Leslie Deere
Array Infinitive, 2023
VR experience for Oculus Quest 2
Array Infinitive is a PhD research project that examines audience experience in audio-visual VR art practice. The studio-led work draws upon ambient audio and colourful VR visuals generated, processed, and ‘played’ via gesture to a locally networked audience. Acting as researcher, lead artist, composer and performer; Leslie uses hand gestures and bodily movements to create and broadcast sounds and VR particle trails to audience headsets in real-time. The aim of Array Infinitive is to create a group altered state of consciousness experience. In addition, the experience has been studied to determine if the audience has an awareness that ‘the instrument’, by which the artist means sonified and visualised VR-responsive dancerly gestures, is controlled by a human. Through this project Leslie has examined and reconfigured the architecture of spectatorship via hybrid-audience (a collective of observers both in and out VR). The paradox of this work is addressed through a new form of multidimensionality within a hybrid-audience: the unusual situation where some audience are isolated from their neighbours through hardware, whilst also connected to the group through the physical space, the encounter and the sound. She asks through this work for audience to find another form of relation, one of a visceral, shared experiential kind - to embody the experience and ultimately give in to being affected together.
Duration: 25 min.
IMAGES
VIDEO LINK
Film by Edited Arts
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Leslie Deere is an artist, teacher, researcher and sound bath facilitator based in Glasgow. Her background is in dance. She moved to London from NYC to study Sonic Art and developed a gallery-based sculptural practice including larger scale sound installation commissions. Recently Deere has been creating work that borrows from her previous training and combines gesture with live audio-visuals. Currently Leslie is completing a PhD looking at live improvised AV performance in VR as a means to generate a shared group experience and create new forms of spectatorship. Her multimedia practice explores affect and perspective. Deere’s work is experiential, minimal and colourful. Her practice seeks to elicit evocative encounters that traverse the veil between the abstract and the metaphysical. She is inspired and informed by the work of Pauline Oliveros, Éliane Radigue, Ann Veronica Janssens and Hilma af Klint. Her work is in public and private collections and she has performed and exhibited internationally.
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