Behold what the machine hath wrought
Trinity Square Video’s VR project embraces, critiques, explores the nascent form
While travelling through the Brandscape recently, I began to feel a familiar twinge: that deep, pit-ofthe-stomach nausea that usually accompanies these excursions, whether floating several hundred metres above pink-hued mountains or suddenly naked while deep underground, while a helpful intern kindly provided a lab coat to prevent overexposure.
This is a place neither I nor anyone else has ever actually been (and to be clear, I was fully clothed the entire time). But virtually? That’s a different story.
The Brandscape, with its fleshtone topography dotted with candy-green trees and deep stores of generic home decor (that’s where I ended up, undressed), is a virtual world created by the art collective Tough Guy Mountain.
It’s one of a slate of new works made for Trinity Square Video’s V/Art Projects, a virtual reality platform the venerable artist-run centre has been developing for almost a year.
In its galleries at 401 Richmond St. W. right now, there’s a VR exhibition called World Building, with four newly commissioned projects; but V/Art, which you can download to your phone, can be seen anywhere and any time you like (in my case, standing in my kitchen).
Motion sickness aside — as it’s invested deeply in the new tech, the consumer entertainment industry has had its nervous moments as users report disorientation, nausea and headaches that threaten to hamper its commercial growth — TSV has gone all in on the medium’s potential for art.
When we first spoke about it earlier this year, David Plant, its executive director, explained that the medium’s relative nascence was precisely what made it a compelling realm for art, saying it had “more potential for presenting another point of view than any other.”
It seemed like a natural evolution. TSV, an artist-run centre, has been a leading incubator of out-there film and video experimentation for decades. In 2016, Plant built a partnership with Toronto-based tech developer Advanced Micro Devices to create an on-site VR studio.
When it opened its doors, it found no shortage of interest among artists wanting to take it for a spin. As such, V/Art in its current form is only the first generation of completed projects. The app will serve as an evolving platform for new works as they’re made.
All that helps to make V/Art, with the help of cheap and readily available viewers such as Google Cardboard, both a platform for virtual artwork and a virtual gallery at the same time. Who needs the hassle of fighting to find parking around 401 Richmond, near the gridlock nexus of Spadina Ave. and Queen St., when you can dial into an art exhibition on your phone, in your pyjamas?
It also negates the inevitable awkwardness of being in public in what is, ultimately, a forcibly private experience (if you saw the VR program at the imagineNATIVE Festival this year, the three chairs outfitted with VR headsets adrift in the cavernous entry hall of the TIFF Bell Lightbox showed you what a weirdly disconnecting experience it is). But how much more cut off do we want to be? Already, Google has created a global virtual museum project, allowing you to street-view your way through such iconic institutions as the Louvre and the Prado. While it’s a nice idea for those of us who don’t find Paris and Madrid on their regular itinerary, it’s a reasonable worry that there could come a time that a virtual visit is seen as a good substitute for being there.
It isn’t. Culture is a communal thing and physical presence matters. VR is already the ultimate in solipsism; if the internet has already cre- ated deep isolation silos in which we’ve built an illusion of connectedness, VR dispatches even with the illusion, delivering a completely selffocused universe of one.
On the upside, at least some of V/Art’s eight projects take on the medium’s inherently isolating, hyper self-focused nature. They range from intrinsic critique of virtual reality itself to the embrace of its sometimes nausea-inducing viscerality to blithe play with its potential for immersive prettiness.
Barf-induction aside, Tough Guy Mountain’s Guided Meditation treads the familiar turf of consumer critique but uses the technology as its own endgame: to create a world where mindfulness and branddriven consumption are one (and makes the nausea a fitting feature). Tommy Truong’s Grow, meanwhile, is more explicit: a fractured, abandoned digital cityscape haunted by hundreds of disembodied screens implies the private digital worlds in which we’ve all increasingly been living since the dawn of the online era.
On the other side of things is The Passing by Thousand Stars, a piano-accompanied boat ride through an Algonquin Park-esque landscape with deep fuchsia waters, complete with a friendly bear. Intended, sincerely, as therapeutic, you can still see the application of the medium here, as you’re able to cast your gaze unguided around the world that’s been created for you.
Things get uglier — and intentionally so — with Endam Nihan’s Final Session, an austere performance piece shot in an empty theatre, where the artist rehearses various victim reactions — arms raised in defence; recoiling from a blow; gagging from being choked — drawn from reports of violence against women. Here, the medium comes into play as self-revelatory, whether you choose to watch or, as VR readily permits, to look away to the empty seats behind you.
These subtleties, offering the viewer agency to craft their own experience, is where VR’s greatest potential lies. Ironically, it means the artist surrendering their own intention, at least directly, to allow instead for a set of possibilities. For me, right now, that’s at the core of a virtual-reality art experience worth having; where art becomes a negotiation between artist and viewer, not a one-way conversation. Welcome to the future, or at least one of them.
V/Art, a project of Trinity Square Video, can be viewed through the V/Art app. See trinitysquarevideo.com for more information.