Mat Collishaw Debuts XR Art at Venice Int’l Film Festival

The renowned artist has tapped XR to explore the darker side of human behaviour at Venice's top film event

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Mat Collishaw BEDLAM
Mixed RealityReviews

Published: August 24, 2021

Demond Cureton

Nottingham-born artist Mat Collishaw is set to unveil a major work of art at the 78th Venice International Film Festival through the medium of immersive theatre and extended reality (XR).

The visionary UK artist pushes the limits in technology and explores humanity’s compulsions towards shocking imagery through his works, and his latest creation required four years of painstaking research, technical development, and writing to create.

Named BEDLAM, the new artwork is a world-first XR experience where audiences are transported to the uncharted wilderness of the Metaverse.

Enter BEDLAM

The BEDLAM exhibit provides audiences with infinite interactions as they are transported to London’s Bethlehem Hospital, or Bedlam—the world’s oldest hospital for patients with mental illnesses.

Collishaw’s latest masterpiece will deliver creative ways for audiences to interact with the Metaverse, and operates across multiple devices types such as 5G-enabled phones and virtual reality (VR) headsets.

10 attendees can visit the project at a time and select historical avatars to interact with other guests in the virtual experience.

Attendees can view the XR experience as it would have existed in 17th Century England, with Collishaw’s work reflecting on the parallel between the historical event and contemporary culture.

Explorers can also unlock additional content specific to each avatar’s experience by exploring the environment individually from the ‘guided tour’ of the experience.

Parallel themes explored in the experience include links between the isolation of BEDLAM residents and the rise of technological isolation in the current world, according to the artist.

Emily Jenkins, an award-winning Elizabethan Theatre Specialist and Playwright who has contributed to numerous productions at the Shakespeare’s Globe in London, helped to craft the period language used in scripts for the immersive experience.

Mat Collishaw explained his work in further detail, stating BEDLAM was:

“an attempt to reflect on the human condition, on our relationship with technology, our perception of reality and the appetite for spectacle [and] to resurrect a particularly sinister chapter in the history of human conduct. Our interest in the absurd and the grotesque and the appetite for human debasement remains today; digital technology is just the latest vehicle to give us unprecedented and immediate access to these darker corners of human behaviour”

The experience did not aim to sensationalise or mock mental health issues, but to “lay bare the savagery” on the historic treatment of patients as well as draw parallels to “modern day voyeurism”.

Partnerships and XRT GAIA Platform

El-Gabal, an extended reality theatre (XRT) production firm venturing into Metaverse experiences, and Minky Productions, a UK based production company for film, imaging, and TV, assisted with the huge project which displays incredible levels of detail to present cultural experiences in a virtual space.

Collishaw’s art was produced with realistic motion capture and rendering techniques on El-Gabal’s GAIA platform, where end users do not require additional software or hardware to experience the project.

GAIA combines expansive scriptwriting and interactive performances using the latest motion capture and streaming tools, allowing audiences to interact in real-time with remote actors in the virtual world.

GAIA’s detailed rendering of motions, facial expressions, and environments reveals new levels of realism not seen in the virtual space for unprecedented human interactions with real-time 3D (RT3D) content.

The experience also provides audiences with a degree of bespoke storytelling to purvey the age of digital communications by merging universal accessibility with humanity’s role in a brave new world.

More Information on the Event

The 78th Venice International Film Festival will dedicate a section to VR films at its Venice VR Expanded event taking place 1-11 September on-site and 1-19 at 14 satellite venues in 10 countries as well as online. The event is one of the first in the world following its acclaimed debut last year.

Mat Collishaw entered the VR space after releasing his ‘Thresholds’ exhibit at Somerset House in London, and his previous works have been featured at Tate Museum and the British Council Collections in London, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, Arrter Foundation in Istanbul, Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego, and Museum of Old and New Art in New South Wales, among others.

The exhibition comes months after several XR experiences took centre stage in London, including the Van Gogh Immersive Experience and Augmented Gallery, to showcase the power of immersive technologies in displaying new forms of creative content to audiences.

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