Thin Air Exhibition

Most exhibitions on show were within blacked out spaces in order to suppress amount of visual information present, but with the addition of it being blacked out, it allows the experience to feel more intimate and close because as humans the only time we see darkness truly is when we are sleeping allowing us as humans to focus on these aspects. But I did find one particular problem which is a let down to the experience, that going from each exhibit didn’t feel seemless as once you exited on exhibit initmacy ended up being lost because you have to move from dark spaces back to broad daylight, moving in and out of dark spaces.

However, with this problem some of the exhibits definitely left and impression and these are some of them:

3.24 by 404.zero

The experience was surreal with music that correlates with the light show in complete darkness whilst realisitically it's a big open dark space, where lights will turn on and off periodically in a certain method along with the ambient music defined the experience. 

Heavily involving visual and audio cues, the visual is just turning the light on and off, but it's only has appearances of light in certain sections within this open dark space and as you move through the light show which fit with audio cues, the lights in the environment along with various colour to represent a particular emotion with mainly red, yellow and white. When red came up, I felt like I was in danger, when white was on, I felt safe and when yellow was active, I felt the need run as a quick irrational action.

UCLA arts conditional studio

Two students were doing a live experiment, and what I mean by that is that they were making that experiment during the exhibition which was quite interesting in itself, but there were two big screens which just had a collection of dots, but interestingly even thought the information which was being process is passing through as text, you are the active participant with the dots, encourage movement and force in an unique yet distinctive pattern of movements and interactions which are taken in real-time. The text defines your dot and the cameras capture where you are creating an interesting experiment with false interactivity, because you directly interacting with the machine however, it is interacting with you.  

Banshee 2023 by Matthew Schreiber

An amazing light show which had very powerful lasers again allow for that illusion of interaction, at least in this case presenting the illusion of tactile sensory information. I can see that the lights do not affect me, but with the colaboration of the visual communication that is sent to my brain with the colour of red meaning “danger” the lasers made a difference as I did feel like something was holding me back and once I went through them, almost as a restricted section or a barrier that I need to overcome has been done as passing through many of these lasers 

Conclusion

Currently, this exhibition is closed and I managed to get there on the last day of it, so I was really lucky. The good thing that it made me gather an overall understanding of regards the idea of ‘presense’ which was mentioned in the reseach earlier and in order to achieve this total immersion is necessary meaning the stimulation of all human senses can allow this to happen and in least in relation to the project, audio, visual and (although not actually there) tactile information all were a part of this experience, which is important to gather as making this VR virtual museum will have to include methods which interact with these human senses.