Latest news with #immersiveart
Yahoo
14 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Exhibition sheds new light on Fountains Abbey
A "powerful" immersive installation will cast new light on parts of a World Heritage site which have not been seen for 40 years, an artist has said. Ed Kluz said his Chaos and Light exhibition, in the Great Chamber at Fountains Hall in North Yorkshire, explored a "pivotal moment in British history" - the transition from the Tudor to the Stuart era. Kluz said the work bridged past and present "through sound, video and sculpture" in a part of the Fountains Abbey World Heritage Site closed to the public since the 1980s. "Fountains Hall has a mysterious, almost casket-like quality. It looks like a jewel box from the outside. It's highly decorative and theatrical," he said. The installation coincides with the Summer Solstice, the longest day of the year, and is set to run until 21 December, the shortest day. Kluz said a "monumental central sculpture" surrounded by immersive video and soundscapes would "envelop visitors in a sensory journey". "This piece is about this idea of comfort in times of change and shift. When things are happening so fast you can barely get to grips with it," he explained. Justin Scully, the attraction's general manager, said: "We are delighted to have the amazing work here. "We are a World Heritage Site, but it's dominated by the abbey and its 18th-Century water gardens. But our World Heritage inscription is about layers of history." Mr Scully said to be able to access and understand Fountains Hall and its history through the installation was "just brilliant" and added "another dimension to a visit to Fountains". "The piece is calming and meditative and there is something quite powerful about the words of 400 years ago speaking to the anxieties of today," he added. Listen to highlights from North Yorkshire on BBC Sounds, catch up with the latest episode of Look North. Fountains Abbey improvements to go ahead Cathedral wants artists to mark 1,400th birthday
BBC News
14 hours ago
- Entertainment
- BBC News
Fountains Abbey unveils Chaos and Light exhibition
A "powerful" immersive installation will cast new light on parts of a World Heritage site which have not been seen for 40 years, an artist has Kluz said his Chaos and Light exhibition, in the Great Chamber at Fountains Hall in North Yorkshire, explored a "pivotal moment in British history" - the transition from the Tudor to the Stuart era. Kluz said the work bridged past and present "through sound, video and sculpture" in a part of the Fountains Abbey World Heritage Site closed to the public since the 1980s."Fountains Hall has a mysterious, almost casket-like quality. It looks like a jewel box from the outside. It's highly decorative and theatrical," he said. The installation coincides with the Summer Solstice, the longest day of the year, and is set to run until 21 December, the shortest said a "monumental central sculpture" surrounded by immersive video and soundscapes would "envelop visitors in a sensory journey"."This piece is about this idea of comfort in times of change and shift. When things are happening so fast you can barely get to grips with it," he explained. Justin Scully, the attraction's general manager, said: "We are delighted to have the amazing work here."We are a World Heritage Site, but it's dominated by the abbey and its 18th-Century water gardens. But our World Heritage inscription is about layers of history."Mr Scully said to be able to access and understand Fountains Hall and its history through the installation was "just brilliant" and added "another dimension to a visit to Fountains"."The piece is calming and meditative and there is something quite powerful about the words of 400 years ago speaking to the anxieties of today," he added. Listen to highlights from North Yorkshire on BBC Sounds, catch up with the latest episode of Look North.
CBS News
10-06-2025
- Entertainment
- CBS News
At 2025 Tribeca Festival, VR, augmented reality and AI showcase immersive storytelling
The 2025 Tribeca Festival continues this week with movie screenings, Q&As, industry panel discussions and public performances across New York City. But one program in this year's festival takes place in virtual worlds. For more than a decade, Tribeca has been expanding its focus beyond cinema and television to include new avenues of storytelling through the use of virtual reality, augmented reality, and other nascent technologies, producing some vivid immersive displays. Even if the storytelling aspect of the programs were limited, the artistic expressions could be powerful. This was especially true with past exhibits that enveloped the viewer in massive spaces, in which computer-generated imagery or time-lapse photography placed the viewer in new worlds, from exploding galaxies to swirling blood vessels. A view of "Boreal Dreams," a simulation of climate's impact on consciousness, one of many exhibits in the 2025 Tribeca Festival's Immersive program. David Morgan/CBS News Hosted under the umbrella title "In Search of Us," this year's installation in Lower Manhattan ties 11 projects together under the rubric of impacts on humanity — exploring topics from artificial intelligence to climate change, war, school shootings and transphobia. The exhibits with the most profound effects are those with the strongest and most emotional stories embedded inside them. The VR exhibit "Fragile Home" allows viewers to explore a house in Ukraine, before and after the Russian invasion. David Morgan/CBS News; Tribeca Festival Within a simple, delineated space furnished with minimal furniture, "Fragile Home," by Ondřej Moravec and Victoria Lopukhina, uses mixed reality to recreate a home in Ukraine that comes under bombardment. Wearing goggles, the viewer walks through a comfortable, well-appointed living room, past a dinner table and a purring cat, and looks outside the window to a peaceful vista — all of which, in a flash, is replaced by the home's bombed-out remains, vandalized with Russian forces' "Z" graffiti. The sense of violation is made so powerful in so simple a setting — and the recognition that such destruction is multiplied millions of times over is heart-wrenching. But the objects that survived — those with personal meaning to just a handful of people – become representations of resilience to many. Left: A view of the cinematic game "Scent." Right: the AR "There Goes Nikki." Tribeca Festival; David Morgan/CBS News "Scent," by Alan Kwan, is a first-person cinematic game in which the player becomes a dog wandering a landscape, who observes people being attacked and killed by malevolent forces. In between avoiding bombs and gunfire, the dog helps guide the souls of those killed to become reincarnated. It's a meditative view of cruel violations impacting humanity and nature. Armed with a tablet, viewers of the augmented reality "There Goes Nikki" can wander a garden populated by virtual flowers, and a visualization of the late poet Nikki Giovanni reciting her poem, "Quilting the Black-eyed Pea (We're going to Mars)." By Idris Brewster, Michele Stephenson and Joe Brewster. Attendees subject themselves to AI's judgmental streak in "AI & Me: The Confessional and AI Ego." David Morgan/CBS News How dangerous is artificial intelligence? How dumb is it? How snarky? "AI & Me: The Confessional and AI Ego," directed by Daniela Nedovescu and Octavian Mot, provides viewers with an opportunity to become test subjects, as it were, to AI's judgmental streak. Upon sitting in a chair, the participant is captured on camera and analyzed by AI, which conjures up your name, personality traits, and goals. How close are they to reality? Prepare to get snarked. But if the AI program "likes" you? Your AI-altered image will turn up in its pantheon of favored carbon-based units (pictured above, right). A view of the VR exhibit "Uncharted," which combines a water-like background (actually composed of numeric symbols) and images of a dancer. Tribeca Festival Other exhibits are immersive representations of culture — some self-generated, some created by AI. "Uncharted" (VR, by Kidus Hailesilassie) combines footage of a dancer with spoken word and visualizations of symbols to become a rapturous demonstration of pan-African language and storytelling. The interactive "New Maqam City," by MIPSTERZ, allows you to become a DJ, manipulating drum beat patterns recognizable in Muslim communities around the world to create a transcendent vibe. "The Innocence of Unknowing" is a video essay and AI project studying media coverage of mass shootings, projected within a simulated classroom. (Created by Ryat Yezbick and Milo Talwani through the MIT Open Documentary Lab.) Strap in! Viewers of the haptic VR exhibit "In the Current of Being." David Morgan/CBS News One of the strongest impacts of any installation was made by "In the Current of Being," by Cameron Kostopoulos. Using haptic VR, the viewer is literally strapped into a chair; electrodes are attached to your fingertips, arms, and torso, along with VR goggles. Interesting, you think. Then, the presentation begins, recounting the true story of a survivor of electroshock conversion therapy. (As a teenager, Carolyn Mercer had been "treated" with electrical shocks in an attempt to "cure" her from becoming trans.) As images of female beauty are flashed before you, electrical impulses throb across your body. This is not virtual reality; the extreme discomfort is very real, forcing me out of the presentation less than halfway through. The upshot: aversion therapy works, because I will never allow VR electrodes to be attached to my body ever again. An AR component of "The Power Loom and The Founders Pillars" shows African imagery and textiles onto the pillars of the New York Stock Exchange. Tribeca Festival Beyond the confines of the exhibition space at 161 Water Street, the two-part "The Power Loom and The Founders Pillars" (by Lesiba Mabitsela, Meghna Singh and Simon Wood) includes a site-specific AR experience, visible on a mobile app six blocks away, at the New York Stock Exchange, creating a memorial to enslaved people once sold at the Wall Street Slave Market, established in the 18th century. While the Tribeca Festival proper concludes on June 15, "In Search of Us," presented in partnership with Onassis ONX and Agog: The Immersive Media Institute, runs through June 29. For more details and ticket info click here.
The Guardian
22-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Manchester to host world premiere of Marina Abramović's Balkan Erotic Epic
Marina Abramović is an art world superstar well known for challenging visitors' awkwardness at sex and nudity by, for example, asking them to squeeze through a doorway between a naked couple. This year, she will take it to a new level in what she is calling the most ambitious work of her long career – an immersive erotic epic featuring performers re-enacting ancient and unashamedly sexual rituals. Manchester will be the venue for the world premiere of Abramović's Balkan Erotic Epic. It is, Abramović says, a reflection on how 'in our culture today, we label anything erotic as pornography'. There will be a cast of 70, including dancers, musicians and singers, with the production unfolding across 13 scenes. Anyone flustered by the closeup sight of breasts, bottoms, vaginas and penises should probably start drawing up alternative plans for October. The scenes will include Scaring the Gods, a recreation of a centuries-old ritual in which Balkan village women would try to keep the rain away by running to the fields, lifting their skirts up and baring themselves to the heavens. Fertility Rite will re-enact a fevered ritual where naked bodies writhe against the ground in 'a desperate call for fertility'. Massaging the Breast explores a ritual where women do just that, gesticulating over graves to awaken the earth. Abramović has described the work as the fulfilment of a long-term dream. 'Balkan Erotic Epic is the most ambitious work in my career,' she said. 'This gives me a chance to go back to my Slavic roots and culture, look back to ancient rituals and deal with sexuality in relation to the universe and the unanswered questions of our existence. 'Through this project I would like to show poetry, desperation, pain, hope, suffering and reflect our own mortality.' Belgrade-born Abramović, 78, is one of the world's most distinguished artists with a career spanning five decades. She is seen as a boundary pushing pioneer of performance who has regularly used her own body to test the limits of physical and mental endurance, often having to be rescued from peril by audience members. She has explored Balkan erotic rituals in film before, but the project premiering in Manchester is a new, much more ambitious work. In an interview last year, Abramović acknowledged that British people have a peculiar sensibility about certain things. 'You're so puritan about everything, about nudity, about sexual organs,' she said. She revels in challenging that. At her blockbuster retrospective at the Royal Academy of Arts in London in 2023 she re-staged a work called Imponderabilia featuring a naked couple in a doorway it would have been rude for visitors not to squeeze through. The question for many was whether to face the naked man or the naked woman. Some went through, apologising. Others were nonchalant, as if it was something they did all the time. Balkan Erotic Epic is produced by Factory International and will be staged at Aviva Studios. The artistic director and chief executive, John McGrath, said it was an honour, describing Abramović as 'one of the most influential artists of our time'. He added: 'This new performance work offers an unmissable opportunity for audiences to experience the next chapter of her creative life – bold, immersive and on a scale that's totally unprecedented.' Audiences will be invited to navigate the performance as they wish with the possibility of 'pop-up encounters' of 'intimate performances, feverish dances and haunting songs'. It is based on folklore and ancestral traditions from regions taking in Romania, Bulgaria, Greece, Albania, Serbia, Kosovo, North Macedonia and Montenegro as well as Roma and Traveller cultures. The idea is that 'erotic' is not something that should be seen as taboo, but more as 'a vital spiritual and life force'. After Manchester, the production will be seen in Barcelona, Berlin, New York and Hong Kong. Balkan Erotic Epic is at Aviva Studios 9-19 October. Tickets currently on sale for Factory International members and will be available for the general public on 29 May
