Karst
Virtual Reality, 2018
Snow Yunxue Fu
Commissioned Sound: Daniel Brookman
Project Assistants: Arne Muraoka, Jay Thakkar, and Ming Rang Bai.
Karst is a multi-level virtual reality visual and sound experience/artwork that creates liminal spaces in between the representational and the theatrical, the limited and the multi-dimensional, and the abstract and the real, for people to visit and experience. The multiple scenes in Karst reference a variety of places in our reality that are being limited to be visited because of various reasons, revealing human’s relationship to the larger world. It pushes the boundaries of landscape art by putting natural ecologies and human environmental interventions in dialogue through immersive VR. It also attempts to embody the concept of Plato’s cave in the medium of a virtually constructed realm, providing a contemplative environment for the visitor to wonder; walking and teleporting within the control of the wireframed virtual hands that are given to them.
Refresh
Multimedia Performance, 2021
Lela Pierce, Snow Yunxue Fu, Eric Anderson, Zoe Cinel, Junyi Min
Refresh responds to the three Virtual Reality (VR) worlds created by Snow Yunxue Fu in Karst, using body movement, motion sensors, sound and video. For five months the artists met weekly to investigate Karst’s vastness, overwhelming beauty, and moments of suspension under the context of glitches. “The ongoing presence of the glitch generates a welcome and protected space in which to innovate and experiment” 1. It is in this unexpected space of disruption of the fiction, commonly disregarded as technical failure or improper use, that Refresh finds compelling moments of awe, play, resistance and a new dialogue between the body, the technology, and the virtual environment.
Beginning with Karst’s themes, inspirations, and visuals, Refresh unfolds the complex politics of VR, especially the relationship between the experience of physical space and its equivalent. Karst was created by Fu to translate and preserve her memories of visiting endangered, disappearing worlds into a digital artwork that serves as a dislocated point of access for the individual. Pierce, whose experience of these landscapes is limited to Karst, responds to the environment by embodying, negotiating, and discovering the limitations and uniqueness of the digital spaces.
Refresh highlights points of tension and conscientiousness between a body and the wearable technology/environment, and challenges VR’s physical constraints and necessary guided points of access (eye to see, hands to navigate). As VR was developed associating vision with immersion, Refresh rejects the sensorial hierarchy by involving the body as a whole to create a truly immersive experience.
While the human eye, ready to immerse, looks through the duo-screens of the VR goggle to experience the memories and recorded environments through simulation, computer vision, intended to survey, is embedded in VR systems, functioning through the use of cameras to scan the room constantly. In the context of a global pandemic and the exponential increase of digital communication and connection, there is no escape from the eye of the digital and from the screen that mediates human interaction. Drawing connections between screen based technologies, accessibility, and surveillance, Refresh is a multilayered artwork that breaks the fourth wall and reveals the nature of the network: a sometimes needed, sometimes unaware dance where we all see while being seen, scrutinize while being surveilled, and form memories while being encoded ourselves.
1. Russell, “Glitch Feminism”, 27
