Timeframe: July 2023 - February 2024

ExperiMotion 3 took place in collaboration with guest artist Anna Vasof, who develops new cinematography and animation mechanisms in her artistic practice, designing and building innovative mechanisms to produce critical films, actions, and installations. Her collaboration with the VRinMotion team involved exploring the relationship between real objects and their virtual counterparts, as well as the manipulation and representation of the space-time continuum within virtual reality using stop-motion animation and eye-tracking. In a total of three workshops lasting several days, three different project ideas were conceived and implemented to varying degrees of completeness.

All of the three project ideas mentioned dealt loosely with parallels between historical media and modern technologies. In the first of the three project implementations, a protagonist was encouraged to capture photo sequences of a bird's flight in a virtual environment using a virtual camera, which, however, had a physical counterpart, based on Etienne-Jules Marey's chronophotograph. When the virtual camera was triggered, a digital photo and a rough 3D representation of the protagonist outside the VR were also taken. These captured individual images could then be reassembled into an animated sequence. A moving birdcage sculpture was created for the second short project. Using a 360-degree camera in the cage, visitors can be teleported into the cage by putting on VR glasses to experience a visual and sonic illusion of time by means of space fragmentation and stop-motion animation, while closing an eye interrupts the illusion. The third project idea, although only sketchily and prototypically implemented, pays homage to the surrealist silent film "Un Chien Andalou" from 1929. Using virtual reality, visitors can admire a live image of their own eyes on the screen in a movie theater while interacting with a virtual, oversized razor blade.

The invited artist Anna Vasof was able to derive the following from the individual experimental short projects for her further artistic work; The immersive nature of VR devices is both their strength and their curse, as not many people are in daily contact with VR stories. The immersive effect often dominates the narrative of the images they display. In this sense, the current situation is somewhat reminiscent of the early cinema of attractions, when cinema was still searching for dominant narrative forms and the resulting artistic possibilities.

Talk by Vrääth Öhner: The Cage of Time at Expanded Animation, Ars Electronica Center, Linz. (2024, September 5)