Nieves de la Fuente Gutierrez

Service unavailable on Sundays or Queen Victoria's birthday , 2016

VR experience for HTC Vive

The work “No habrá servicio los domingos ni en el cumpleaños de la Reina Victoria” (English: Service unavailable on Sundays or Queen Victoria's birthday) is an exploration of an ancient copper mine area in southern Spain. The landscape of this area has been so strongly reshaped and changed by intensive industrial mining that today it looks similar to Mars, not only in terms of topography, but also in its composition. Due to its likeness to the red planet, this landscape has also became a scenery for NASA's investigations in the last decade. The territory has been 3D scanned (year 2015-2016) and preserved in the form of a VR video game in which a Mars-like environment can be explored by the player. The interaction in the VR experience overtakes the digital being triggered by analog inputs in the gallery space due to microcontrollers.

 

Credits:

Programming Arduino and Processing: Jonas Hansen and Martin Nawrath

IMAGES

VIDEO LINK

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Artist Statement:

"Art is for me a discursive tool for the production of spatial constructions. I have mainly worked sculptural and in the form of installation to follow my process of investigation. However these installations are filled with technology: as a medium or also as a reference to itself and its malleability. My decision on virtuality and the production of experience as a medium must be viewed politically. As a woman and artist, I want to explore the cultural potential of intellectual and digital landscapes as a subject of artistic research. In the last 3 years I have been working with the birth place of my mother, an old mining complex completely transformed as a simulacra of a martian landscape. The concerns about ecology, the Anthropocene and feminism are recurrent themes I revisit in my whole praxis.

 

I am dealing with translation between the analog and the digital that lately got involved with Virtual Reality as a medium and part of installation constructs. My artistic research position on this matter would be how to sensitize the corporeality in VR, not based on the standards provide by the technological consensus in the industry of entertainment on which VR its based."

If you are interested in exhibiting or viewing this artistic VR experience, please send an email to us.

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