Exhibition

XR work
 

I share a body with many Is. They come together, argue, love, and hate each other. I recognise this confusion as fate and digest them as “I”. I unfold them and present the chaos of a cohabitation of many Is and the “worlds” they create to the audience.

Utilising XR technology, Hojin Lee deals with concepts and symptoms of dissociative identities. Dissociation denotes complications in relating personal experience to the social world. It is something we observe while having sex, being on ketamine, or during the attempt to remember a childhood. Dissociative identity means complex psychological conditions that are marked by the existence of two or more personalities that determine a person’s behaviour, consciousness, and memory. It often emerges as a coping mechanism in reaction to trauma. Dissociative Identity employs various effects and thus offers the audience the disorientation and the illusion of a dissociative identity, handing them the experience of being protagonists themselves.
Extended reality (XR) refers to a technological spectrum that encompasses virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), and mixed reality (MR). XR environments provide audiences with several unique experiences that help them take a deep dive into the happenings. Guests experience narratives that evolve according to their interactions, decisions, or real-time data. This XR work merges the exhibition space, the exhibition itself, and the virtual space. When guests move throughout the room, they become part of the artistic work, completing it.

Hojin Lee was born in South Korea and graduated from Ewha Womans University in Seoul, majoring in Visual Art, Art History, and North Korea Studies. She subsequently studied Visual Art at Ewha Womans University of Fine Arts (without graduating), having worked as a media artist since then. She currently studies Media Arts at KHM (Academy of Media Arts) Cologne. Her work is focused on narration and the examination of further integrating audiences into the artistic work. Hojin Lee also works as an activist to practice “queer”, both as an adjective and a verb.

Premiere / VR Dance Experience

I See You is a VR dance experience that takes place in the stark beauty of an artificial universe, set to the music of Gustav Mahler’s Fifth Symphony Adagietto. The work sprang from the collaboration between choreographer and dancer In-Jung Jun and media artist and film professor Olaf Hirschberg. The film aims to create the experience of the human body’s immediacy and presence for the virtual world. It can be viewed via a VR headset. The audience is presented with an experience of intimacy that does not exist in this manner. As already suggested by the title and the music, the main theme of this VR experience is the longing for human intimacy and energetical exchange. In contrast to the usual VR films, this volumetric 360° film features interactive elements, because the perspectives change with the position of the viewer, such as in the vicinity of the dancer.

In-Jung Jun was born in Seoul, South Korea, and lives in Düsseldorf. She has won several awards for her work as a choreographer and dancer. Since the inception of her Blue Elephant Company, In-Jung Jun has produced numerous full-length pieces, some of which premiered at tanzhaus nrw. Even though she lives in Germany, she maintains close bonds to Korean artists of various genres. I See You is her first VR production.
Olaf Hirschberg is a media artist and camera operator. He works as a professor for time-based media in Mainz and is one of the co-founders of headtrip immersive media, a Cologne-based production firm specialising in VR.

Augmented Reality Dance Piece

Dance Trail offers its users an original artistic experience in its contemplation, playfulness, and poetry. The participants will be active during the AR experience: It is up to them to choose their perspective and to trigger dance sequences. The sequences are apparently designed as seamless loops with neither beginnings nor endings. The dance piece has no predetermined duration.
Dance Trail is an augmented reality dance piece in the form of an iOS app that enables users to summon virtual dancers into the ‘real’ world via their smartphones or tablets. With the app, users can cause virtual dance scenes in the environments they occupy (inside or outside). Dance Trail is also a social experience encouraging users to interact with others and to share their photos and videos. They can place dances anywhere in the world and share screenshots and videos via social networks.

Gilles Jobin conceives contemporary dance pieces, is a film director, and experiments with new technology such as virtual reality (VR).

“Jobin’s choreographies [open] a new and critical perspective on humanity to us, in the variety as well as in the fractures of its contexts today. […] Gilles Jobin [is] a passionate explorer, an analytical artist, and a radical contemporary.” (Esther Sutter, jury panel Schweizer Tanzpreis 2015)

How many angels fit into a cloud? This obsolete medieval scholastic problem resurfaces today in the guise of clouds, bits, and data. While a major part of our work comprises the manipulation of data and its storage in clouds, we rarely ask: What does it feel like to touch data? What does it feel like to touch clouds?
The group centred around Norbert Pape, dancer, choreographer, and mathematician, and Simon Speiser, visual artist, deals with the touching of digital objects. A short-circuiting of touch and abstraction.
Digitus (Latin for fingerbreadth, number) originates from Proto-Indo-European * deyǵ- (showing, pointing). Virtual Reality enables us to handle digital objects, in the true sense of the word. This short-circuiting of touch and abstraction provides a fertile framework for the examination of the materiality of immaterial objects. The reversal of touch into abstraction enables us to explore this materiality as well as to explore how these digital objects move us through the space, how they choreograph us.