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> Logline

    ‘nerd_funk’ is a digital identity existing on Instagram, following the contemporary digital culture. In this Chapter based VR Installation, Users will explore the new reality that emerged out of social media.

> Synopsis

    In the current climate of the Internet we have reached an irreversible state in our social life and inherently the way we think and comprehend our reality. It’s a situation we have all dived into, floating and yet struggling to find ourselves in it. To investigate this phenomenon and allow others to investigate it with us, we decided to create a virtual identity called nerd_funk, a collective formed by its artists (Ali and Mamali) which exists on Instagram and follows a portion of contemporary digital culture.

    Through the lens of this profile, the user will set out on a journey that represents an archive of collected moments and stories shared by others, bringing the user into an interactive journey composed and directed on the basis of nerd_funk‘s Instagram stories feed.

    The experience will be a confrontation of the user with different sets of curated social media content, which transforms participants between the chaos of information and order . By providing an alternate hyper-reality, we attempt to compare and thus better perceive our current state of existence in social media. A dynamic that attempts to represent a kaleidoscopic portrait of the present that can provide an alternative perspective on the reality of ourselves and our societies.

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> NERD_FUNK - A seven year odyssey

> Installation View

> VR/Video Screenshots

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Concept

    The arrival in our lives of new-technology devices such as the smartphone has led us to see, use, and extend our bodies in totally new ways.  The first chapter focuses on how VR gives us a new experience, implying new and quite different ergonomics. It allows the visitor to explore the way VR breaks down real-world limitations and offers new forms of enjoyment,   demonstrating and exploiting our body’s ability to adapt to new complexities, and to develop and practise the new skills needed to navigate the VR environment. The experience will help visitors to have a new consciousness of their own body and physical and mental capacities.

Experience

    After emerging from a dense thicket, phone in hand, the visitor’s virtual path meanders through a cavern-like space with living walls presenting body parts in bizarre, disorienting juxtapositions. The walls have random holes through which the visitor discovers videos collected from Instagram, referring to the post-body age from diverse viewpoints: biotechnology, animatronics, life sciences, performance art… The virtual phone in the user’s hand reproduces, as they advance, the content they are investigating. A tunnel lined with a hallucinogenic array of selfies and avatars, modified with filters, represents new ways of presenting the self. This slowly emerges into a dystopian wilderness, under the stars, with a multi-screen performance referencing the self-destructive dangers of new technologies.

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Concept

    The idea of this space is to overwhelm the visitor with the beauty and power of technology’s impact (sound, light…) on our senses, but also see how and why we are drawn to potentially self-destructive artificial stimulation.

Experience

A beautifully designed, spherical, virtual room equipped with high-tech sound and light will offer a total, transformative sensory experience, inspired by and expanding on the experience of techno-parties, music festivals, concerts… where the combination of sound, light and movement makes up an immersive and addictive package, pushing to physical and mental limits through an escalating kaleidoscope of successive videos, at first carefully synchronised but eventually losing control, spiraling into sheer noise.
For the visitor, these Instagram-sourced videos are experienced like a performance that becomes increasingly intense and, eventually, overwhelming.

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Experience

    the VR experience begins in total darkness. The soundtrack quotes, in French, excerpts from the
Revelation of Saint John. The experience rotates in sync with the physical installation, and the English-language text forms and crumbles away in spiral 3D motion graphics as the viewers’ gaze scans the virtual horizon.

    When the text is done, the seven avatars descend from the sky, each backed with a screen displaying their stories. Each avatar is equipped as a horseman of the apocalypse. The user may then ‘hack into’ the universe of up to three of these characters, for an intimate, one-minute immersive experience of the personas, real or cyber, some of them ‘recreated’ using volumetric scans of the real-life originals. Then, although seated in the normally peaceful lotus position, at the end of each experience, the viewer may destroy the persona violently, like in a video game.

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Experience

Visitors enter a dystopian cityscape inspired by Cyberpunk cities and the multi-layered Instagram stories produced by advanced users. Seated in a mock-up concept car, surrounded by screens displaying multiple layers of information of all kinds, they undergo an immersive experience similar to using a VR headset.

They explore the borderlines between reality, augmented reality, augmented virtuality and the virtual, while discovering what lies behind familiar utopian visions of, e.g., ‘the city of the future’ and the promises made by its corporate promoters. As the car speeds on, the environment becomes increasingly grim and post-apocalyptic, till the vehicle careers off the road into the void.

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> Rijksackademie OpenStudios 2022, Amsterdam

    > Installation Views

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> Credits

Created by Ali Eslami & Mamali Shafahi
Assisted by Pensive Vivifier
Library research by Marijn Bril
Curated by Angelique Spaninks
Co-produced by K.O. Productions

Print design - Diego Grandry & Samuel Rynearson

Thanks to
CPH:LAB
Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten
Arnaud Schmitt
Jason Mohaghegh
Vancouver Biennale
Nigel Wilkinson
Domenico Gutknecht
Alireza Asadi Zendehjan

Powered by Unreal Engine

Supported By
Stimuleringsfonds
Mondriaan Fonds
Amsterdam Fonds voor de Kunst
MU Hybrid art house
Film Fund IDFA DocLab Interactive Grant
CNC France


Chapter 1: #ray_oscopy
3D art design - Guillaume Roux
Animation and Rigging - Fish Flight Entertainment
Sound design - Shahin Entezami

Chapter 2: #tech_hole
3D art & Animation - Fish Flight Entertainment
Sound design & Music  - Shahin Entezami

Chapter 3: #n2
Sound and Visuals - Pensive Vivifier

Chapter 4: #mortal_7
3D art design - Diego Grandry & Samuel Rynearson
AI avatars - Siavash Naghshbandi
Sound design - Shahin Entezami

Chapter 5: #sub_terranea
Sound and Visuals - Pensive Vivifier
3D art design & Animation - Post-Neon