calling tidal by Jasmine Liaw

‘calling tidal’ is an installation where participants/viewers may interact with a tank of water. With an animated floor projection, the piece emulates a colourful, cybernetic space where movement becomes communicative through audio-visual responses. The interactive projection changes based on presence and movement, including water movement, sound frequency, or walking. This use of transparent materials represents nature’s vulnerabilities to economic/industrial decisions by humanity. The piece emulates a portal as if the participant emerges into an urgent calling state with the natural world. Its vibrant colours represent the overwhelmingness and blinding intensity of the space that mirrors climate anxiety. Exploring the paralinguistic response, the immersion of the hand in the water triggers a waterproof JSN-SR04T ultrasonic distance sensor with Arduino. When the sensor is triggered due to the close proximity of the participants’ hand, a Cytron mp3 player shield plays the sound of a voicemail filtered glacier crashing into the ocean.

Jasmine Liaw is a queer emerging Chinese-Canadian interdisciplinary artist. Bicoastal, she works in so-called Toronto and Vancouver. Her connective practice focuses on conceptual realms of dance and digital/new media landscapes. Jasmine is compelled to explore her contemporary views of identity and the agency of climate anxiety.

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Virtual ISLANDs by Olivia Mc Gilchrist

Virtual ISLANDs explores the relationship between the experience of virtual immersion in VR and the physicality of being submerged, offering viewers audio-visual interpretations of the ebb and flow of water around them. The project invites a reading of VR’s virtual space foregrounding submersion alongside immersion, to highlight the relation between water and fluid identities, inspired by my dual Caribbean and European heritage. In earlier versions of Virtual ISLANDS, I explored the affordance of my white privilege through the lens of hybridity by visualizing my body coming in and out of the artwork’s visual plane. In Virtual ISLANDs’ current VR experience, the viewer is placed in an aquatic scene where they can interact with the moving figure of Newfoundlander aerial performer Keely Whitelaw. Her choreographed performance portrays a gestural response to an original composition by Newfoundlander electronic composer Kasey Pocius, inspired by a virtual experience of being underwater.

Olivia Mc Gilchrist (she / her) is a white French-Jamaican multimedia artist and doctoral candidate exploring how colonial legacies extend their reach to Virtual Reality (VR) technology. She works with video, multimedia installation and VR both as an artist and a consultant on interdisciplinary and audio-visual performance based projects.

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