Our Cupidity Coda

There’s an aspect of current Virtual reality that underplays an emphasis on the personal, the poetic, the introspective, and the spaces that exist in between. Our Cupidity Coda seeks to address this by creating (what I term) a MicroVR Experience: a poetic snapshot of the life span of a romantic relationship, bridging the gap between the impersonal and the intimate. 

The meat of the project is a set of poetic texts interspersed with 360 illustrative stills. The work is deliberately designed to partially echo the conventions from early film-making days (including no audio), making a viewer focus on text inserts, which are contrasted with having to move (turn in the 360 VR space) and view the 360 tableaus (a reflection of the theme underlying the work) to engage fully with the 360 illustration sections. 

Our Cupidity Coda is designed for viewing on any mobile phone and is designed for (initial) quick sharp consumption, then repeat plays for those with which it resonates. It’s designed for viewing as a 360 video through a URL on most mobile devices and/or desktops/tablets/ VR headsets (recommended is viewing through a Vive setup via a 360 viewer such as Virtual Desktop or the latest version of the Mozilla Firefox browser). Our Cupidity Coda was built from a desire to encourage repeat viewing, to play through the experience several times in order to stitch together the poetic denseness of the minimal text, and to absorb and process the 360 visuals. It’s a slow-burn work for those that click with it.

(source: ELO 2018 website)