Solastalgia – 3/31/17
Dateline: 3004 Larimer St.
Denver, CO
Jayne Butler / Molly Lofton / Noah Travis Phillips / Sarah Richter / Bart Rondet / Anna Winter
A mixed exhibition of EDP MFA students featuring virtual reality, digital, tactile and sonic arts.
I had a great time experiencing the wide breadth of work from our program’s graduate students at Solastalgia. I started with Bart’s HTC Vive virtual reality piece, which successfully conveyed a vast sense of space and constant shifts in environment. Molly’s digital art print from Cinema 4D was well lit and did a great job contrasting digitally inspired renderings with a natural mountainous landscape. I liked Anna’s combination of tactility with her video art, and thought that projection mapping the video directly onto the GAK may have made an interesting iteration of this project. Jayne’s jacket camera was well-conceived and raised great questions regarding rights to safety vs. rights to privacy. Noah’s audio experience was deeply immersive. A mask was worn while focusing on the soundscape and created a sense of ritualism which I picked up from the alien-like mantras. Sarah’s projection mapping was scaled intimately and drew me in for several minutes, watching the simple cube structure slowly shift in context. Overall this was a fun show and I was really inspired to dig into Unity over this Summer to start creating immersive environments in VR.