With Virtual Reality, it’s artists who will lead the way in showing us what’s possible

With VR, we keep being told "the possibilities are endless". Nowhere is the volume turned up higher on this point than in the gaming industry, where companies are running circles around each other to figure out just how far these "possibilities" can take gamers. If we listen to the loudest voices on the virtual reality scene, VR seems to offer us two major opportunities: to "step into" games, and to replicate "real-world" experiences we'd not otherwise have the chance to explore.

Whilst I think that both of these things are pretty great, simulating or replicating real- or gamer-world experiences are only one facet of what VR can and will be able to offer us. And amongst all the racket coming from the gaming and tech industries, it seems to me there's a vital voice missing here: artists.

The potential of VR technology to create new kinds of art experiences has not been lost on artists, but they rarely seem part of the conversation. This summer, I've been lucky enough to be working with NEW INC, an incubator space for creative practitioners working at the intersections of art, tech, and enterprise, run by the New Museum in New York. Some of the NEW INC members are artists using VR in intriguing ways.

Charles Sainty is one of those people. His exhibit at NEW INC's recent public showcase was a virtual reality installation and sculptural series constructed from user-uploaded YouTube videos of wrecked vehicles. In Nothing to See, images from these videos were digitally mapped and manipulated to create a virtual reality installation that visitors can move through. But it's not quite what you expect. During the process, the images are abstracted, resulting in a fragmented and glittering VR landscape that speaks to the violence of the source material, but is also very beautiful. One visitor commented that it was like being in a sculpture garden (one that can only exist in the realm of VR). By literally positioning the viewer in a virtual space that is at once participatory, beautiful, and violent, Nothing to See challenges us to question our relationship to these types of online images and how we consume them.

Virtual reality has the potential to transform our experience of the performing arts, too. Another NEW INC member, filmmaker Eliza McNitt, has created a virtual reality film that offers viewers an opportunity to float within the imagery from the Hubble Space Telescope. The film is part of The Hubble Cantata, a multidisciplinary performance four years in the making that recently premiered in Brooklyn, New York.

Composed by Paola Prestini, The Hubble Cantata is an opera inspired by images from the Hubble Telescope, and which tells the story of a woman who loses a child before taking her own life. The opera anchors this story of human tragedy to that of the birth, life and death of stars, connecting us to the cosmos. The performance (which at its premier was, fittingly, outside - although nary a star was visible from New York City) combined a live choir, opera singers and an orchestra. During the last five minutes, the audience donned virtual reality headsets to watch McNitt's film. Together, we floated through the Orion Nebula, witnessing the bright glow of the earth's curve slowly emerge beneath us, encountering pink clouds of faraway galaxies, whilst the musicians continued to play. Far from feeling gimmicky, the virtual reality portion was the perfect cadence to Prestini's opera, sending us soaring through the cosmos - somehow managing to connect us to the stars from which, as the voiceovers in the performance reminded us, we all come.

Virtual reality is still in the very early stages of development, but it makes sense that artists, tasked with showing us new ways of viewing the world, should be exploring it as a medium. There's potentially a whole new aesthetic and way of relating to art to be discovered through VR. Artists are going to be vital in uncovering it.

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Image via Flickr