Narayan Saviskas

Telfair Museums Pulse Festival

The Pulse Festival hosted a free family day on January 20th at the Telfair Museum in Savannah. The festival is a mixed media art presentation showing off the latest ideas and the technology we use to show off modern art.

VR spectacles, Virtual adventures and art in another reality are all a part of the growing sphere of Virtual Art in today's art scene. The Pulse festival brings a variety of works such as Jakob Steensen's Aquaphobia and Wangshu Sun's Dream of Wings along with other technical miracles to the forefront of ordinary people's lives.

(Images from Steensen's Aquaphobia)

The VR adventure Aquaphobia takes guests through underground passages and an almost doomsday like scene of Brooklyn park where a strange, fluid like orb guides guests while reciting poetry, around the landscape. Complete with virtual deer, alien like subterranean ruins, religious and post modern world imagery, Aquaphobia takes viewers into a world after devastation. Ravaged by natural forces it appears that human technology couldn't save Aquaphobia's Earth from whatever disaster destroyed it. The only things that remain in this world fully intact are the natural flora and techno fauna. Aquaphobia could be showing guests a world after us, where only our bits and pieces remain. The world around our ruins however, does not care for the past and instead has moved on to show life continuing in a new and strange world.

("Room" by Dasul Kim)

In another exhibit, a machine sits before a moving image of several views of a house. Room by Dasul Kim is an interactive series of images that allows viewers to change details or events within or around the house. Cooking eggs, ordering packages via the phone on screen and assisting a lizard in escaping his cage are all controlled by various knobs and switches on a small block below the pictures. With certain actions taken in a particular order, events can occur that change things about the house or its various rooms. For example, if someone were to order packages thirty times then activate the stove to cook ramen, the boxes and a portion of the house will catch fire and burn up the yellow boxes stored on the left screen. Another such mechanic is a light sensor on the top of the machine determines how much light is in the room and changes the weather to match. Dark rooms get stormy or rainy skies while bright or semi light rooms can have cloudy or sunny weather. Room becomes an excellent example of interactive art as guests attempt to cause events by fiddling and playing with the variety of switches and sensors.

Art today can now take advantage of VR and AR (augmented reality) technology in unique ways. In the past viewers of art had to make due with typically more static works, but with VR, artists can now create entire journeys for viewers to experience. World's can be made and explored, masterpieces reformed virtually and unique experiences can be explored from a more active participant than ever before. Even paintings and sketches can now be made virtually with programs from companies such as Google's Tilt Brush and a program called Gravity Sketch.