The Field

The interactive VR installation The Field was created within the MARTA project / Mixed Reality Kunst im öffetlichen Raum / at the University of Applied Sciences in Düsseldorf.

The Field is a virtual version of the online project Dream Archive /www.arhivsnova.hr/ – a domain where the visitors can record their dreams in a textual form, realized in 2013 as the central work of the exhibition Between Heaven and Earth for the 55th Venice Biennale. Thanks to a wide global response (more than 2200 dreams in different languages ​​have been collected in the Archive), a sort of dream pool has been created where numerous introspective and hermetic dream inscriptions testify the ability of the human mind to unconsciously create worlds beyond the control of the conscious self. The starting point of the interactive VR installation The Field is to make visible this phenomenon of creating/constructing dream worlds. In The Field the dreams – which emerge as products of bio-virtual reality created by our unconscious – are paradoxically placed in the field of the so-called ´real´, technically produced virtual reality created by the conscious mind. The virtual scene is a ploughed, muddy field in a foggy and rainy autumn morning, above which billboards hover all the way to the horizon. They display selected dreams from the Archive in the way that visitor can read while walking through the field. The confusing sense of presence in this ‘redefined’ virtual world of dreams (double virtuality) is enhanced by the fact that the only thing that comes from reality are actually the texts from the Dream Archive.