Zeesy Powers

This Could be You, 2017

VR experience for HTC Vive

The technological and social framework around Contemporary VR is simultaneously an infinite landscape and a prison. It has the aesthetics and rhetoric of infinity (“you can be anyone, anywhere, doing anything”), but practices of confinement (restricted mobility, limited access, embedded surveillance). In This Could Be You, users inhabit the body of a 90-year-old woman, trapped in an environment raining trash from the digital era. Her actions are mirrored in her twin, stripped of clothing. Live motion capture through a Kinect allows the user to interact with the experience without the use of controllers. 

This project was produced as part of a 2017 Residency at the Toronto Animated Image Society. The artist would like to thank DMG Toronto and GammaSpace for their generous donation of equipment during the production of this work. 

VR experience for HTC Vive with Kinect One.

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ABOUT THE ARTIST

Zeesy Powers is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice explores and questions the impact of technology on lived experience. Using open-source and consumer technologies, as well as live performance, she creates ephemeral environments to subvert and reveal the hidden structures that form the basis of our society. For over a decade, she has performed and exhibited at venues including PS 122 (NY), Night Gallery (LA), Eastern Bloc (Montreal), and the Art Gallery of Ontario. Her videos and animations have screened internationally, and she has created several large-scale art and performance works in collaboration with communities. She has been artist-in-residence at CCA Kitakyushu (Japan), Palomar5 (Berlin), the Banff New Media Institute, Studio XX (Montreal) and the Toronto Public Library. This Could be You is her first VR piece, produced through the 2017 National Artist-in-Residence program at the Toronto Animated Image Society. Powers teaches digital tools for image making and knowledge dissemination through arts organizations in Canada and the United States. She is a recipient of numerous grants for her new media work, and was a finalist for the 2016 K.M. Hunter Artist Awards and the 2017 Transitio_MX award for digital art. She lives and works in Toronto.

 

The artist is represented by Vtape.org

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

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