Waiting for Cargo
a VR installation by Paweł Janicki

"Waiting for Cargo" is a VR installation by Paweł Janicki, a part of the "Point Nemo" solo show at the WRO Art Center (2020).

Buried in a miniature sand – and, thus, silicon – dune, definitely unwearable VR goggles replay a speech in which General Xu Yan, a lecturer at the People’s Liberation Army’s National Defense University (中国人民解放军国防大学), comments on the emergent protests in Hong Kong (15th June 2019).

In the world of art associated with new technologies, AR/VR is an equivalent of architecture and film – an emblematic medium which is perceived as a manifestation of technological advancement, interpretable in terms of commercial entertainment and the political discourse of progress.

According to Jaron Lanier, who came up with the coinage “virtual reality,” AR/VR was supposed to serve first and foremost as a communicative amplifier and a catalyst in the fusion of film, music, and programming into a new quality within media art. Successive iterations of the AR/VR technology gradually reduced the mass of the headgear device, without ever retracting from its declarative state-of-the-artness and defining the potential developmental paths so as to justify the demand for more efficient silicon, for an institutional superstructure (as exemplified by a CAVE infrastructure originating in the spirit of mainframe culture), and additional funding.

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Video documentation from the Point Nemo by Mira Boczniowicz courtesy of the WRO Art Center.