Pillflower World, 2009virtual reality installation, interactive performance, machinima, comic book documentation

swipe/drag image

Pillflower World, a mixed reality exhibition, is a ‘Russian doll’ experience. The piece was shown at the Australian National University (ANU), Canberra, in a ‘real-life’ gallery. Within the ANU gallery, the online, 3D world, Second Life was projected. Within that space, there was a giant snow globe environment—worlds nested inside each other. Snow globes, universal signifiers of all things kitsch, are trusty souvenirs of travel and exotica. In Pillflower World the snow globe becomes a metaphor for the conflation of locale, space, culture and even time. Snow globes are ubiquitous and generic. Tropical scenes share cold-weather precipitation right along with the North Pole. This was a place of seemingly happy, jolly flowers and snow play, all encased in a sim-spanning, dynamic, swirling snow globe, a whimsical overlay to a dark undercurrent in that the pretty flowers are made of pills,  imagery that conjures up so many associations with unhappiness and illness. Soothing pastel shades of the medicinals belie their power and effect on the human body and our drug dependant culture. Alluring and candy-like, the pillflowers visually signify that ‘all is right’ with the world, or at the very least, can be made so instantaneously.

Special thanks to Desdemona Enfield for her scripting genius and Larry Pixel of the New Media Consortium for the generous loan of the sim on which the art was displayed.

Comic Book

Review

 

 

 

 

 

Pillflower World, 2009virtual reality installation, interactive performance, machinima, comic book documentation

swipe/drag image

Pillflower World, a mixed reality exhibition, is a ‘Russian doll’ experience. The piece was shown at the Australian National University (ANU), Canberra, in a ‘real-life’ gallery. Within the ANU gallery, the online, 3D world, Second Life was projected. Within that space, there was a giant snow globe environment—worlds nested inside each other. Snow globes, universal signifiers of all things kitsch, are trusty souvenirs of travel and exotica. In Pillflower World the snow globe becomes a metaphor for the conflation of locale, space, culture and even time. Snow globes are ubiquitous and generic. Tropical scenes share cold-weather precipitation right along with the North Pole. This was a place of seemingly happy, jolly flowers and snow play, all encased in a sim-spanning, dynamic, swirling snow globe, a whimsical overlay to a dark undercurrent in that the pretty flowers are made of pills,  imagery that conjures up so many associations with unhappiness and illness. Soothing pastel shades of the medicinals belie their power and effect on the human body and our drug dependant culture. Alluring and candy-like, the pillflowers visually signify that ‘all is right’ with the world, or at the very least, can be made so instantaneously.

Special thanks to Desdemona Enfield for her scripting genius and Larry Pixel of the New Media Consortium for the generous loan of the sim on which the art was displayed.

Comic Book

Review