And the stars look very different today
360°-video virtual reality experience
Duration of experience is variable and individual
And the stars look very different today (2016) is a site-specific 360°-video experience was made for an event curated by Ginger Shulick Porcella at San Diego Art Institute Project Space. This video documents that artwork.
The visitor arrived at an art gallery full of people for a one-night event of expanded cinema: video works were projected on walls, sculptures emitted sounds and images, and performances unfolded. Standing in the middle of the gallery holding the artist-made virtual reality viewer to their eyes all the people and artworks disappear. The video in the viewer situates the visitor in the present and the past simultaneously. In the 360º-video viewer, the visitor experiences the same gallery space around them, yet the gallery is empty, excepting projected images on the walls, as it was a week prior when the footage was recorded.
Multiple projections of planets in a kinetic field of digital stars swirl around the viewer. Covering the empty gallery walls were projections of galaxies, planets, nebulae and blackness from a procedurally generated outer space captured while exploring this fictional environment. In this parallel reality, our long-standing fascination with space travel and colonization has been taken to the next level. The visitor is no longer limited to two-dimensional representations of space, nor to the known universe. Traveling beyond our earth to virtually inhabit a speculatively generated universe, while simultaneously in the past and the present, this work considers the notion of space exploration and colonization as a speculative future.