18 October 2017

Man Without a Movie Camera

Not cinema and not theatre. Not photography and not painting. Not architecture and not sculpture. Not literature and not videogame. Virtual Reality begs, steals and borrows from many languages in the Arts, yet the words to describe a VR experience tend to fall flat more often than not. You have to do it to understand it, they say, while in studios everywhere we scramble for narrative tropes and technical descriptions hoping the next person down the assembly line will comprehend. With hardly any creator or studio having worked in this medium for longer than a few years and most coming from an established arts and media practice, what sort of translation happens when we leave the known territory of our artistic traditions and venture into the wildly shifting grounds of VR?

This forum was held 18 October 2017. A recording of the live stream can be viewed below.

Biography

Oscar Raby is the Co-Founder and Creative Director at VRTOV, the Melbourne-based Virtual Reality studio behind the projects The Turning ForestEaster Rising: Voice of a Rebel and Assent.

In 2013 he completed a Masters degree in Animation and Interactive Media at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology where the subject of his research was Portraiture in New Media. His graduating work, the autobiographical Virtual Reality documentary Assent, has been part of Sundance New Frontier, IDFA DocLab and Sheffield Doc/Fest as well as festivals in Australia, Canada, USA, Mexico, the Netherlands and the UK. Assent received the Audience Award for Cross-platform at Sheffield Doc/Fest 2014.

Catch up on Oscar Raby's forum here (360 video)