Alice Unchained XR (2018-2019)
3-Channel 3D-Animation Installation
Including Vive VR Experience +
Augmented-Reality Wallpaper
Alice Unchained is a virtual chamber for chamber music consisting of several motion-captured avatar performances rendered in 3 virtual cameras and a VR experience. It is the first work loosely inspired by Alice in Wonderland, created by Claudia Hart with music by the composer Edmund Campion, choreography and captured dancing by Kristina Isabelle, and a wrestling routine and captured performance by Isaias Valesquez. The Alices series imagines a future in which advanced bio-technologies would liberate human culture from the constraints of an individual, gendered body. In response, Hart directed and motion-captured professional wrestler Isaias Velazquez and choreographer-dancer Kristina Isabelle, mixing their data together to create a singular, cyborg ballet.
Alice Unchained is a liminal space, a physical room installation consisting of projections on three walls covered by augmented-reality wallpaper with a VR headset accessible in the center of the room. Hart further complicates her play between multiple realities by covering one gallery wall with augmented-reality wallpaper. Alice XR wallpaper features a decorative motif esthetically related to the Alice virtual worlds but also triggering an augmented-reality web app for smart devices. This app turns a tablet or phone into a “magic mirror,” permitting viewers to see animation embedded in the graphic wallpaper pattern.
Alice Unchained XR mixes realities in the truest sense. The installation combines different perceptual models in a single exhibition space. The first is the “flat” three-channel high-definition movie projection. The second takes place within what has been mathematically and therefore perceptually constructed as a spherical dome: the Vive VR world. The third is the flat decorative animations on the wallpaper revealed through the augmented app. These three kinds of representational space coexist simultaneously, though each emerges from a different epoch in art history. The animations use different versions of photographic illusionism coming from the 19th -20th century, the age of the analog camera. The VR dome-like space is post photographic, and is a new kind of post-digital picture-making. These multiple illusions transform Alice Unchained into a halfway space, one that is truly liminal. It bridges multiple worlds by uniting very different representational strategies. But it is also a world of inverted logic capable of confounding the mind and its perceptions.