Roes, 2018
Roés (Flows) is a virtual reality project, designed for and inspired by the Eyes' Walk festival 2018. The project compares the paths followed by the visitors of the festival itself, to the trails curved on the global map by the flow of refugees.
How well do we really perceive the adventure of those people? The mass media are flooded daily with images and descriptions but they often focus on individual dramatic events, sometimes displayed to shock. “Ροές” attempts to bring the viewer closer to the concept of the ‘course’ experienced by the refugees and the concomitant difficulties in moving, but also to take a position on this phenomenon.
With this reasoning, the audience (using the particular application) is faced with a crowd simulation, moving in the digital footprint of the exhibition space, assuming two distinct roles - that of the exogenous factor and the role of the perpetrator himself.
As an exogenous factor, the visitor has the ability to intervene in the course of the crowd, facilitating or preventing it from moving, having the same scale correlation like that of a child playing with a colony of ants; his dimensions shrinking continuously until the visitor becomes one with the flow of the crowd. When the viewer is fully integrated with the crowd, he is given the opportunity to be dragged by or follow any member of his choice, leaving his fingerprint as a distinct unit in the mass, allowing the next visitor to ‘read’ his path and distinguish it from the rest. Thus, this massive flow, originally made up of impersonal units for viewers, acquires identity.
The virtual world in which the visitor is immersed into, references that of the festival; the crowd however is not only invited to participate in the events of the festival, but also to make a statement on the movement of people and populations wherever this has happened or is happening right now.
Crowd, unit, flow. These are the three elements that govern the work "Ροές", in an effort to assign a dual role to the user, where on the one hand he has almost absolute control over the crowd, and on the other he becomes one with it, having surrendered his course.
Christina Chrysanthopoulou, Renia Papathanasiou, Dimitris Trakas
Copyright ViRA 2018
How well do we really perceive the adventure of those people? The mass media are flooded daily with images and descriptions but they often focus on individual dramatic events, sometimes displayed to shock. “Ροές” attempts to bring the viewer closer to the concept of the ‘course’ experienced by the refugees and the concomitant difficulties in moving, but also to take a position on this phenomenon.
With this reasoning, the audience (using the particular application) is faced with a crowd simulation, moving in the digital footprint of the exhibition space, assuming two distinct roles - that of the exogenous factor and the role of the perpetrator himself.
As an exogenous factor, the visitor has the ability to intervene in the course of the crowd, facilitating or preventing it from moving, having the same scale correlation like that of a child playing with a colony of ants; his dimensions shrinking continuously until the visitor becomes one with the flow of the crowd. When the viewer is fully integrated with the crowd, he is given the opportunity to be dragged by or follow any member of his choice, leaving his fingerprint as a distinct unit in the mass, allowing the next visitor to ‘read’ his path and distinguish it from the rest. Thus, this massive flow, originally made up of impersonal units for viewers, acquires identity.
The virtual world in which the visitor is immersed into, references that of the festival; the crowd however is not only invited to participate in the events of the festival, but also to make a statement on the movement of people and populations wherever this has happened or is happening right now.
Crowd, unit, flow. These are the three elements that govern the work "Ροές", in an effort to assign a dual role to the user, where on the one hand he has almost absolute control over the crowd, and on the other he becomes one with it, having surrendered his course.
Christina Chrysanthopoulou, Renia Papathanasiou, Dimitris Trakas
Copyright ViRA 2018
