A Swiss artist explores the limits of virtual reality

As a reminder, virtual reality (VR) is an artistic form linked to the technology that gives it form. Participating in an “experience” of this type, whether in VR or extended reality (RX), which combines virtual and real, presupposes putting on a plastic headset. But the charms of illusion can be broken at the slightest malfunction. As soon as wires get tangled around the ankles or wrists or noises from the outside world or bodily sensations interfere.

The artist who dabbles in it must in principle also have a certain idea of ​​programming in his baggage. If this is not the case and his or her artistic ambition exceeds his or her technological skills, he or she must then call on a developer, whose technical realism may restrict the initial artistic vision.

These formal limits questioned me last October in Prague during my visit to the Festival of Virtual Reality and Immersive Art (ART*VR). At the DOX Contemporary Art Center, where the festival took place, a space hosted projects selected by curators and for which the public was invited to don any headset. On another floor, for the competing projects, a specific helmet was dedicated to each of them.

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While virtual reality is seen as a futuristic art, the technology behind it remains primitive. Due to technical constraints, the discomfort of headsets and a proven risk of nausea, projects rarely exceed 25 minutes. Most projects are computer-designed animated films or small films shot in the real world with 360-degree cameras.

On closer inspection, the graphics used for these animations would not be out of place in a video game dating from ten or fifteen years ago. As for the short films immersed in hyperrealism, most suffered from compressions that were sometimes too visible with skies full of pixels.

Note that all the headsets provided were from Meta, Facebook’s parent company, which dominates the market for the production and distribution of these devices.

A Swiss VR artist

Among the projects presented, that of 2D animator Fabienne Giezendanner entitled “Bloom”. It was at the dawn of fifty (she is 57 today) that this Franco-Swiss was attracted by the artistic opportunities that virtual space offered. But she never stopped during our interview to emphasize that her work was limited by the field of possibilities.

Fabienne Giezendanner, artist RV

Michal Hančovský

“This can be frustrating as a host. I can order from my designer about ten birds and he will tell me that three will be enough otherwise they will be too small. It was even worse when I started looking into this art in 2016. Let’s say that it is now appropriate to stick to around 200 megabytes per clip. But it’s difficult to stay on track and the adaptation is permanent,” she explains.

A series of contingencies at the level of form can impact the narration. “For an immersive artist, it is a real challenge to write scenarios in the conditional since you must therefore think in the following way: if the spectator has his eye fixed on the bird, another animation must follow suit . But be careful, if you think too far ahead, you get a headache. It’s in the evening while eating that I understand the possibilities offered,” she says.

A digital forest

Virtual reality is still in its infancy. Many of the projects presented last fall in Prague had identifiable characteristics. Film critic Roger Ebert once called cinema an “empathy machine.” It has become a way of mythologizing virtual reality too.

In this festival, the public was “in situation” with the possibility of slipping, for example, into the shoes of women who suffer from miscarriages or postpartum psychoses. The opportunity to also witness the mistreatment inflicted on Korean “comfort women” during the Second World War, to cite just two examples. A highly written and experimental work like “Oneroom-Babel” (2023) by artist Lee Sang-hee has also been described as a response to the housing crisis.

“Bloom” invites us to a real climatic nightmare set in the streets of Ornans in France. Where Fabienne Giezendanner lives. A city where Gustave Courbet was born. In the work of Franco-Switzerland, the museum which is dedicated in this city to the painter of the 19^e century is literally consumed. Ashes swirl around the building. We hear sirens in the distance. Panic sets in. But then a bird appears guiding the user towards a forest in order to escape the heat. That’s when I started looking at my hands behind the helmet visor. My own hands. Twigs appeared. My wrists were covered in moss and my left hand was blooming. I was the forest.

I then asked the host how she went about taking on these kinds of challenges and what constraints she had to overcome. “I write a story first,” she explained to me. “With my collaborators, we then assemble sounds, then we move on to basic animations. This happened with the bird that triggers the action in ‘Bloom’. Then comes the background phase. Fabienne Giezendanner specifies that programming specialists can “suggest triggers in this imagined world”.

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Virtual reality in Switzerland

Fabienne Giezendanner, who was born in Switzerland, lives and teaches in France for pragmatic reasons above all. “I have both passports. I can easily move from one country to another depending on the funding available to set up my projects. Having both passports is a real opportunity for artists like me. If a producer declares himself in one of the two countries, I can be co-producer in the other, which greatly facilitates the situation,” she explains.

The community that revolves around immersive fiction is emerging in Switzerland. Despite the fact that crucial drivers today actively participate in its expansion and better dissemination of this type of works of art.

According to Fabienne Giezendanner, this community is much denser in France comparatively. “With co-production houses, financing, curators,” she lists. “In Switzerland, we have the Geneva International Film Festival (GIFF) (where his work was previewed, editor’s note) which is fantastic. But it’s true that we’re only at the beginning here. There are fewer people in Switzerland, where salaries are high, who want to venture into VR-related projects.”

If financing projects is one thing, knowing this specific subject is another. Virtual reality has hardly imprinted itself on the minds of many young artists in Switzerland, because this art form requires basic knowledge of programming technologies.

“Most of my students come from cinema, theater, animation or dance. As soon as they begin to understand how it all works, many imagine that anything is possible. My job is to tell them that nothing is possible,” she laughs. Fabienne Giezendanner adds that her students must above all think about logical progressions by putting themselves in the place of the users. “I don’t really like passive experiences. I like the audience to know why they are participating in an experience,” she says.

The possibilities and pitfalls

All artistic forms are limited by their own techniques. But once, with the support of technologies, they can be freed from formative contingencies, they can flourish and be more complex.

We must think of cinema, a distant cousin of virtual reality despite very relative similarities. Digital films like the popular machinima documentary Grand Theft Hamlet (2024) can now be produced without a single camera, distributed without ever being shown in a theater (although this was not the case for Grand Theft Hamlet), and always be considered “films”.

But maybe I’m too stuck in the old world. When I saw “Bloom” by Fabienne Giezendanner, my mind could not break away from the presence of annoying wires between the visor of my helmet and the earphones. Another downside: with a poorly adjusted visor, the virtual effect was attenuated by the sight of my knees visible at a small angle in the dip of my nose. These are the kinds of obstacles that preclude the desired effect.

This festival gave the public the opportunity to immerse themselves in digital worlds, close in certain respects to video games, and in the middle of spaces where several people were sometimes gathered and connected without temporal contingencies. Embarking on these worlds apparently delighted many people. Proof that the doors to possibilities are gradually opening.

Proofread and verified by Catherine Hickley/translated from English by Alain Meyer/kr

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