by Margherita Fontana
The Frame Beyond, in collaboration with the AN-ICON research group of the University of Milan, which since 2019 has been working on Extended Reality (XR, VR and AR) from both a scientific and curatorial point of view, presents to the Concorto audience two virtual reality works selected from the best of the current international panorama. Virtual Reality is a medium that is increasingly approaching its visual maturity, continuing to dialogue with cinema while hybridizing its language with the performative characteristics of theater and the imaginative freedom of CGI. By enveloping the user in a 360-degree environment, VR is able to transport us to another place, to evoke empathic responses of co-presence, and to demand intense participation. Moreover, it is precisely because of its power that the expressiveness of VR is proving increasingly suitable for confronting political issues in an original way, and for renovating the structures of memory and imagination.
The two works presented are particularly in dialogue with Concorto’s aesthetic and political scope. Emperor is an interactive animation that transports the user into the forced incommunicability of an aphasic father: here, VR becomes a tool for “touching” the intensity of the memories that remain. In Mirror, on the other hand, we are literally drawn into the mental landscapes of the unconscious and family relationships, between dream and nightmare.
Empereur, Marion Burger and Ilan Cohen, France and Germany, 2023
鏡子 (Mirror), Wu De-Chuen, Taiwan, 2023
Where and when: Sunday 18 to Saturday 24 August, from 4:00 PM to 7:00 PM, at Circolo Arci Rathaus, Via Pietro Giordani 4, Piacenza
Free access (Arci membership card holders) upon reservation on eventbrite.
Project carried out within the framework of the European Union’s Horizon 2020 – Research and Innovation program (grant agreement No. 834033 AN-ICON), funded by the European Research Council (ERC) and hosted by the Department of Philosophy “Piero Martinetti” of the University of Milan as part of the “Departments of Excellence 2023-2027” project awarded by the Ministry of University and Research (MUR).
