The new course of immersive art is site-specific: these creations have been designed for a very specific venue, rather than for a home visor. This trend comes after a downturn in the visor market as well as a need coming from the art itself, which has been growing distant from the top-down creation of parallel worlds to dedicate to researching mixed realities. Real, tangible, analog+virtual, immersive, and digital. Young creatives are the first to feel this need. It is such the case with Corinne Mazzoli, who created The Gossips’ Chronicles after winning a grant at the Biennale College Cinema Immersive, truly a hotbed of young talents and a catalyzer of original trends.
The Gossips’ Chronicles is a trans-media journey where theatre and Virtual Reality mix, though not blend completely. They won’t trick you into believing that they are alternative or ersatz worlds: they are, in fact, complementary, compenetrating one another with technical prowess and conceptual elegance.
The audience is welcomed into a dark room, presided by Gothic glam real-life actors, cousins of Dr. Frank-N-Furter and guides to a museum of torture that promises horrifying visions. Once we step through the door, what strikes us is the formal elegance of the experience, in turn adopting the possibilities of Virtual Reality and the ability to mix media with ease and technical precision. Mixed sound editing, for example, gives scope to a creation that lives on contrasts, like the one between ‘analog’ three-dimensionality and the very well executed bi-dimensionality of digital imagery. A mature work in both purpose and outcome that will launch VR into perspectives, worlds, and circuits that are yet to invent.
THE GOSSIPS’ CHRONICLES
by Corinne Mazzoli
with Benedetta Borciani, Est Coulon, Tulls Primultini, and other 500 people
(Italy, 30’)
