games & play

  • Paradigm Shell
  • SHI•RO
  • future perspectives
  • B[ORDERS]
  • 100 years of Bauhaus
  • Klickhüpfguck

    • media arts

  • DISCO CRAWLER
  • neveroddoreven
  • access server
  • Code, Layers, Infrastructures
  • Gazing Figures
  • privacy arena
  • webcamera obscura

    • about

  • Iz
    •

    future perspectives,
    modified animals,
    critical machines

    A screen recording shows a pixelated scene of a hand moving a flower closer to the camera. The background is black, with some lost pixels dancing around.

    An experimental research series on virtual gazes and VR, 2017-18, with Jasper Meiners

    Our interest in modified visions was awakened through the advertisements of virtual reality (VR) companies which stated that ‚everything is possible‘ (Oculus, 2013) with and in VR. Oculus’ commercials show how ostriches, flightless birds, learn to fly by watching a flight simulation in a VR headset.

    While commercial VR companies capitalize on the ableist fantasy of overcoming bodily 'limitations', we wondered how to question, hack, and rewrite the defaults embedded in VR systems. As our graduation work at the School of Art and Design Kassel, we developed 10 experiments to question concepts of 'the virtual'.

    Each exp_ started off with specific research questions and an idea for a gaze modification or different way of perception. Key to our approach was to play forward: Whenever we got stuck, we tried a different approach.

    experiments

    exp_01: the internet restroom

    In a browser, a virtual 3D space is opened and shows a bathroom with 4 toilet cabins. While the left cabin is closed, the two right cabins are open and show closer toilets with red lids.

    interactive online space. visitors enter the internet restroom and communicate with others by interacting with light switches, doors, flushes. If visitors need a break, they can enter a cabin and close its door to block the cabin for other users – making their cabin 'a truly surveillance free space' on the World Wide Web.

    exp_02: all is surface

    A person with blonde shoulder long hair is positioned in front of a computer screen on which silvery cans mirror some of her appearance. She is touching a webcam that is positioned below the screen to modify the images.

    installation: application that loops a gaze between human eyes and a webcam, opening questions about nonhuman participants in sighted humans habits of seeing.

    exp_03: insect vision

    A screenshot taken from within a VR application shows 12 hexagonal tiles. Every tile has its own field of vision, meaning that each shows a slightly different angle on a simple virtual scene in which fruit are positioned in a room with concrete walls.

    VR application: an attempt to simulate the view of the wasp Megaphragma mymaripenne, one of the smallest insects known to humans. This experiment applied 29 multidirectional facets/points of view to human testers who are accustomed to binocular vision.

    exp_04: item vision

    A screen recording shows a pixelated scene of a hand moving a flower closer to the camera. The background is black, with some lost pixels dancing around.

    VR application that emphasizes saturated colors so that objects seen through the camera of the HTC Vive VR headset appear like items in a game.

    exp_05: A synchrony

    installation: a real time connection is established between a physical and a corresponding digital cube. The cube can be altered by human actors and by algorithms.

    exp_06: Default Safari

    A photographed view through a VR headsets shows a gallery space with people and objects in dark colors. The colors smear as though some of the people and objects are in motion.

    VR application that picks up bright colors in webcam imagery and turns them black. This experiment questions the white-as-default logic of technological image production and is based on research on how whiteness in favored by facial recognition algorithms.

    exp_07: Motion Vision

    VR application that only shows objects that are in motion inspired by the vision of cats.

    exp_08: Gazing Figures

    The photo is filled by a person who is wearing a dark, self-made Virtual Reality Suit that consists of a hood for the head in which a VR headset is hidden, a large shirt that has webcams attached to it, and leggins. They are crouched down, with one leg extended and one leg holding their weight. Their arms are reaching towards the sides of the image. Webcams are attached to their wrists, and to both knees.

    Performance & Installation. Gazing Figures lets go of two-eyes vision and confronts performers with a multi-eyed perspective that is inspired by the jumping spider Phidippus Regius.

    exp_09: urban AR lab

    On an Augmented Reality Walk, three out of six participants are wearing white AR headsets. The person in the front is touching the headset with their hand, and using the other hand to touch the concrete wall next to them.

    Experimental hacking lab and city walks at Stadttfinden Festival Leipzig, 2017. As a team of four (with Jörn Röder and Lennert Raesch), we developed sensor kits that sent repeated measurements of carbon dioxide, air humidity, temperature and water values to smartphones in AR headsets. We turned these measurements into vision modifications so that unvisited phenomena in cities could be experienced by participants of urban AR city walks.

    exp_10: Nica Heads

    Four 3D-printed heads in pink, organge, blue and green are arranged diagonally on a mirroring surface with the pink head in the front. This head has USB cables sticking out of their cheecks, and a large tentacle instead of hair.

    3D-printed heads for the otherwise headless Golden Nica, which is the award of the media arts festival Ars Electronica. A trans*feminist reclamation of an award given to cis-men in most cases.