Virtually Visible is a performance art project about community and technology.
Three elements comprise this project - multimedia performance, augmented reality installation, and a community generated zine. The goal of Virtually Visible is to cultivate community while reflecting on how the amazing tools around us add layers of abstraction and possibility to our previous methods of interaction.
On February 11th & 13th at the In, Virtually Visible showcased their first interactive installation at the Heartbreak Science Fair, a platform for local artists, performers, and science enthusiasts to express discoveries and analyses of heartbreak through its relationship with art and science.
The Virtual Preserve by Virtually Visible combined art, performance, and virtual reality to immerse viewers in an alternate universe set far in the future during a time of great climatic shift. In the year 2350, teenage girl Dalia displays a science fair project that invites participants to be climate change heroes through a virtual reality experience.
As participants explore the Virtual Preserve, they can touch the trees to preserve the objects on the terrain. As time passes, the landscape slowly reddens and deteriorates, and the participants are left in a desolate wasteland with only a few of the preserved objects they were able to touch in the span of the 5-minute sequence.
For the project, I designed a set filled with textural abstract paintings, live plants, found objects, and a collaged reinterpretation of the virtual reality landscape. Combined with a notebook scribbled with scientific illustrations by the project's director, the curation set the scene for an imaginary natural world slowly becoming toxic.
Clouds, Blood, & Slime by Michelle Tobin. 2015.
An actor played the mythical girl Dahlia alongside her science fair experiment and engaged in dsicussion with the audience about the planet's real and imaginary future. She also passed out copies of the first issue of the community zine:
Cover image
Sea Moon by Michelle Tobin
View augmented reality content over the cover image
by downloading the Android app at:
Google Cardboard recommended
