PERFORMANCE
A multi-media performance that blends virtual reality, dance, and design to invite the audience into an experience that goes beyond the sum of the several media. In this attempt to go past the technical and aesthetical boundaries of virtual reality, this experience rehabilitates the rapport between real and virtual, between presence and immersion – it redesigns its function under the sign of performance. What is a performance, though, and does the idea of performance relate with the aesthetical dimension of expanded realities? Performances are an integral communicational behaviour that involves the spectator, makes use of different languages, and is transient. Each performance is adjacent to other social behaviour, like rituals. Here at the Venice Film Festival – once again a collective ritual, Dazzle exists as an adjacent set of behaviours that involves more than one spectator into the action. This action happens in two environments, themselves adjacent to one another: presence and virtual reality. Dance, which is all about corporeality, is the joining element, the constant in this performance whose aesthetical values refer the avant-gardes, and Vorticism in particular. Dazzle is a trans-media game of mirrors that can be lived with or without the VR visor. It is a performance whose essential motions are the warming up and cooling down moments, which coincide with the wearing and taking off vorticist and camo clothing designed specifically for the occasion (also find instructions on how to make them at home by following the QR code provided).
A complex contraption, aesthetically consistent, and well-designed that fruitfully and originally blends immersive technology within the multiform world of performance. What if the lens of performance is the most useful to observe and describe immersive art?

DAZZLE: A RE-ASSEMBLY OF BODIES
COMPETITION
by Ruth Gibson, Bruno Martelli, Alexa Pollmann, Bine Roth
(UK, 45’)