FOREST VR - Artist Statement
FOREST is a series of interwoven sound sculptures mixed in spatial audio and arranged into a unicursal labyrinth, offering a virtual space for reflection, movement, and being.
The bodiless viewer is suspended and surrounded by gesturally-carved, sculptural black forms through which viewers can freely move. Wandering through the misty light-gray, horizonless and groundless space, viewers are swathed by womb-like comfort in a space that is unfamiliar yet welcoming. Guided by delicately spatialized natural sounds, soft percussive polyrhythms, and resonant strings, viewers are invited to the heart of a primordial digital space.
Its original demo premiered in Austin’s 2019 SXSW Virtual Cinema Festival and won Best Digital Experience in VRHAM! Hamburg. Artist/animator Kelsey Boncato and sound-artist/composer Daniel Oldham have now completely rebuilt and reconfigured the experimental VR piece, transforming the working into a fully interactive experience. The 2024 update also allows it to run natively on the new Meta Quest 3 VR headset, making the experience far more accessible than the original demo which required a costly high-end gaming PC in addition to a VR headset in order to run.
In its newest iteration, Oldham’s alternative methods to mixing in VR using Wwise, presents an innovative approach to time and space in relation to the viewer’s phantom movement and interaction with Boncato’s porous sculpture-drawings. Gentle yet playful melodies and rhythms are attached to each of the sculptures. The deliberate composition remains in a genre neutral space, a static mood that prompts viewers movement through textures and a subtle rise in intensity. The abstract musical narrative is relative to the viewer’s exploration, as their orientation is ambiguous while the sense of time/space slips, compresses and stretches.
Diverging away from cinematic hybrid-orchestral underscores, contemporary guided meditations (i.e. a guiding voice or sound baths), and overwhelming video games, which instead elicit one specific emotion, FOREST's refreshing take on sound treatment animates the viewers’ activity as they open up each scene. The inquisitive music is made with sample recordings of multiple forests from the Ancient Bristlecone Forest in the Eastern Sierras of California, Mt. Hood National Forest in Oregon to Mt. Asahidake in Hokkaido Japan. The sonic exploration is further expanded through recordings of improvised cello, played by Japanese-Australian classical cellist Yoshi Masuda. The cello instrument recording stands-in as a historical object of rich resonance parallel to tradition, craft and ancient wood as material –a relic fragmented throughout the VR piece as it musically suggests memory and sanctuary.
FOREST opens the possibilities of virtual space as a stoic-otherworldly realm that translates the beautiful qualities of nature alone and the emotive humanness in both art and music. The reductive yet expansive environment offers a poetic and soothing experience in contrast to many other digital immersive works that can be exhausting and over-saturated. Through this technological framework of audio-visual translation and erasure, the avant-garde project simultaneously questions the stability of consciousness both in digital spaces and in “natural” spaces. Between emptiness and fullness, the dissonant yet soothing world gives an introspective place to be vulnerable and to surrender.
2024 Credits
Animator, Designer, and Concept: Kelsey Boncato
Music Composer and Wwise Authoring: Daniel Oldham
Technical Development and Interactive Designer: Daniel Oldham
Featured Cellist: Yoshika Masuda 増田喜嘉
Featured Vocalist: Madison Stoddard
2019 Demo Credits
Animator/Designer: Kelsey Boncato, Technical Development/Music Composer: Daniel Oldham, Interactive Designer: Bryan Zhang, Director of the Immersive Media Lab, School of Cinematic Arts, University of Southern California: Candace Reckinger, Immersive Media Lab Technician: Shaoyu Su, Featured Cellist: Yoshika Masuda 増田喜嘉, Featured Vocalist: Madison Stoddard
Awards/Prizes (2019 original demo)
2019 Winner of Best Experience, VRHAM! Fest, Hamburg, Germany
2019 Nominee for Best Digital Experience, Sheffield Doc Fest, UK
2018 Experimental Virtual Reality Alumnus Project Prize, SCA Immersive Media Lab, USC School of Cinematic Arts, Los Angeles
Screening Exhibition Selections (2019 original demo)
2019 Ottawa Animation Int’l Festival, Ottawa, Canada
2019 South by Southwest SXSW Film Festival, Virtual Cinema, Austin, TX
2019 Cinequest Film + Creativity Festival, San Jose, CA
2019 Sheffield Doc Fest, Subconscious Sensibilities Exhibition, Sheffield, UK
2019 Open City Doc Fest, Expanded Realities Exhibition, London, UK
2019 Festival Du Nouveau Cinema, FNC Explore Exhibition, Montreal, Canada
2019 VRHAM! Festival, Hamburg, GE
2019 Geneva Int’l Film Festival, Bande Originale, Geneva, Switzerland
2019 Linoleum Int’l Contemporary Animation & Media Art Fest, Kyiv, Ukraine
2019 Anny Animation Nights, New York, NY
2019 Bucheon Int’l Animation Festival, Bucheon-si, South Korea
2019 VRE Fest, Rome, Italy
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