Image Technology Echoes

Virtual Reality, 2021 

︎ Image Gallery

In the immersive experimental fiction Image Technology Echoes by Lauren Moffatt, we enter a quiet gallery inside a cavernous museum space. The gallery is empty, except for an older man and a younger woman. The pair are having a stilted conversation about the painting they are looking at: a large expressionist canvas depicting a stormy ocean. This odd exchange seems to circulate indefinitely… unless we step inside the body of one of the two figures and are transported to their mental space. Each interior is a messy room with its own life. In this place, the person’s doppelgänger homunculus is reciting their stream of consciousness that the artist generated with a neural network, and the painting appears very different from what we just saw in the gallery.

Performed by live actors captured using volumetric video, and written in collaboration with deep learning frameworks, Image Technology Echoes asks how we experience perception and embodiment, and how much might be going on below the surface of those we meet every day. Programming by Nico Nonne, with volumetric capture provided by the VSENSE Lab at Trinity College Dublin.