Alice XR: A Machine For Thinking Claudia Hart, 2019
Room installation projected on three or four walls with Alice VR hanging headset in the center
Alice is a machine for thinking: a virtual chamber for repose and contemplation. It is the third work loosely inspired by Alice in Wonderland, created by media artist Claudia Hart.
Alice mashes 3D animation, motion-captured ballet and music improvised by Danielle DeGruttola, while immersed in the VR, then recaptured and placed in the bodies of music avatars who is then added back into it, who is driven and deforming to the now recorded live track. Alice feeds-back the virtual and the live, blending them together in a liminal, uncanny mix. This XR work mixes realities. It consists of 2 parallel representations, coinciding in a single exhibition space. The first is a four-channel high-definition movie projected on three or four walls. It is a 3D animation rendered anamorphically as a panoramic expanse. The second is a VR surround environment mapped into the same physical space, built out as Vive VR.
The dual spaces exist simultaneously, though each is a construction coming from different art historical periods: one from the age of capture and the analog camera and the other from the current digital age. Hart has conceived of this doubling as liminal, a construction made possible through the “queering” of space and likens it to the technology theorist Donna Haraway’s notion of the Cyborg as first described in her 1983 Manifesto, where the writer imagined a Utopian future in which advanced bio-technologies would liberate human culture from the constraints of traditional gender binaries. As liminal, Alice expresses the idea that the VR medium itself is a paradigmatic philosopher's hut, world of inverted logic to confound the mind and its perceptions.
Music by Danielle DeGruttola Audio Mix by Edmund Campion Editing by Meredith Leich Alice Unchained was created with the support of the Center for New Music and Audio Technology at UC Berkeley Motion Capture Technical Producer: Stéphane Dalbera Motion Capture Director: Jeremy Meunier Motion Capture Studio Courtesy Of: Game On, Montreal Motion Capture Post Production Courtesy Of: Atopos, Paris, in partnership with the Bachelor in Real-Time-3D Program, HECTIC, Paris