GMU:VR Experience Designers/Sarah Hermanutz

Give and Take

VR and video installation created by Sarah Hermanutz in collaboration with Desiree Förster, Andreas Rau, and Michaela Büsse. Give and Take presents a multi-media installation that uses an immersive and responsive environment to create sensitivity for metabolic processes and vegetal life.

With regards to climate change the urgency to acknowledge our complicity with the ecological crisis seem inevitable. However, due to perceptual limitations this endeavour seems impossible. Designed in an abstract and evocative manner, the first part of the installation invites the viewer to experience the CO2 cycle reduced to the interaction between the human breather and the plant’s photosynthesis. In a second part, we zoom out from this isolated experience into its chaotic entanglements and display how localised behaviour of molecules leads to specific connections, events and disappearances.

The experience that leads the observer from micro to macro scales of vital processes, extends the sensible experience towards metabolic relations with the surroundings. The immersive environment induces a perceptional link with thermal, climatic, meteorological processes that are enacted in partial response to the engaging individual.

Give and Take was created at the Bauhaus University Weimar, Lacuna Lab (Berlin), and Critical Media Lab (Basel). Critical Media Lab event

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While in the VR environment, the visitor's breathing is detected by a microphone headset. The breath is visualised within the VR as a stream of particles, and these particles are absorbed by the plants which surrounding the visitor. Different particles are emitted by the plants, and these are absorbed by the visitor, so that an exchange is established.

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This installation has two parts- the 5 minute VR experience, and a 4 screen video installation.

The virtual environment was created in Unity by myself (Sarah) and Andreas. A minimal, atmospheric island was created as well as custom, illustrative-styled plants from digitally painted textures. Fog and mist effects were combined with gradual shifts in atmospheric lighting across the 5 minute duration within the VR. Microphone data (driving the breath visualisation) was processed in a MaxMSP patch and sent via OSC to Unity.

After spending time breathing in the VR, the visitor is invited to sit in the 4-screen video installation, displaying:

1. a recording from within the VR environment
2. a time-delayed 'live' feed of the VR user while they were using the headset
3. a composition of footage suggesting human / environment / material entanglements as seen across multiple societal, infrastructural, and individual scales, created by Michaela.
4. an Google-Earth animation which travels from the global scale to the city scale, created by Michaela.