Aurora Australis Ultimo Choro VR
Outline
This artwork was generated from data captured on the last voyage of the Australian icebreaker RSV Aurora Australis to the Antarctic continent. Recreating a virtual representation of real places and people from their captured 3D data poses opportunities and questions related to both the form of the artwork and the content. It is not documentary in a traditional sense, there are choices to be made as to how faithfully people and place should be represented weighed against the opportunity to focus attention on particular moments or even embellish and fabricate the narrative and interactions to guide the experience in a particular direction. In the VR work we moved away from objective reality, using point cloud renderings and reimagined crew movement to create an essential experience of people collaborating in a unique and adverse space.
Partners
Investigators
This work engages with Hideaki Ogawa’s concept of Artistic Journalism. Real world social and cultural issues can be interrogated through the arts, often using factual source material as the base, transforming the experience through an artistic lens in order to raise questions essential to contemporary debate. Our Antarctic works will engage with Artistic Journalism’s tension between social reporting and artistic highlighting of experiences and resolutions.
The work also engaged with the Art Gallery theme: The future of Ritual and Resonance. Motion capture was used as a means of creating new movement rituals elaborating on the patterns of movement the crew, scientists and expeditioners developed in order to function in such a tightly-knit, co-dependent environment.
This VR artwork emerged from McCormick and Nash’s Australian Antarctic Arts Fellowship won through a highly competitive peer review process. The work was subsequently chosen by peer review for inclusion in the Siggraph Asia Art Gallery, one of the premier electronic art forums in Asia and the world, at the prestigious Tokyo International Forum in Japan. The work was also selected by peer review for inclusion in ANAT SPECTRA 2022 at Melbourne Connect Studio.
