with Uwe Brunner and Bettina Katja Lange.
Title: Occultation
Authors: Uwe Brunner, Bettina Katja Lange and Joan Soler-Adillon
Format: VR experience (Room-Scale)
Duration: 8-10 minutes
Occultation was exhibited at the Espronceda, Institute of Art & Culture gallery, in Barcelona, from February 21st to 29th, 2020.
Occultation is an immersive XR installation between physical and virtual world capturing the material character of our everyday stories.
Our everyday life is told by the things we surround ourselves with: a traffic sign at the crossroads, the grandmother’s inherited camera, a newly bought Nike sports pants. Every moment in our life is much dictated by the relationship we have established to these things. We own them and we dream of them; we collect, we love, we bestow… we share our most imitate moments with things.
Private collections are witness to the existence of a person and can tell us about their story, their wishes and hopes, their preferences and maybe their fears. Things became the archives of our social life, storages of our vivid memories and canvases onto where we project ourselves.
Objects are virtual portals to the stories and histories of humankind, as much as they are a fertile ground for speculations. It is part of their character to mystify and to store the best kept secrets. It is in the nature of things that they are inexhaustible and inscrutable.
Based on a collection of everyday objects, Occultation presents an immersive experience that continuously oscillates between the physical and the virtual space. In it, visitors are able to interact with objects that expand into the virtual space and gradually unfold fragments of their untold stories and secrets. By inhabiting those spatial stories, visitors find theirselves in an intricate web of entanglement, open to speculation, of everyday objects and their owners.
Occultation was created during the Immensiva VR/AR Residency at Espronceda, Institute of Art & Culture, Barcelona (Catalonia), on Februrary 2020.
