At a moment when immersive media are rethinking their language, works like Earths to Come are all the more notable. These are the kind of experiences that both in creative process and in outcome, show the trace of original research and a given, precise direction. Produced by Biennale College, this Virtual Reality installation is the first VR work by a known artist, Rose Bond, who authored independent, experimental animation movies, often dedicated to the world of women. This time, Bond drew beautiful inspiration from Emily Dickinson’s I have no Life but this – both the words and the original physical manuscript, which is reproduced and freed from paper’s strict bi-dimensionality. It is masterfully animated, clearly by someone who know how to use actual artist’s tools. The artist blended Dickinson’s free lyricism, a call to life, with the urgency to get out of the isolation imposed on us by the pandemic. A fortunate, mature blend between poetry, graphic and pictorial art, and immersive media for a piece of rare aesthetic consistency. It is curious that the expression of the urgency to evade and wander is entrusted to sound, first. Sound is the protagonist in many of this year’s line-up at Immersive Island. Vocal band Roomful of Teeth’s spatialized voices sing Dickinson’s text after it has been broken up, reassembled, reconstructed, and yet clearly recognizable in its free spirit and subtle despair. Sound creates much more space than vision can, with the latter being limited to 180-degree, and that’s unfortunate. The lyrical, intimate, yet choral and airy space uses VR like a magical lantern, shining light in a space where images and sound can tune into the perception of the audience. The experience is, in fact, installed for a collective audience. The final impression is that of a seminal piece of Virtual Reality, a promise of great things to come, much like in the late-1800s, itinerant pre-cinema shows announced the anthropological shift that brought us here today.
Let’s keep on listening…
EARTHS TO COME
by Rose Bond (USA, 13’)
