The Interactive Media Room transports visitors from an enclosed soundproof space into an immersive virtual world. You can experience one of the many new experimental approaches and innovations happening in contemporary virtual reality, video game, and digital art development.
April to June 2023
Samsara
Hsin-Chien Huang | 2020 | Taiwan | VR | English and Chinese | 21 min.
In Buddhism, ‘samsara’ refers to the karmic cycle of the six different realms of life and death. This immersive and interactive experience journeys across millions of years through a myriad of physical and psychological landscapes—from violent scenes of war and destruction that render our planet uninhabitable, to a psychedelic odyssey to search for a new home. As the environment shifts, you are no longer just human but a disoriented, mutating entity trapped in a continuous cycle through time and space without reaching a destination. Can we be freed from this seemingly endless quest for spiritual belonging?
January to March 2023
The Hallway
Alan Kwan | 2016 | Hong Kong | Video game | No dialogue
Inspired by the artist’s own childhood experience, The Hallway is a single-player video game in which the player steps into the perspective of a five-year-old child. After being expelled by his father, the child wanders alone in a silent hallway, unable to go home. Odd items such as a tricycle, a paper plane, and figurines are scattered across the floor. Without explicit cause and effect to your actions, the game encourages you to explore the surreal setting to look for a way out: where do the doorways lead to, somewhere specific or nowhere we can predict?
December 2022
The Universe of Liu Kuo-Sung
Huang Hsin-Chien & Liu Kuo-Sung | 2020 | Taiwan | VR | English and Chinese | 7 min. 30 sec.
Liu Kuo-Sung is a pioneer of contemporary ink art. During the 1950s in postwar Taiwan, he revolutionised Chinese painting through abstraction by blending Western and Eastern traditions in his work. The Universe of Liu Kuo-Sung, a collaboration with digital artist Huang Hsin-Chien, continues the ninety-year-old painter’s trailblazing artistic trajectory. In this interactive and immersive experience, viewers embark on a dramatic three chapter journey through Liu’s iconography. In the first chapter, you witness the genesis of the universe in a monochrome environment, where explosive torrents of ink pour from the clouds and puddle at your feet. The scene then opens onto a colourful and craggy topography as a blazing red sun multiplies around you. Finally, you are transported to outer space with the expanding cosmos reflecting humanity’s minuscule place within our vast universe.
Created in partnership with VIVE Arts.
November 2022
Planet City
Liam Young | 2020 | Australia, United States | VR | English and Chinese without subtitles | 5 min. 50 sec.
Could we design a city for ten billion people—the entire population on Earth? Planet City, by film director and architect Liam Young, provocatively imagines one megacity to house all our urban sprawl, allowing the rest of the world to return to the wilderness. Based on extensive cross-disciplinary research, the film explores the productive potential of hyperdensity and tackles some of the most urgent questions humanity faces today.
Created in partnership with VIVE Arts.
October 2022
Endodrome
Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster | 2019 | France | VR | No dialogue | 7 min. 50 sec.
Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster's Endodrome—its title derived from the Greek words: endon, meaning ‘internal’ and dromos, meaning ‘racetrack’—explores the notion of space through virtual reality. In this hypnotic experience, you are immersed in a monochrome environment, before moving into a colourful, abstract, psychedelic space. The vibrant colour fields shift in response to your gaze and voice.
Drawing from the artist’s interest in alternative states of consciousness, Endodrome intends to induce a trance-like state. The work and its accompanying soundtrack by shamanic musician Corine Sombrun take us beyond physical realms, to a journey within.
Created in partnership with VIVE Arts.
This work includes visual effects that may trigger photosensitive epilepsy.
September 2022
RE-ANIMATED
Jakob Kudsk Steensen | 2019 | Denmark | VR | English without subtitles | 14 min. 16 sec.
RE-ANIMATED invites you to a dense digital landscape, once home to the extinct Kaua’i ʻōʻō bird native to Hawaii. Drawing from archival research at the American Museum of Natural History, interviews with an ornithologist, and extensive fieldwork, the work resurrects the Kaua’i ʻōʻō bird and reanimates its original habitat filled with plants, birds, fish, and insects. The soundscape features recordings of the bird’s mating call and algorithmic music that responds to your breath and voice, projecting a virtual reality experience unique to every user. RE-ANIMATED poetically examines our relationship with nature, irrevocably altered by human intervention.
Made with support from The Danish Arts Council, Bikuben Foundation, Harvestworks, Mana Contemporary, and Artist Alliance. Produced and owned by Erratic Animist LLC, directed and founded by Jakob Kudsk Steensen.
August 2022
The Jellyfish
Mélodie Mousset & Edo Fouilloux | 2021 | Switzerland & Denmark | VR | No dialogue | Continuous duration
In this virtual reality experience, you are transported to the bottom of the ocean from the soundproof Interactive Media Room. Plunging into a serene aquatic world, you are greeted by a flock of glowing jellyfish. Sing them a song and they will begin to echo and harmonise with the pitch, vibration, and intensity of your voice. Offering audiences a unique interspecies connection, The Jellyfish encourages contemplation of our relationship with other life forms and humanity’s position in the world.
July 2022
S for Sisyphus ¬
lp Yuk-yui | 2015 | Hong Kong | Video game | No dialogue | Continuous duration
In S for Sisyphus ¬, lp Yuk-yui turns Albert Camus’s philosophical essay The Myth of Sisyphus (1942) into an experimental video game. Camus compares the absurdity of life with the experience of Sisyphus, who was condemned to repeatedly push a boulder up a mountain only to have it roll down again. In this game, the player faces a similar philosophical dilemma with an oversized cube. You have two options: push the cube towards a never-ending horizon or end the game by killing yourself. The player can choose to experience the action from four different perspectives: the Player, the Cube, the Other, and the Anonymous God.
June 2022
Into Yourself, Fall
Anish Kapoor | 2018 | United Kingdom | VR | No dialogue | 12 min.
Anish Kapoor is best known for his large-scale sculptures that challenge our perception of reality and physical boundaries. They often create illusionary experiences of space and void. In Kapoor’s first virtual reality work, he explores a unique shapeshifting space—the human body. Simulating vertigo, Into Yourself, Fall invites us to descend inwards, falling into a labyrinth of flesh, organs, and muscles. This immersive journey is an experiment of radical introspection and blurs the boundaries between inside and outside, the self and the world.
This immersive experience is recommended for viewers ages twelve or above.
May 2022
Passenger
Isobel Knowles & Van Sowerwine | 2019 | Australia | VR | English without subtitles | 10 min.
What is it like to arrive in a new country and a new home for the first time? Passenger is a 360 degree stop-motion animation that recreates the experience of an immigrant’s first taxi ride from the airport. Speeding through the dark, you sense the quiet shock of a new world. Your taxi driver—a friendly bird who is a migrant himself—navigates the new terrain with you, acting as your guide while revealing small parts of his own story. Rich with handmade detail, Passenger explores the emotional dislocation of arriving somewhere unfamiliar and beginning the journey of finding a new home.
This immersive experience is suitable for all ages.
December 2021
The Eternal Wave
Cao Fei | 2020 | China | VR | Mandarin without subtitles | 9 min. 30 sec.
Set in and around the Hongxia Theatre in Beijing that houses Cao Fei’s studio, this VR experience takes viewers on a surreal journey through China's early electronics industry. Upon stepping through a kitchen cupboard and into a 1950s computer room, viewers witness an illicit affair before being transported back to the kitchen as an astronaut clumsily emerges from the sink. Crossing through time and space, The Eternal Wave also presents a digital archive of Hongxia, a part of Beijing’s industrial history that is rapidly losing its character due to gentrification.
November 2021
The Invisible Hand
Omer Fast | 2018 | Israel / Germany | VR | Mandarin with English subtitles | 12 min. 30 sec.
Inspired by a Jewish medieval fairytale, Fast’s tragicomic The Invisible Hand is a contemporary urban fable told from the perspective of an eight-year-old Chinese girl from Guangzhou. The fable begins with the father, as a child, discovering an invisible hand of a ghost, which suddenly grants his family ample material wealth. Eventually, it leads to an ethical and social breakdown within the family.
