Festival of virtual reality «Token» is devoted to the phenomenon of virtual reality and its features. The program of the festival includes lectures, seminars, and master classes concerning problems of virtualization, technologization, and demands they make to the image of modern media environment. Also within the framework of the festival there will be presented some speculations of modern artists on the topic of virtual being of humans. The festival will take place in one of the art-centers in Moscow.
Nowadays, technological innovations orient cultural model of our society to the process of virtualization thus forming peculiar virtual cultural environment, which is a sphere of eternal self-citation. Virtual reality has long been free from artificial self-modeling by the environment. The virtual reality that we know is created every day by means of media culture and has various forms. Virtual reality is the basis of social human life and a platform for effective self-presentation. Efforts of thousands of mechanisms are aimed at forming comfortable environment for virtual being of humans. This is an environment where the place of a mechanism and the place of a human cannot be differentiated because virtual reality depersonalizes any phenomena. Participants get an opportunity to slide among different identities and create their own image and environment. It is also a perfect platform for recreation; practically all kinds of entertainment have virtual analogues. Humans accept this virtual logic and boundaries between virtual and real gradually vanish.
My project is a kind of invitation to this virtual world. And my aim is to show the attractiveness of this virtual environment. To achieve this goal the spectator is placed in the position of a silent observer: he sees measured scenes of virtual life uncover in front of his eyes, many images will seem familiar to him and they may be similar to his usual reality but better.
To keep the distance between two realities “artificial” colors are chosen intentionally – procreation of a computer and mass culture, so that the spectator has a feeling of “embellished” familiar reality, the reality in which some drawbacks (“Bugs”) such as bad weather are eliminated. Thus, virtual environment is an idealized place where one can have a good time, relax or even stay – a kind of a resort.
