Femis: Exploring Virtual Reality 360°

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Workshop Presentation Text

Virtual reality
by Benoît Labourdette

Uses and diversions playful, political, technologies in vogue of the “VR”, to reintroduce critical spirit in a technology that does not yet philosophically question. 360 ° films, scenic experiences, installations ... invent, take a distance.

The image is now part of real life and presents, in particular with live video (Periscope, Facebook live...), it has become in less than ten years one of the ways of the incarnated existence of humans in their relations to one another. In this field, the image is intrinsically linked to the written text and the spoken word, text and image seeming to merge into a new “layer” that filters our relationship to the real.
For example, the term “virtual reality”, for 360 ° viewed / viewed images, is indicative of a simulacra project of reality, which is a political and commercial project above all. Today it is so rebellious by the professionals of the audiovisual sector as a future panacea of ​​the image, whereas its use is not yet existing, that it seems salutary to question this device by the philosophy and the acts. If no one does that, then we’re going to go collectively into a political wall.

To rephrase, the “VR” is thus the new fashion of professionals of the audiovisual and the media. The deployment of a technology without critical thinking marks the dawn of a loss of the sense of the devices of representation. Let us divert tools and working methods, amuse ourselves, challenge norms, shake our thoughts, and be aware of the political dimension of our work. Let’s make shows with installations, not just mock images of reality in helmets stuck in the eyes of obedient humans and enclosed in their bubbles.

As part of this workshop, as I have done with mobile phones for 11 years, the challenge is not to have a “professional” practice in the technical sense of the term, but to explore, with tools for the general public spaces of creativity that do not offer professional tools, much heavier and charged with stakes (even if only financial ones). So play with their technical “flaws” especially as signs of poetic and political material.

As each phone is different and produces a different picture bill, each small RV camera produces an image type, and also device, different. These light methods, if taken seriously, lead to other postures and therefore other types of artistic projects, and it is precisely the purpose of this inter-school week to “shift”, take a step aside, to explore, discover, imagine, other territories. Films projected in helmets, but also in theaters, or in the form of installations or “spectacle” ... Rethink in depth, with new technologies, our “trades”.

Students who participated in the workshop “Exploring Virtual Reality 360 °”

• Rafaël Torres Calderon
• Lucas Le Postec
• Agathe Reiland
• Liviu Bora
• Alexis Bertrand
• Arnaud Rémy Girardin
• Téo Sizun
• Eliott Khayat
• Edouard Pénaud