The Entropy Gardens by DEPART, is an artistic VR experience exploring the nature of post-digital reality. There is perhaps no cultural artifact more fundamental and archetypal than a garden. It represents an applied confrontation with entropy and the threat of nature through it’s formal principles, symbols, and mythical charge. In an open simulation, a hermetic world – in the form of a virtual garden – is constructed by creating a multisensory and spatio-temporal experience. A virtual landscape invites us to leave behind the gate of physical reality and be guided by the garden. Deeply rooted in our culture and often conceived of on the basis of often given ideals, it determines the visitor’s behavior. At the same time, The Entropy Gardens requires the visitor’s active participation. Virtual narration only exists and develops through the visitor’s immersion and interaction with the garden. Garden and visitor enter into a conversation based on a semiotic system. Through sounds, images and algorithms, a virtual immanence is generated, which exists parallel to the visitor.
DEPART’s The Entropy Gardens manifests the changing relationship between artwork and viewer. The passive observer becomes an active protagonist, indispensable for the progression of narration and the completion of the work. In addition to the participative engagement of the VR visitor, new technologies and the paradigm shift towards digitalization are artistically experienced. The artist no longer produces a physical artifact, but creates the framework for an immaterial and data-based experience. Only through the synthesis of algorithms and VR visitors can the virtual work unfold completely.
DEPART
The Austrian duo DEPART (1999) consists of Leonhard Lass (1978) and Gregor Ladenhauf (1978). Deeply rooted in the digital, their access to multimedia creates unique moments characterized by a formally rigorous and profound aesthetic. They combine precision and emotion into a multifaceted and abstract whole, reflecting fragments of the audience’s experience. DEPART’s works are sometimes mysterious, often deliberately dark and dazzling. They contain a highly concentrated mixture of virtual mechanics, poetic moments and hermetic symbolism. Their work moves in the field of tension between text, image and sound and spans from interactive installations and net-based applications to expansive performances and A/V live shows.
Choreographing the Public
The curatorial project Choreographing the Public is a multi-formatted program featuring exhibitions, performances, interventions, and screenings taking place from October 2019 to June 2020 at the OnCurating Project Space and other collaborating venues in Zurich. It seeks to reconfigure the relationship between the creator and its audience, creating new forms of storytelling. Receding from the traditional experiences of art, the curatorial project sheds light on the possibilities of participation to generate new and multi-faceted narratives. By means of metaphorical and invisible arrows, visitors are invited to take experimental routes, navigate, move around, interact and freely engage with the environment, while at the same time, becoming the choreographers of the works.
In collaboration with: OnCurating Project Space, Österreichisches Kulturforum Bern, Amos Gärten GmbH
Commissioned by: sound:frame
sound:frame realizes commissioned artworks at the interface of art and technology and networks international artists*, theoreticians* and experts* in the field of immersive media and post-digital art.