co̥njunctio̊n
2015

Through looking beyond our bubbles of personal experience and listening beyond our own spheres of existence can immersive media put us in contact with the multiplicity of ways that the earth is experienced by beings? 

An Oculus Rift project made for the UK’s partial solar eclipse of March 2015.

Intrigued by the spectacle of the black sun that can not be looked at with the naked eye, we built a virtual reality performance as a way of witnessing the event in digital ceremony. Conjunction continues the Of the Spheres project and takes the audience outside to relate to the real rythms of the earth and skies.

Research into how ancient cultures understood this specific cosmological conjunction inspired us to create a virtual experience that explored the moon and the eclipse symbolically and mathematically. Made for outside viewing, we incorporated a live web cam into the virtual experience so that the viewer can see the “actual” eclipse occur in the sky above them.

The Earth; The Starting Point,
New Cosmologies - David Packer for Of the Spheres

This phase explored panoramic spheres as a way of recording life on the planet “in the round”. Drawing on the growing field of Acoustic Ecology, we investigated the 360º Photo Spheres and immersive sound recording to explore a media ecology of different recordings of place, looking to the relationship between living beings and their whole environment.

“Using techniques of re-mixing the micro and the macro - life on earth and the sounds and visions NASA is collecting of the cosmos - we are interested in making visible and audible more of the pluralities of worlds that live on Earth.”