A final article to wrap up XRMust’s overview on the Venice Gap-Financing 2023, the part of the Venice Production Bridge that, during the 80th Venice International Film Festival, will offer selected European and International projects the opportunity to close their international financing, through one-to-one meetings with international decision-makers.
In the previous articles we met the teams behind AN EMPTY SEAT and soon IMPULSE: PLAYING WITH REALITY. Today we come to you with a brief insight on Michelle and Uri Kranot’s last work, GARDEN ALCHEMY, developed during the workshop of Biennale College Cinema VR, 7th edition.
Put on your headset… I enter the the Garden. Dusk obscures my vision. Nature’s sounds surround me—whistling wind, buzzing insects. Who am I? I move my hand. It generates a fturry of particles and dust. I step forward leaving a trail of trampled vegetation behind. I push forward as the Garden yields. I’m urged to explore deeper. A cloud of dust, alive like me, draws near. We reach out, connecting. A ftash of electricity—something happened! Try again. In an instance, we are connected by a stream of synapses. A slice of the world has changed. Not a garden but an ethereal space; woven of pulsating nerve-system-like connections. Music resonates, vibrating through us. We feel gratitude. We remain together, moving slowly. The delicate balance requires proximity and harmonious motion. Disrupt the connection, and we’re thrown back to the world. Another entity joins, expanding our ethereal space. The music deepens, embracing comforting low frequencies. Stay calm to maintain the connection. With each new partner, the world expands, and the music crescendos. We can gently move around together as one big organism connected through synapses of shared knowledge. We have become the Garden.
GARDEN ALCHEMY, synopsis
On the deep core of GARDEN ALCHEMY
GARDEN ALCHEMY XR is an interactive audiovisual and tactile Experimentarium. It is a multiuser, co-location, equilibrium playground: a celebration of music, hand-painted animation and immersive installation.
In its core we aim at engaging people in a collaborative virtual experience, freeing ourselves from human reality in the hope to achieve a ‘beyond human’ perspective on the world- manifested in our work as a magical garden.
One of the key concepts which frames the project is also the notion of Bio-regionalism. More than observation, it also suggests a way of identifying with place, weaving oneself into a region through a shared responsibility of the local ecosystem and looking beyond the human perspective.
On the technology and the story
In GARDEN ALCHEMY we moved forward with the knowledge we gathered from our former experiences (Nothing happens, Songbird, The hangman at home) We have shifted our focus from strict narrative to a playground, using VR as a tool for re-connection and adopting a different perspective than the one we usually have as humans.
In that sense we try to take advantage of recent VR technology- moving from VR as an individual experience to a shared communal one.
A shared experience for the audience
In this prototype stage we are testing how the shared experience is affecting the audience and explore the possibilities of shared interaction. We hope to discover a behaviour that we don’t usually encounter when strangers meet in the real world…
On the Venice Gap-Financing Market
We are in the development stage, just finished our first little prototype, and moving forward into pre-production. We are looking for partners: co-producers, production houses and distributors, together with venues and possibilities for exhibition.
GARDEN ALCHEMY (Denmark) is an immersive project created by Michelle and Uri Kranot and produced by Tindrum production and The Animation Workshop.
The 2023 Venice Gap-Financing will take place at the Hotel Excelsior in Lido, Venice, from September 1 to 3. You can download the official brochure in pdf format at the following link: Venice Gap-Financing
