Dennis Del Favero, Tomasz Bednarz: SoS

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Artist Statement:


    SoS forms part of a research program exploring ‘dialogical spatial aesthetics’, namely the investigation of spatial experience as a two-way dynamic transaction between the viewer and space, rather than its treatment as a linear and static relationship between an observer and a setting. It tests the hypothesis of Manuel Castells, the world’s foremost-cited communications theorist, who formulates space as a fluid process that is constituted through the interactive relationships between its constitutive cyber, human and physical components. SoS tests this by creating a cyber/physical experience where the viewer is physically positioned to immersively experience a virtual ocean voyage whose wave and climatic behaviours change in unforeseen ways. By doing so it models the dynamical uncertainties that characterize the actual experience. These dynamics involve, on the one hand, the behavior of the user, and on the other the behavior of the virtual oceanic space. As the viewer experiences the voyage, attempting to control it through their gesture and optical orientation, the space responds to their behaviour in relatively independent ways, resulting in different wave and climatic behaviours. Inversely, changes in the space induce shifts in the viewer’s behavior.