SUBTITLEA circle, a VR forest, and the artifacts of a year that synchronised everyone.
2020
RELEASE
MEDIUM
Networked multiplayer virtual-reality installation: a real-time 3D environment built in Unity with custom netcode, two VR headsets with in-headset sound, a TouchDesigner-controlled LED lighting system using Art-Net/DMX, living plants, and a physical calligraphic circle painted on the floor with water-based paint.
SHOWN
Two visitors could participate on site while additional users connected remotely through the application. The actions of all participants — on-site and remote — collectively affected the physical lighting in real time.
DIMENSIONS
Physical circle approximately 2.5 m in diameter
RECORD
PS/PROJECT/THE-BECOMING/V01
REGISTER
OPENINDEXSOURCEWET
NOT IN THE RECORD
COLOUR · LOCATED · STATE · PROTOTYPE
01 / ENTRY
A space of becoming.
“The Becoming” is an immersive installation that embodies the key principles of the artistic method of “ontological mapping” — the exploration of the processual, relational, multidimensional nature of reality. Entering the space outlined by a circle, the viewer finds themselves inside a “machine of affective induction” that generates new states of consciousness and body through the transformation of habitual perceptual and conceptual coordinates.
02 / PHYSICAL INSTALLATION
Inside the circle.
FIG. 01 / INSTALLATION LAYOUTSCHEMATIC / NOT TO SCALE
Two bodies. One shared environment. The symbols indicate a spatial principle, not measured placement.
DOC02 / Installation / oblique viewVIEW ↗
01Two seats facing one another.
02Living plants and LED lights inside the circle.
03A calligraphic boundary painted on the floor.
04Gameplay shown on adjacent screens, outside the circle.
PHYSICAL CIRCLE / APPROXIMATELY 2.5 M IN DIAMETER
03 / VIRTUAL SPACE
A forest of 2020.
VIRTUAL ENVIRONMENT / 09 STILLS
The central element of the work is a virtual forest, immersion in which is carried out through VR devices. This forest becomes a metaphor for the very environment of our existence — fluid, rhizomatic, saturated with metamorphoses and singularities. Moving through it, the viewer discovers artifacts of 2020 — traces of the first truly planetary event in the history of information culture, which synchronized the collective experience of humanity.
Images balancing on the edge of the recognizable and the inexpressible — a ventilator suspended in the air, a coronavirus in the river, a stock market crash chart — refer to the experience of radical destabilization of the basic coordinates of existence. Interacting with objects of the virtual world, the viewer discovers their direct impact on the physical space of the installation, just as collective affects “overload” the fabric of reality.
VR01 / Luminous form in the forestVIEW ↗
VR02 / Water / fog / forestVIEW ↗
↘
VR03 / Hospital bedsVIEW ↗
VR05 / Market graphVIEW ↗
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VR04 / Ruined buildingsVIEW ↗
VR08 / Vehicles / fireVIEW ↗
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VR06 / ElephantVIEW ↗
VR07 / Microscopy imageVIEW ↗
↘
VR09 / RiverVIEW ↗
04 / SHARED ACTION
A circuit across worlds.
INTERACTION → PHYSICAL LIGHT
Two visitors could participate on site while additional users connected remotely through the application. The actions of all participants — on-site and remote — collectively affected the physical lighting in real time.
FIG. 02 / FUNCTIONAL RELATIONNOT A NETWORK TOPOLOGY
01ON SITETwo participants
02REMOTEThrough the application
↓ ACTIONS
SHARED VR WORLDUnity / custom netcode
→VIRTUAL IMAGEAdjacent screens
↓TOUCHDESIGNERArt-Net / DMX
PHYSICAL LIGHTInside the circle
On-site and remote participants act in one shared VR environment.
05 / THE BOUNDARY
A zone of intensity.
THE BOUNDARY
The circular form of the installation refers to the idea of a ritual transition, but the boundary itself is understood here not as a clear division between states, but as a zone of intensity of becoming. “The Becoming” explores the boundary as a wave of transformation, passing through which we irreversibly become other.
The project’s title points to the processual nature of reality, eluding attempts at final signification. In a world of total metamorphosis, art takes on the task of conveying the very rhythm of change, the texture of processuality. It becomes a mechanism for initiating the viewer into the experience of a transformative encounter with the other.
FROM THE TEXT“passing through which we irreversibly become other.”
HABITUAL COORDINATES → A ZONE OF INTENSITY → BECOMING OTHER
06 / CO-BEING
Compositions of forces and affects.
CO-BEING
humannonhumansubjectworld
In the spirit of Spinoza and Deleuze’s ontological understanding of ethics, “The Becoming” lets us feel reality as an immanent plane of composition of forces and affects, a space of mutual positing of subject and world. The distinction between actor and environment, human and nonhuman is erased — all become equal participants in the process.
The aesthetic experience constructed by the installation becomes a kind of “simulator” for acquiring a new ethical sensitivity, for reopening the very parameters of our existence. Interweaving the actual and the virtual, the documentary and the imaginary, “The Becoming” invites us to think the world beyond substances and essences, to grasp it at the point of incessant self-differentiation.
Thus, through immersion in an immersive environment that deprives us of familiar supports, the installation cultivates a special mode of co-being with the world — in incompleteness, vulnerability, openness to the radically other. It becomes an experimental testing ground where, through aesthetic experience, scenarios of transformation of the very ethical coordinates of the viewer’s existence are played out.
Ultimately, “The Becoming” manifests art not as a reflection of some predetermined reality, but as an active agent of ontological transformation that changes the very parameters of our perception and understanding of the world. It is an invitation to accept becoming not as a frightening chaos, but as an opportunity for one’s own transformation, for the free creation of forms of life — at the moment of crossing the boundary, at the point of the elusive “between”.
GRAMMAR TRANSFERDIALECT — RELATION
Relational wordsBetween
SOURCE GRAMMARBOUNDARY · STATES
PRESERVED RELATIONbetween
FOREIGN MATERIALBOUNDARY · STATES
PERFORMED RESULTBOUNDARY between STATES
TRACE / AFTERSTATEshared span
BOUNDARY and STATES share a span that belongs to neither
