VR3–Whimsies Attic + Exhibitions

These are the the concepts/ themes and ideas that we all come out together:

Concept/Themes

• Surrealism as both an aesthetic and a concept. Representational/Veristic Surrealism.
• Contradiction, subverting reality.
• Play with scale, perspective and perception;
• The space (home, intimate space?) as a shelter for the dreamer and imagination (‘The Poetics of Space’, Bachelard?). An invitation to return to childlike play. 
• Virtuality and Actuality. (bergson/deleuze virtuality in music, paintings, books and the digital)

Mechanics

Interactive objects — This will be applied on each objects in the starting room to increase the “exploring” fact

“shrinking” effects — In some special cases, make the surrounding environment objects larger or make the player’s own perspective preset proportionally smaller to achieve a similar effect similar to “Alice in Wonderland”Triggering conditions — This refers to some special scenes or perspective changes that will appear when the player starts certain conditions or interacts with certain objectsScene transitions — The cinematic transition effectSpecial effects (environmental) — In term of “surrealism”, several special processes to beautify the rendering effect of the environment. (e.g. Particle, reflection, realistic lights)
3D painting effect — A popular presentation of 3D artworks (pics or paintings) that combines 2D plane and 3D contents.
Face capture — A unity program that allows detailed 3D facial expression and auto-generated face animations.

Sound

Elements

Foley, Field Recordings, Sound effect , Music (themes/diegetic, Acoustic/non-acoustic), Soundscape

Sound in space, acoustics in relation to scale and perspective

Themes for individual rooms or a motif that recurs throughout the different styles/locations?

Each location has different aesthetics, and ‘rules’ of sound.

The more visually stylised the scene (in the objects worlds) the more we could ground the sound in ‘realism’

Procedural audio elements and generative/dynamic/adaptive soundscapes

Computer: kinda bit-crunched for pixelated? more synthetic/electronic music but based on the sound of internal components moving?

Painting: overly user generated (like the game proteus)? if we do a painter set underwater then filtered audio. like falling into monet’s water lilies, as cliche as it may be. Lots of action based sound, moving your hands sounds like brush strokes?

Book: Spoken words? Dialogue/narration?  onomatopoeic effects. Paper sounds 

Music Box: Featuring a linear Acoustic composition. Watching a performance

I think the performance in outernet london is very underwhelming. The visual of the screen amazes me in a second because of its richness. And The whole thing with generative flowers and symbols does not amaze me. What’s more, the sound is quite bad which let me agree on the point that visual people dont care about sound. The best shout is a classical painting scene which only lasts for two minute long. And we take like 1 hour to wait that to happen. The music is very electronic, and the beats are not sync to the painting. Can we use a symphony? They are not vanishing!

Another case study from: Mike Nelson’s Extinction Beckons

Memory: The Amnesiacs are a fictional biker gang invented by Nelson in the 1990s as the co-creators of the series of sculptures that are assembled inside this wire cage. The gang is seemingly made up of military veterans from the Gulf War (1990-91) who suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder. This causes them to experience flashbacks: dissociative episodes in which the past is re-lived vividly as if it is occurring in the present. From the perspective of this imagined collective, whose sense of past and present is troublingly distorted, Nelson works intuitively with found materials; old things that also bring their own jumbled and dislocated histories. Like the partial recollections of the past that constitute our own memories, these works don’t have fully elaborated meanings but rely on the viewer to bring their own experiences and associations to interpret and complete them. Memory is always misplaced; must the objects of memory be in order? In Mike Nelson’s Amnesiacs, it seems that the world as seen through the eyes of veterans of the Gulf War (1990-91) is really seen through their eyes – objects that are normal to normal people may all be offensive to the characters – -their sense of the past and present is disturbingly distorted. It made me reflect, too, on the part of my work about childhood memories, does it have to be ordered and reflect reality? Or can it be incorporated as part of the emotion and become a blur? As I reflected more on my childhood memories, I began to sense the passage of time and how it gradually blurs our recollections. This reminded me of Salvador Dali’s renowned painting, The Persistence of Memory,55 where the melting clock conveys a surrealistic vibe. It sparked the notion of creating a 3D model of a childhood item, infused with similar surrealist elements.

From a sonic perspective, it does not let sound getting involved, Instead, the audience explore objects themselves realistically. Everything is very real. The metallic door and the wood door still let me feel worried. I appreciate how much effort he put into it and the desert scene is my favourite. It kind of gave me a immersion of the Iraq war and how the old attic was drone in the sand made me feel shock. I thought sometimes would been good to block out the sound part, instead of making something fancier and scifi which was not make sense.