ABOUT
“FALENA” is a new type of gallery for viewing and interacting with Art. It is a hybrid environment between gallery and video game using VR Chat rooms. Falena raises questions about art world stereotypes, ownership, authorship, and the physicality of the art pieces. It is a VR experience, a live participatory performance, where the visitors are the performers. It explores human behavior in a society (the VR chat society) where humans are now at a state of primitivism and tribalism due to its early-short yet age, experience, and polishes. We see that space as a great opportunity to explore and free natural behavioral impulses of human subject -observer or participant- towards art objects, art galleries and art events. The anonymity of an avatar and the gamified environment can show us what true desires and opinions linger behind the modern standardized behaviors we experience in art galleries because of the value of artworks, ownership, and social image. What happens if we reverse those -so far unchallenged- parameters? (value, ownership, social image) What if the participants are also owners, what if the value is a very subjective non-countable meaning, what if there is no limit to social behavior and image by using anonymous avatars.
"FALENA" is a VR chat room space designed of the relics of our grandma's house and other objects of memory. The space is filled with objects, some of them movable and some fixed at the space. Throughout the space there are curated artwork from emerging artists. The artwork is either created digitally or is going to be digitized through 3D scanning and photogrammetry processes placed in the Virtual Gallery. As the visitors wander around the gallery space, they can interact with the other users/visitors of the gallery and talk about the artwork presented. Moreover, they can grab the various objects found in the space, move them around and throw them on the artworks. The objects are designed to stick on the artworks. In this way the artworks gradually alternate. The more objects people through it the higher the likes shown at the bottom of each artwork. After several visitors at the gallery, the original artworks lose their image as new objects are stuck on them. In that case, now the visitors are also making art by throwing objects on the artworks.
Created by:
Despoina Zachariadou
Arsenios Z.
Kaiho Yu
Sound by: