Olivia McGilchrist What Makes an Installation Interactive
© Olivia McGilchrist, still from the installation Virtual ISLANDs, 2022.
In collaboration with Compétence Culture, REPAIRE and with the financial participation of Services Québec
This workshop is aimed at media and digital artists, as well as performing and visual artists who work with video. It costs $125 plus tax.
It will address the notion and experience of immersion in multimedia art, beyond the tools commonly used to render a work immersive (such as virtual reality or 3D). Participants will be introduced to various immersive technologies:
- 360° video
- Stereoscopy
- Interactive programming
-Surround sound
- Large-scale video projection
- etc.
This workshop will provide participants with a theoretical understanding of immersion as an artistic tool. Participants will collaborate on the staging of different scenarios that demonstrate the main components of immersion in installations. This will serve as a starting point for a critical discussion of the possibilities of immersion.
Drawing on a variety of interdisciplinary case studies, and with a particular focus on the performance/performative element, the instructors will lead discussions on the theme of creating immersive experiences. Other topics will include scale and perspective (as used in video game technologies), considerations for the physical location of viewers in the exhibition/performance space, and immersion in an indoor or outdoor space.
© Olivia McGilchrist, still from the installation Virtual ISLANDs, 2022.
Olivia McGilchrist (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 has exhibited in Canada, Jamaica, USA, Brazil, Germany, Norway, Austria, France, Switzerland, UK. Building on her experience as a white Euro-Caribbean and research in the portrayal of her hybrid identity within contemporary Jamaican culture, Olivia explores how this can be represented in VR.
Tracy Valcárcel (she/her) is a Peruvian lens-based artist and cultural worker currently living in Tio’tia:ke (Montréal). Trained in video, dance and physical theatre, she moved to Canada in 2009 to pursue studies in Interdisciplinary Performance and Media Arts. In her practice, she uses moving images and archive to consider the body as a living cultural map, questioning to what extent our identities are shaped by memory, environment and habit. Central to her research are the broader themes of food and migration. Her work and collaborations have been shown locally as well as internationally at video and performance festivals including Kinesthesia Festival (Middlesex, UK), Rendez-vous Québec Cinema (Québec, CA), Festival de Cine Experimental Cinetoro (Cali, Colombia), REThink Art Digital Festival (Crete, Greece), Movement Research at Judson Church (NYC, US), Summerworks Festival 25 (Toronto, Canada), Szczecin European Film Festival (Szczecin, Poland), ikono On Air Festival (Berlin, Germany), ((.mov)) Videoarte en mOvimiento (Madrid, Spain) and Performance Voyage 3 (Tromsø, Norway). She is an active member of Fruition, a Montreal-based QTBIPOC collective and her video work is distributed by GIV.
