Virtualis

ABOUT

Presented at IDFA DocLab 2020, Virtualis is a creative experiment in art, research, and performance. Using the social VR platform VRChat, my collaborator Matt Romein and I created a conceptual tourist agency as a way to engage audiences with our research and fascinations with social VR. While being playful, performative, and fun, the tours are also critical examinations of the culture-making, body confusions, and social norms specific to VRChat and prevalent in social VR as a medium. You can read more about the tours at virtualis.tours.

Virtualis is the manifestation of the belief that media theory and deep thinking around the future of our digital spaces and counterparts can be explored and discussed outside of research papers and academic institutions.

We received and Research and Development grant from IDFA DocLab and presented Virtualis at the festival as part of the do {not} touch exhibit at IDFA DocLab and were included in the Competition for Immersive Non-Fiction. We led eight remote tours in VR over the course of five days of the festival and live streamed them on Twitch.

Highlights from the project were also showcased on the ITP Adjacent Journal Instagram Page: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6