of Mickey Mouse and Princess Elsa has revealed it is planning to join the likes of Mark Zuckerberg and Microsoft in the metaverse.

The new tech concept, a blending of the physical and digital worlds where people can interact virtually, is becoming a multibillion-dollar fixation for Silicon Valley executives, including the Facebook founder who is staking his company’s future on its success.

October 15, 2021

‘You are the dog in space’: inside Asif Kapadia’s new VR short, Laika

With his new animation, the Oscar-winning documentary maker – and former VR cynic – is exploring how the technology might revolutionise the way we experience cinema

“We would have to build a car, that’s the only way it would work,” says Asif Kapadia, brainstorming how to recreate the unforgettable opening passage of his movie Diego Maradona, in virtual reality. “You know what an LED lightbox is? It’s the new version of green screen, a wall of tiny little lights, thousands of them. So you create whatever you want, you put it on that wall, and it projects. We’d have to take every location of Naples in the 80s, put that on a light box, build a car, then put us in the car driving so that when you look out of the window you see Naples. I mean, it would be great. But you’d have to build every environment and that …” he whispers, “is why it’s so expensive.”

Over the course of the pandemic, Kapadia has been keeping busy. He directed a miniseries on the subject of mental health starring Oprah and Prince Harry, and a history of music in the year 1971 inspired by David Hepworth’s hit book. He produced an Indian drama series for Amazon about a shaman on the run who joins forces with a local cop. He’s building up to his next “big doc thing”, a story he says is to do with space travel, confronts “all the mad shit going on right now” and means he’s “going fully dystopian”. He has also made a film showing at the London film festival (LFF) right now; a VR short about Laika, the first earthling to orbit Earth.

October 10, 2021

What a game convention afterparty looks like in the age of COVID

A live, in-person PAX was held for the first time since 2019. But did the PAX Parties survive the pandemic?

August 26, 2021

Demonic review – Neill Blomkamp’s sci-fi horror is pure pulp

The director’s latest film – in which a daughter enters the virtual mind of her serial killer mother – is so-so compared to his earlier efforts

After the mega-budget blowouts of 2013’s Elysium (which had some tried-and-tested ideas rattling around inside it) and 2015’s Chappie (which had Die Antwoord), this so-so shocker finds mooted multiplex saviour Neill Blomkamp recalibrating his disc space and career prospects. Operating with TV-movie production values and nary a single familiar face among its 10-strong cast, it’s a small, manageable, patchily inspired genre piece that unpicks the fraught relationship between a daughter, her convict mother, and a medical tech firm instigating an altogether unhappy reunion.

Much of Demonic suggests a sometime “visionary director” who has turned to streaming-bound work-for-hire to make ends meet; it’s cautiously compiled, competent work-for-hire, but the wild swings and grand designs of this film-maker’s earlier output are sorely missed. It’s at its most Blomkampian early on, with the integration of effects into the plot: our heroine Carly (Carly Pope) submits to “volumetric capture” (essentially mo-cap 2.0) so she can enter a virtual-world simulation that will allow her to interact with her comatose mum. Inevitably, this passage into a digital wonderland is preceded with dire warnings as to what might happen if memories slip out of sync, and inevitably, the simulation doesn’t run as smoothly as hoped. Partly this is due to the vast reserves of anger Carly ports into this virtual realm, partly due to the proximity of a giant skeletal hellbeast. These scenes have a distinctive, hyperreal look (and presumably blew the budget), rotoscoping over the uncanny-valley glitches that have blighted countless blockbusters. This time, the glitches are deliberate: the aim is to unsettle.