VORTEX

The Vortex (VRTX) section in this year’s L.E.V. Matadero is composed by six surprising virtual reality works. One of them is Anandala, a virtual, abstract world full of fascinating forms and three-dimensional colors, inhabited by some intelligent artificial life. This universe, created by Kevin Mack, the pioneer of immersive art, invites the visitor to fly over and explore its surprising nature, and to interact and engage with its peculiar and friendly inhabitants.

Meet Me Halfway, by Italian architect, artist and engineer Anna Pompermaier, is an experience of multiplayer extended reality, created to research the future of meeting spaces, located inside hybrid environments halfway between a physical and a digital world. Another example of these new meeting spaces is the animated virtual reality experience Goliath: Playing With Reality, created by Anagram, directed by Barry Gene Murphy and May Abdalla, and narrated by actor Tilda Swinton, who guides the visitor through the different realities of Goliath, a man who has lived most of his life isolated in mental institutions, and who connects with the outside world through multiplayer video games.

The project Future Dance of Nostalgia explores the relationship between our bodies and the hard, repetitive physical work during the pre-industrial age. A video game created by Beijing visual artist and designer Kexin Hao, combining songs about work taken for historical archives and the dynamics of games such as Just Dance. From Taipei, experimental artist and producer Meuko! Meuko! and Taiwanese collective NAXS Corp present Innervision, a version of their series Ghost Island in the shape of a virtual reality installation. A virtual post-utopian landscape in 3D, located in the frontier between mythology and reality.

Besides, the shocking documentary in virtual reality On the Morning You Wake (To the End of the World) by the multi-awarded studios Archer’s Mark and Atlas V will immerse the viewer in a terrible event which took place in January 2018 in Hawaii, when its citizens received a text message from the Estate Emergency Service, wrongly warning them about an imminent ballistic missile attack. A piece that proves the vast potential of VR technology to portrait the world around us, and to make us reflect about it.

Vortex (VRTX)
Virtual Reality and VR Cinema experiences
Nave 17
Kevin Mack: Anandala [Us]
Kexin Hao: Future Dance of Nostalgia [Cn]
Barry Gene Murphy & May Abdalla: Goliath: Playing With Reality [Uk/Fr]
Meuko! Meuko! & NAXS Corp: Innervision [Tw]
Anna Pompermaier: Meet Me Halfway [It]
Archer’s Mark & Atlas V: On the Morning You Wake (To the End of the World) [Uk/Fr]