Following the call for entries for the Recto VRso 2021: Virtual Exhibition / Real Exhibition – Art online, the Recto VRso artist team has selected 30 artworks, which can be viewed on the Festival website.
This edition of the festival seeks to explore the emergence of new artistic expressions and to question their aesthetic form by analysing contemporary trends in online art.
7 categories were identified following this analytical work:
Online art gallery, Online collaborative art, Online generative art, Online interactive art, Online performance, Online video art, Online art space.
ONLINE ART GALLERY
PASCAL DALOUS
Dalnumerique
Digital painting is a new renaissance in the continuity of classical painting. Pascal Dalous tries to use its technique and content through form, perspective and colour, with the power of a computer, a graphics tablet or even a telephone. The software allows you to copy brushes, felt-tips, pencils and aerosols onto virtual surfaces such as paper, canvas or fabric, managing solid colours, lines, thickness, pressure and transparency.
Valdas Neuro_Virtual
Immortal Forms
Immortal Forms is an artwork representing the golden artefact of humanity’s closest relative, protected by the spirit of the musical genius. Immortal Forms is a 3D digital sculpture that can be viewed on the Sketchfab platform.
Nataliya Velykanova
INTROSPEXION
Gate22’s INTROSPEXION exhibition aims to offer our audiences a new vision of reality and the world around us. It all begins with thought, which, through different concepts, gives us a perception of our reality. Is reality universal or specific to each of us? Is the world around us just an illusion, a construct of the mind? Through three experiments created by artists from the Gate22 community, you will be invited to introspect and find your own answers to these questions.
Julien Lomet
Paradigme Optique
Paradigme Optique is a virtual space inspired by illustrations from the graphic design studio A droite de la main gauche and by self-hypnosis sessions. A geometric architectural ensemble inspired by optical art, the works here are the artwork of artists Julien Lomet and Patrick Lancelot Bonvarlet. The graphic artwork becomes three-dimensional and immersive.
Carla Gannis
wwwunderkammer
The wwwunderkammer project is inspired by the sixteenth-century Wunderkammer, also known as ‘Cabinets of Curiosity’, and by the contemporary social media practice of creating archives and collections on sites such as Pinterest, Instagram and Tumblr. Through this project, Carla Gannis considers the strange complications of terrestrial reality and virtual reality, while constructing virtual worlds based on decolonising, post-human and feminist archives.
ONLINE COLLABORATIVE ART
Mert Ekbel
Discussion Rooms for an Exhibition Opening
Discussion Rooms was an accompanying programme specially designed for an art exhibition at the Stadtgalerie Saarbrücken, the official art gallery of the city of Saarbruecken in Germany. Four virtual discussion rooms have been created on Mozilla Hubs, resembling the architecture of the gallery’s physical building. The discussions in these four rooms focused on current issues in working life and the process. For example: “Am I pursuing a specific objective with my work? Discussions in two rooms were in German, one in English and one in French.
Ana Fernandes
Ensemble
Ana Fernandes and her team have developed a digital platform, a basic drawing tool on which participants can express themselves based on a theme. This device is not intended for the public, who can operate it from a computer, tablet or smartphone. This flexibility helps to popularise the concept.
GENERATIVE ART ONLINE
Grant Patterson
Flowstate
FlowState is a real-time collaborative art experience. Participants paint with fluid, bewitching colours on a shared canvas. Designed as an artwork with social distance, FlowState allows participants to create together from any distance. FlowState is also driving an LED wall for a public installation, allowing users to create art from their mobile devices. While each device sees the same brushstrokes, subtle variations in the fluid simulation make each participant’s experience different.
Michel Bret and Marie-Hélène Tramus
Pilobolus virtual
Pilobolus Virtual is a remake by Michel Bret of the installation Corps & Graphie (1997) by Marie-Hélène Tramus (written in anyflo language). The spectator interactively builds a pilobolus (in reference to the eponymous dance company), a tree of dancing bodies. This installation invites viewers to become choreographers by using several bodies of moving virtual dancers to create a kind of living plant organism that moves in real time. He clicks anywhere on a virtual body and a new body ‘grows’ there, and so on by clicking several times.
Jia-Rey Chang
SkyWindow
“SkyWindow” is an immersive interactive installation that projects a sky-like visual onto the ceiling. Audiences are invited to come closer and stretch out their hands as if touching the sky, triggering raindrops (meteor showers) and sounds to fall. “SkyWindow” involves a piece of hope that people desperately want during the days of quarantine in an entire enclosed space about this pandemic crisis. However, with the link provided and a webcam, you can also enjoy it online.
INTERACTIVE ART ONLINE
Chihiro Sakoda
Another World
As an interaction engineer, Chihiro Sakoda is thinking about the kind of interaction she could benefit from at home. That’s when he came up with the idea of webcams. With the spread of viruses, people all over the world are using webcams. The concept of this artwork is to look into “another world” by holding both hands over the webcam. This artwork expresses the viewer’s two-handed access to another world that is inseparable from real life: the world of networks.
Sarah Ticho
Hatsumi
In this virtual reality experience, you will be guided to create your own life-size body map, which visualises and explores the experience you have had. You will be guided through a series of meditative and creative activities based on the principles of mindfulness during the body mapping process to help articulate and visually express experiences and methods for coping with everyday and uncommon experiences of pain, emotions and sensory experiences.
Noëlie Delesse, Pierre Lepercq, Magali Walch
La Chute de Satan
La Chute de Satan is a VR experience in which you are immersed in a virtual exhibition of original paintings-illustrations depicting moments from the myth of the Fall of Satan. In a neutral exhibition room, you are invited to change the way you ‘visit’ in order to explore the different paintings you are confronted with, and to modify your experience of the exhibition.
Mélanie Courtinat
Ten Lands
Ten Lands is a hybrid of video game and music video, created to accompany Yatoni’s ambient debut album. It features ten distinct worlds, each corresponding to a song on the album. Play the role of a lone knight and explore the remains of giant battles, the ruins of abandoned castles and deserts of fire and ice. Find your way to a Lovecraftian creature lurking beyond the misty sea. Discover a new way of experiencing an album during a pandemic. Take your time Watch and listen.
Peter Spry
What you don’t see: Invisible Instruments
Invisible piano keys, guitar strings and percussion instruments sound as you move through this soundscape. Stand perfectly still and the music stops. Move and the music starts again. An application optically detects movements and translates them into musical sounds. No VR headset required! Anyone within the field of vision of the iPad/iPhone camera can take part. The camera sees, and the person experiences, an augmented reality filled with virtual musical instruments. Any movement that ‘touches’ the virtual instruments produces piano, guitar or percussion sounds.
Jeanne Susplugas
Where my house lives
In this unique context of confinement, Jeanne Susplugas began to collect personal accounts of confinement. These short stories were passed on to writer Claire Castillon, who reinterpreted the situations to create powerful, imaginary narratives. This collection is not intended to be a precise analysis or a sociological study, but rather to offer a range of experiences, some painful or frustrating, others bitter or disturbing, revealing in a powerful and profound way our reactions to an unknown and unpredictable event. Produit par Jeu de Paume (France) et Aarea (Brasil).
ONLINE PERFORMANCE
Collectif Orum
Nos Vies Comme des Songes
“Nos Vies Comme des Songes” is an immersive show that brings together technology, video creation, music and theatre. The show is made up of several tableaux, real or fictitious, with figures recounting their sensitive relationship with an invisible event (esoteric, scientific, creative…). Our approach is to ensure that technology serves emotion and history.
Sigrid Coggins
Serial Portraits Virtual
Serial Portraits is a participatory creative process and an invitation to experience virtual reality while taking action in the real world. This version has been adapted for the web. Meet the artist and take up his challenge! All you need is a blank sheet of paper and a pen… The result will be presented in a virtual reality installation in July 2021.
Erin Gee and jena McLean
We as Waves
In “We as Waves”, Erin Gee collaborates with queer playwright Jena McLean to weave a world where the listener is encouraged to lose themselves in the pleasure and danger of sound waves, and to immerse themselves in the sound of Gee’s voice. Gee stares unblinkingly into the camera, caressing the air, using combinations of pre-recorded, lip-synced and whispered live text, playing with expectation and sincerity in an electroacoustic performance inspired by ASMR.
ART VIDEO ONLINE
Elizabeth Leister
All Her Bodies
All Her Bodies uses volumetric video and eye interaction to immerse you in the stories of five women who recount intimate and powerful memories of violence. These women are of different ages and ethnic origins, which shows that these moments can be experienced by anyone. Descriptions of vulnerability and empowerment are woven into five poetic narratives, while collectively referring to issues that have affected women over time and today
Anabela Costa
Baroque Moments On Fire
BAROQUE MOMENTS ON FIRE is an online art video by Anabela Costa: “Between CHAOS and COSMOS, exuberant details, deep colours, achieving a sense without simplicity and austerity in the forms of movement.”
Collectif CK2G
Ghost City
This audio-visual – or, more precisely, “musicalo-graphic” – object is in what the artists hope is a poetically exact correspondence with the 9 paintings in the “Ghost City” series by photographer and visual artist Bruno Clochard. These paintings are the origin of the project. The first “motif” in these images (in the sense of “what motivates”) is linked to the emergence of Covid-19, with its masks, confinement, cities that are gradually emptying out, thousands of very real dead, and the digitisation of our humanity at breakneck speed… Ghost towns!
Chiara Pasa
Still Life
“Still Life” is an art installation that is both physical – as it consists of several AR sculptures made from ceramics, 3D printing and other materials – and VR, as it can be used via the Oculus Rift 3D headset. “Still life” analyses the processes of nature by studying the relationship with it and what is represented in art today as still life.
ONLINE ART SPACE
Stefano Cerelli & Erika Glionna
As big as the internet, as small as a village
“As big as the internet, as small as a village” is a virtual journey through a fictional city of talking algorithms that tell dubious facts about each other and their environment. The WebVR experience reflects on the influential power of digital information and the way in which online communication has dangerously sunk to the level of tales and gossip.
Anke Schiemann, Arthur Gouillart, Alexandra Barancova
aWaiting
Fantasies of a sustainable, human-centred future send their visions back to a time yet to come. In the meantime, we’re stuck, almost exhausted, waiting. Our time is a waiting room for this fantasy of a ‘cleaner’, ‘greener’ future. An intermediate era, condemned as unsustainable, but which, apart from geological time, is here to stay in the foreseeable real time of our human lives. What can we make of a transition that prevails despite its inherent contradictions? At a time when misfortune and emergencies are making themselves felt, our project serves as a spatial archive documenting our encounters with the realities of waiting.
Darcy’s Painting & Sculpture Garden
Darcy Gerbarg
“Darcy’s Painting and Sculpture Garden is a fully interactive and immersive 3DVR experience. Up to 50 people at a time, in the form of avatars, can fly through this garden, in and around the illuminated sculptures and billboard-sized paintings, and observe the works of art from all distances and angles. Avatars can interact and converse with each other.
Commonolithic & FRKTL
Iron Pile
Iron Pile (2021) is a WebVR experience of a twisted metal pile 20 feet high and 100 feet wide, accompanied by a multi-source soundscape accessible via your web browser. A spatialised nebula created at the extreme limits of hardware, sound and network, that has to be experienced to be believed… A collaboration between Commonolithic and FRKTL.
Sandrine Deumier
Lotus Eaters
Lotus Eaters is a journey through an immersive and interactive virtual environment that attempts to develop an imaginary world centred on a form of post-futuristic animism.
Arash Akbari
Obscure
Obscure is a Web VR audiovisual installation by Arash Akbari. An AI-generated wave sculpture forms the centrepiece of the composition, while a data-driven scaffold fixes it in place. As viewers enter and move around the sculpture, spatial sound elements shape their perception of the essence of the object.
Jean-Michel Jarre – VRrOOm
Welcome to the Other Side
Jean-Michel Jarre’s virtual concert “Welcome To The Other Side” at Notre-Dame was produced in partnership with VRrOOm, the City of Paris and under the patronage of UNESCO. The New Year’s Eve concert was seen by 75 million viewers and virtual revellers around the world across multiple platforms, including VR platforms VRChat and Oculus Venues, national and international television and radio, and various social media channels. The 50-minute concert, which can be replayed, includes tracks from Jarre’s recent album Electronica.
