Uncharted Territories | immersiVR

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I N V R and synthesis gallery join forces for immersiVR: the first dedicated, tailored customer experience of its kind: a platform combining art, technology and programming aimed at the large-scale distribution of Virtual Reality (VR) art, making it affordable and easily accessible to the general public. Virtual reality technology offers a magnified, visually captivating world, reshaping mainstream ways of embodiment and interaction. Through VR, artists can explore new ways of creating multi sensorial environments and narratives. immersiVR provides an artistic experience through a user-friendly VR headset for rent - shipped anywhere within the EU and the UK, no deposit required - with access to a collection of ambitious virtual reality artworks produced by pioneering artists in the medium. synthesis supports immersiVR with its artistic direction: a bi-annual programme with a new set of VR artworks every five months, allowing the ultimate user to experience some of the most important art that is creating the current landscape of virtual reality and shaping the conversation of its future.

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The exhibition ‘Uncharted Territories’ – synthesis’ first on headset for immersiVR – features a group of artists whose work engage with physical and metaphysical spaces, and issues of integration, identity and place. The ‘Uncharted Territories’ are Elias Canetti’s inspired playground, the so-called Land of Cloud and a thin moon strip. Territories yet to be discovered, lands of exploration and social experimentation.

Patricia Detmering (b. 1980, DEU) in her work APORIA, designs a virtual space where power dynamics interlace and overlap, change and dissolve, yet seem to balance out organically. The residents of APORIA (i.e. human avatars driven by Artificial Intelligence algorithms) find harmony in the same unwritten rules they follow when engaging and interacting with each other. Until a disturbing factor - a new human avatar, a stranger – arrives to alter the pre-established order. Detmering draws on Elias Canetti’s seminal work ‘Crowds and Power’ to create a social playground for experimental dynamics of integration and cointegration, separation and insularity, tolerance and prejudice.

Armin Keplinger (b. 1982, AUT) merges virtual and physical space in ms-R. The artwork features a moon-sliced ring with zero latitude. Inspired by the striking images of the Apollo 13 mission, Keplinger’s artistic effort is aimed at building a bridge between the moon’s historically changing surface and his fascination for ever-changing physical sculpture surfaces. As the ring moves slowly in a circle around the participant’s view with subtle light and movements, ‘ms-R’ aims to send the viewer on a journey to void-dark spaces. In his physical and virtual sculptures, Keplinger is inspired by American minimalism and its European precursors, including landmark figures such as Richard Serra, Donald Judd and Josef Albers.

VR/AR pioneer Tamiko Thiel (b. 1957, USA), in her work Land of Cloud takes the viewer on a journey beyond space and time. That is where the Land of Cloud can be found. The Land of Cloud is a magnificent garden whose inhabitants are silent and communicate with each other only through splendid, yet strange, cloud mirrors. They are in constant contact with their deity: ‘The Cloud’. They do not look at you. They do not look at anything but their devices, standing motionless. Each of them susurrates and repeats their own mantra, given by the Cloud Deity. This is what the viewer hears as she stands next to them. The mantras are taken from the Hillary Clinton vs. Donald Trump 2016 US election campaign, when it seemed to Thiel that national and personal dialogs with others had ceased and each focused only on their own small media bubble.