Worldbuilding

AN EXHIBITION OF VIRTUAL REALITIES

November 3—December 9, 2017

Trinity Square Video, Toronto

Erin Gee —

Project H.E.A.R.T

w/Alex M. Lee

Project H.E.A.R.T is a twist on the archetypical first person shooter war game, proposing a video game where the player controls a cheerleading virtual pop superstar that is controlled by the player’s emotions. The aim: to boost the morale of her military allies. Success is measured by the player’s ability to communicate positive emotional states via a specially designed bio-feedback device. The reward: to fight another day. Inspired by cyborg-feminism, Gee reconfigures the virtual distance that military gaming and pop cultural fame is built on by re-entangling the body, technology, and political agency.

Erin Gee is a Canadian artist who explores new media through the metaphors of human voices and electronic bodies. Her interest in what counts as a voice and a body in the digital age colours her technically innovative work, and distinguishes her practice across performance, choral composition, robotics, and audio art.

Alex M. Lee is a digital artist who utilizes 3D animation and the potential of simulation technology in order to visualize and abstract the notion of time, space, and light - culling from concepts within science, science fiction, and Modernism. He received his BFA and MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Research & Narrative Design: Sofian Audry, Roxanne Baril-Bédard, Erin Gee

3D Art: Alex M. Lee, Marlon Kroll

Animation & Rigging: Nicklas Kenyon, Alex Lee

VFX: Anthony Damiani, Erin Gee, Nicklas Kenyon

Programming: Sofian Audry, Erin Gee, Nicklas Kenyon, Jacob Morin

AI Design: Sofian Audry

Sound Design: Erin Gee, Austin Haughton

Music: Evening Machine Night Chaser (Jonathan Dyck, Rob Green), Heaven Lazerblade (Jonathan Dyck), Virtual Feels (Austin Haughton)

Yowane Haku character originally created by CAFFEIN

Yowane Haku character model created by SEGA

Eshrat Erfanian —

Waiting for Rostam

Eshrat Erfanian’s Waiting for Rostam is a nine minute 360-video, capturing the mundane and everyday in Iran. Panning from shopping malls to historic buildings and museums, Erfanian points at both old and new architectural landmarks, where generic subway stations and brand name malls contrast with 16th to 19th century palaces-turned global museums. With these images Erfanian brings the serenity and calm that she experienced during her 2016 visit to Tehran and Isfahan into 360 degree visual space, as a counter to hyperbolic and anxious popular images of Iran circulating in the west. Through this virtual tour, visitors are prompted to reflect on the ways digital colonization operates through architecture and content producers/consumers.

Eshrat Erfanian is an Iranian born, Toronto based multimedia artist with a PhD from York University. Her practice is focused on the accelerated effect that new technologies have on circulating and establishing images of “alterity.” In 2017, Erfanian was the Artist-in-Residence at the Vermont College of Fine Arts, Faculty of the Graduate Studies.

Concept & Camera: Eshrat Erfanian

Editor: Andrew Cromey

Sound Design: Zev Farber

Jeremy Bailey,
Kristen D. Schaffer —

Preterna

Preterna is a pregnancy simulator that invites viewers to become a pre, pre parent by virtually inhabiting a pregnant body. Expanding from their augmented reality video work, The Future of Marriage (2013), which takes the promises of a post-gender digital world to an ironic extreme, Jeremy Bailey and Kristen D. Schaffer have proposed Preterna, the future of families. Responding to narratives of VR as an “empathy machine,” and taking advantage of the invention of self-learning, and intelligent computer software, they have created software that couples can carry to term, and eventually “raise” as a technologically superior alternative to having a baby. Through their vision of a future of families that transcend material constraints and labour, Jeremy Bailey and Kristen D. Schaffer satirize the utopian lifestyles often proselytized by guru tech innovators.

Jeremy Bailey is a Toronto-based self-proclaimed Famous New Media Artist. “Since the early noughties Bailey has ploughed a compelling, and often hilarious, road through the various developments of digital communications technologies.”(Morgan Quaintance, Rhizome) Bailey has performed and exhibited all over the world, from bathrooms in Buffalo to museums in Moscow.

Kristen D. Schaffer performs as a heterosexual married woman of childbearing age. Schaffer graduated with an MFA from The Slade School of Art in London, UK. Her current research as a doctoral student at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto addresses how we teach socioecological issues to teenagers.

Project accessible at http://preterna.com

Yam Lau —

Out of this World

Following his work in making philosophical inquiries into space and time by constructing virtual spaces with computer modeling and animation software, Yam Lau will explore the philosophical dimensions of the “virtual” with his VR Commission artwork Out of this World: Mind Minus Body. “When VR is activated, I experienced a slight, even infinitesimally negligible “moment” that the body and/or the mind fail to recognize the new immersive reality simultaneously. ... (I can perceive a world but my body isn’t there yet…). This staggering is accompanied by a sensation, often very obscure and below the level of conscious awareness, that the body/mind is deprived of a world, that it is “worldless” for however brief a moment in time…” Drawing from the artist’s first-hand experience with VR described above, Lau seeks to prolong this moment when the body/mind falls out of sync between the worlds of the virtual and the real by exploring its striking parallels with reports of near death experience and the philosophical/experiential implications of such a state. The result is a VR environment that amplifies this dissociative power of the medium based on the research of the aformentioned near-death experiences. Lau’s goal is to explore the productive potential of VR to reconfigure the relationships between the body, mind, and world towards “successive states of flux and becoming.”

Born in Hong Kong, Yam Lau is an artist/writer based in Toronto. Lau’s creative work and research explore new expressions and qualities of space, time and image, often combining computer-generated animation to re-create familiar spaces in varied dimensionalities and perspectives. He teaches at the Department of Visual Art at York University in Toronto.

Concept & 3D: Yam Lau

VR & Coding: Jonathan Carroll

November 3—December 9		2017
November 3	6—8 PM	Opening Reception
November 4	1—3 PM	Panel Discussion with Eshrat Erfanian, Erin Gee and Alex M. Lee
December 2	1—3 PM	Panel Discussion with Yam Lau, Jeremy Bailey and Kristen D. Schaffer

Curators

John G. Hampton is the Executive Director of the Art Gallery of Southwestern Manitoba and Adjunct Curator at the Art Museum at the University of Toronto. His recent research includes the ontologies of stones, humorous minimalism, critical virtuality, and Indigenous relationality. He holds a Masters of Visual Studies – Curatorial Studies (2014) and is a citizen of Canada, USA, and the Chickasaw Nation.

Maiko Tanaka is the Executive Director of Squeaky Wheel Film & Media Art Center in Buffalo, NY. Since 2007 Maiko has curated projects and publications at the Justina M. Barnicke Gallery (now Art Museum at the University of Toronto) Gendai Gallery, Trinity Square Video, and Casco (in Utrecht), among others. She holds a BFA from OCAD University and an MVS from the University of Toronto.

Designer

Shaheer Tarar is a documentary artist and designer from Toronto. He uses satellite images, found footage and legal documents to trace historical events to the role they play in the contemporary moment, and presents these studies as publications, websites, large prints or multi-channel films. Shaheer is a recent graduate of OCAD University.

Installers

Alex Nagy and José A Mora

Staff

David Plant, Emily Fitzpatrick, Andrew Cromey, Milada Kovacova,
and Jason Ebanks

In early 2015, TSV invited four artists/teams to respond to the philosophical, ethical, and physical conditions of “the virtual” by creating new work using VR technology. Created by artists known for working critically in moving image, interactive technologies, animation, and architectural space, the projects they developed upend the prevailing rhetoric used to promote the VR medium and speculate on the creation of alternate realities.

As new virtual technologies begin to flood the popular consciousness via gaming, experience design, journalism, and healthcare industries, they are accompanied by claims that immersive, 360°, and 3D environments create more authentic experiences of “presence.” On the one hand we are seeing claims that the technology can cultivate real empathy for the experiences of others, and on the other, they enhance the resolution of militaristic ways of seeing and “voyeurism without consequence.” The artists in Worldbuilding bring a critical eye to this rhetoric emerging alongside the technology. Through the building of alternate versions of the worlds in which popular VR experiences currently exist, the artists exaggerate, undermine, and push the limits, of the claims of VR’s empathetic and experiential potential, in subtle, humorous, and re-embodying ways.

Curated by John G. Hampton and Maiko Tanaka, Worldbuilding invites audiences to experience four virtual installations in an exhibition that plays with the rules of engagement that immersive technologies are designed from.

Trinity Square Video
401 Richmond St W #121, Toronto, Canada
Tuesday—Saturday: 12—6 PM

Curators

Designer

Installers

Alex Nagy and José A Mora

Staff

David Plant, Emily Fitzpatrick, Andrew Cromey, Milada Kovacova, and Jason Ebanks