About this Event
BATOPIA is an interactive VR experience that lets the player see the world through the eyes of a bat via Embodied Virtuality. Created by media artist Yiou Wang, HCI researcher Yujie Wang and a team of interaction designers and researchers who navigate between physical and virtual realms, Batopia simulates a bat’s sensory umwelt through conceptual, technological, and imaginative lenses, immersing the player in the world of an animal with sensory modalities very different from our own. Chaos, signal, the nonhuman sense of musicality - Trans-Sensory Mapping, which maps ultrasonic recordings of the Greater Sac-Winged Bat adapted through generative techniques onto both spatial soundscapes and sight, simulates a bat’s phenomenal world amidst a wide range of cognitive, social, and musical contexts. In this immersive audiovisual experience, you can explore a bat’s nocturnal echolocation, foraging, and the musical sensibilities in their singing. The experience connects people with nonhuman animals by, as philosopher Elizabeth Grosz says, opening them up to the “universe of becoming-other” through the active sensing and navigation of a unique nonhuman experienced world.
BATOPIA will premiere as a VR game and installation at :iidrr Gallery, New York, on July 26 to 27. BATOPIA can be experienced on an individual basis through 30-minute slot reservations from 1 pm to 5:30 pm, Friday, July 26 and from 10 am to 7 pm, Saturday, July 27. The opening talk and video demo is at 6pm, July 26.
Artist:
Yiou Wang is a multimedia artist in the fields of 3D art, XR/VR and immersive experiences, with a background in architecture. Yiou delights in worldbuilding-based storytelling using a blend of traditional and emergent media/technologies to meander between the physical and the virtual realms through myth, tech and nature. Co-founder of Mixanthropy Art Tech Studio, Yiou explores the sense of 'ancient future myths' rooted in humanity’s ancestry while employing emergent methods like XR, motion capture, and interactive media, all nested in their native potentials for embodiment and metamorphosis. Yiou creates non-binary, anti-anthropocentric works that seek to be a conduit between us and a larger, more-than-human world.
Yiou graduated from Harvard Graduate School of Design with a Mind Brain Behavior Interdisciplinary Fellowship. Yiou’s works have been exhibited and awarded at multiple exhibitions and festivals on a global scale, including SXSW, SIGGRAPH, Southern Sweden Design Days, Asian Media Arts Festival, and so on. BATOPIA, a project produced collaboratively by her team Trans Species Collective, has been a global shortlisted finalist for S+T+ARTS “Repairing the Present” Prize in 2022.
HCI Researcher
Yujie is a Human-Computer Interaction researcher, entrepreneur, transdisciplinary designer, and the co-founder of Trans Species Collective, working in the hybrid fields of healthcare, wearables/AIoT, sustainability, biodiversity, and behavior change. He has a background in Human-Computer Interaction from MIT and Harvard. As a mediator between the objective and the subjective in shaping human relationships with machines and the environment, Yujie has research experience at MIT Media Lab and Harvard Medical School, and professional experience in IKEA Home Smart, FaunaPhotonics, Philips Healthcare, and A.P. Moller-Maersk. Transforming how people interact with media such as brain-computer interfaces, mixed reality, wearable devices, and responsive environments, Yujie employs value-driven design methods in conjunction with quantitative and qualitative research to enhance personal and social well-being from the body scale to the planetary scale.
Yujie was a panel speaker at the 2022 SXSW conference and MIT Climate Plug-In Conference, with peer-reviewed publications in international conferences and journals such as ACM SIGCHI, IEEE BSN, ACADIA, CAADRIA, CDRF, Art Machine, and We Robot, and his work has been exhibited in various venues including the Cooper Hewitt Design Museum NYC, UABB Shenzhen Bi-City Biennale, and MIT Museum.
Credits:
Concept, creative direction, and production: Yiou Wang, Yujie Wang
Interaction design and programming: Chuhong Wang, Shaoting Zeng
Original field recording & science consultant: Mirjam Knörnschild
Acoustics and sound design consultant: Benjamin Markham
Batopia was made possible with support from CAMIT (Council of the Arts at MIT) and CAF (Culture & Animal Foundation).
Hours and Address:
:iidrr Gallery
162 Allen St, New York NY 10002
VR experience hours: (RSVP Required)
July 26 :1 pm - 5:50 pm
July 27 : 10 am - 5:30 pm
Opening reception (open to public):
6 pm - 8:00 pm, July 26
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
162 Allen St, 162 Allen Street, New York, United States
USD 17.85