PEACEFUL PLACES – AUGGIE AWARD 2021 winner for Best art or film

FESCH.TV INFORMIERT:

PEACEFUL PLACES is an experimental projects that is both a physical and emotional experience. It is a 360 movie that is designed to invite people to move. A new way of conceiving interaction that use tools from the body instead of technological solutions.

In such a tiring historical moment for our bodies, we wondered how physical confidence is changing in pandemic times. In place of the image of “bodies as weapons”, an image that has been returned by various thinkers to define the relationship with the other today, we propose the image of “bodies as peaceful places”, after having avoided so many bodies in the last year finally the possibility to meet others.

In the video the viewer will meet fives couple with different real relationship (grandfather and grandson, mother and child, mother and adult daughter, friends since childhood) and will imitate their gesture. The user will have the chance to imitate, and so incorporate, the hugs and the affective gesture that will see in the video, starting to move and composing a unique simple choreography made of affective gesture.

Virtual reality in this sense becomes a tool to “augment” the physical experience, but also the physical language tool from a VR (Virtual Reality) viewer. In fact, the project proposes to deepen the possibility of creating a choreographic score starting from immersive videos of real bodies that tell their stories by aiming for an emotionally and engaging experience.

Viewers will then be made available to the public to “travel” in physical contact and movement, in a sort of participatory installation in which the materials to move are given in real time by the viewer.

Peaceful Places has a double layer: it is an experience of proximity, thanks to virtual bodies, but also an experience of absence, of loneliness, from outside we will see a flock of bodies hugging the emptiness.

Movement become dance when a gesture is done with poetry. To do that, between the gesture itself and its realization, there has to be a space for listening to emotions in place and to act a reinterpretation that allow to traslate it into dance. Our artistic research combine technology and movement with the intent to let dance emerge from everyday gesture. The project aims to allow everybody, all kind of body, to transform their emotional state into dance, letting the user learn in a contemplative state. Imitation is a basic tool to embody and VR is very effective tool to engage the audience emotionally.

Peaceful Places wants to focus on the body as a place, where we all actually live in. In this world pandemic body became a place of war. Peaceful Places is an installation that has the power to let people experience both proximity and absence at the same time, and this paradox give an important perspective on the historical moment we are living now.

The use of 360 video goes in the direction of an hyper reality instead of a non real reality. So real bodies, real people, real bonds and their real emotional stories. This is also why we chose to develop a 3dof experience of movement, instead of a 6dof interactive one.

a project by Margherita Landi e Agnese Lanza