How Artists use VR?

The festival was held at Minnesota Street Project galleries at 1275 Minnesota St in San Francisco’s Dogpatch neighborhood. The gallery is a major hub of San Francisco’s contemporary art community and is developing into an internationally recognized arts destination.

Each artist in the exhibit gets their own open space where the audience can wander into their imagination. Some artists told stories on iPads using augmented reality, with the screen showing the view through the camera transformed, in one case, to show the room on fire or drenched in rain.

“In another artist’s space, I pointed the iPad’s camera at small, 3-D printed beds. The view in AR showed Sims-like figures sleeping with their realistic dreams playing out above them. Some dreamed of giant spiders; others, the nightmare of a computer that won’t stop buffering.” (Esme Bella Rice)

Some of the artists made their work more personal. Judit Navratil used AR to revisit her childhood home through a video that incorporated her deepest memories, including talks with her grandmother. With just about every installation, it would have been easy (and fascinating) to spend way too much time exploring every detail.

Artists

Estella Tse – Estella is exploring the intersections of art + technology + impactful storytelling using VR/AR technology. Her backgrounds include: web design + front-end development, sociology, and illustration + visual design.
Anna Landa w/ Joel Ogden – Their work is an attempt to highlight the subjectivity of human perception. From deconstructing the visual process to analyzing one’s relationship to time, The goal is to create works that interrogate the firmly held notions of an ‘objective truth’.
Suzanne Husky – Problems relating to the exploitation of natural resources, landscape use, and globalization are at the core of Husky’s multimedia practice. From sculpture to drawings, action and photography, her work questions mainstream media in relation to its environmental, social and political agenda.
Elaine Buckholtz– Elaine Buckholtz utilizes video and light in relation to sculptural forms, digital prints, and preexisting sites in architecture and nature often under the cover of darkness. Her most recent explores optical and phenomenological experiences within immersive environments.
Neil Mendoza – Neil’s work uses digital and mechanical technologies to bring inanimate objects and spaces to life. Using this medium, he explores the absurd, the humorous, the futile and the surreal.
Milton Menezes With over 15 years of professional experience, Milton started as a Fine Arts student, Designer and Art Director. Today at Lightfarm, he is directing and working with the Photoshop and Photography teams for the the world’s biggest brands such as Audi, Heineken, Armani, Samsung, New Balance and so on
Erik Kimberly w/ Callie MacSaylor. Erik studied fundamental design theory and is mapping these concepts to co-inside with a painted image created by artist, MacSaylor.
Russell Preston Brown – With over 33 years of creative experience at Adobe,Russell has contributed to the evolution of Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator with feature enhancements, and advanced scripts. He is the Senior Creative Director at Adobe Systems Incorporated as well as an Emmy Award-winning instructor.
Vladimir Petkovic w/ Vuk Nikolic – Vladimir is a Serbian-born CG artist, who lives and works in California. He has had a career of diverse and unexpected experiences, working in the game, motion picture, retail, and tech industries.
Judit Navratil – Judit’s works are mindmaps of different levels of consciousness, comparing the collective subconscious with the very personal stories and memories of a person – examining archetypes, structures, network systems and the tiny miracles of nature.
Gabriel Barcia-Colombo – Gabriel is a mixed media artist whose work focuses on collections, memorialization and the act of leaving one’s digital imprint for the next generation.
Stuart Lynch Stuart is a 3D generalist with a background in motion graphics and photorealism. His work in emerging VR/AR technologies pulls inspiration from nature, science fiction, architecture and concept design. He is originally from the UK, and has worked as an artist in San Francisco for nearly 20 years.
Can Buyukberber – Can is a visual artist working on immersive audiovisual experiences blurring boundries between physical and digital spaces. His practice consists of experiments with virtual/augmented reality, projection mapping, geodesic domes, large-scale displays and digital fabrication. Driven by an interdisciplinary thinking which extends to art, design and science, his work focuses on human perception, exploring new methods for non-linear narratives and emergent forms.