link to the VR Tour:
https://www.roundcube360virtualtours.com/wp-content/uploads/virtual/family_portraits_5/
WARNING
This artwork contains fast flashing images. It may cause discomfort and trigger seizures for people with photosensitive epilepsy.
Family Portraits virtual tour Instructions
(headset)
To navigate the virtual space, you do not have to move in the physical space. Put on the headset and adjust it, put on the headphones and you are ready to explore. While wearing the vr headset stand firmly at one place and look around you in any direction.
The small white dot in the center of your field of view is used as a cursor. Buttons and screens in the virtual tour are triggered by your look, just look at the point of your interest steadily for 2” and you will be transported there.
(desktop - laptop)
When the link opens you have to accept the sound and then click and move your mouse in order to move around the space. When viewed on a computer screen you have to click on the arrows to move through the space and each arrow/step you do try moving around by clicking and dragging with your mouse cursor. By placing your cursor over the screens you will see that many of them are clickable (there are 9 clickable screens in total in all the rooms of the apartment, not every screen is clickable). When you'll enter in a screen you will have to move around by clicking and dragging with your mouse cursor again and to exit the screen you ll have to click on a curved arrow button. If in the screen you entered there isn't an exit button there will be buttons prompting you to "accept» something or "forgot password" buttons so you can go on in the tour.
Text
Family Portraits
Moving on in the digital era our perception of the world around us is shifting constantly. To be precise, each software update, camera upgrade or new feature of the platforms we use determines the speed of that change. Ever new realities are emerging on the screen surface.
All those screens are the only way we can have access to this parallel man-made universe, the internet. Those devices guide us trough the real world, they answer our questions, they advice us and keep us company day and night. At the same time, they record our every move and our every choice, always with our permission. What exactly is their role among us? Are they just objects we use and control or is this a bidirectional relationship? Are they friends or enemies? Or are they a mirror, where we constantly seek our reflection as a confirmation of our existence?
In this virtual installation photography is the building block of an experience. Being surrounded by a photograph that looks nearly as real as reality poses even more questions about what photography is and where that leads us.
What it feels like experiencing environments that exist only digitally? Buzzed by sounds, immerged into images and videos, the real and the virtual come closer, making it difficult to rely on your senses.
Text ||
Clicks, blinking sounds, emojis and gifs.
Notifications, alerts and emails (mostly spam).
Connected, still lonely.
Limitless possibilities, predictable choices.
Vast information, limited attention.
Fragmented impressions of never-ending streams.
Testimonies of the present, deleted by tomorrow.
Images, more images.
And here we are, ceaselessly watching.
Additional material
Synopsis
Family Portraits (Virtual Tour)
A dark house interior, illuminated by screens. Where are the inhabitants of this house? Who are they?
What it feels like experiencing environments that exist only digitally? Buzzed by sounds, immerged into images and videos, the real and the virtual come closer, making it difficult to rely on your senses.
Presentation text
Navigating in a house interior is a common experience for most. By depriving the familiar feeling the visitor feels as an intruder in somebody else’s house, perceiving the rather usual scenery as extraordinary and thus evaluating the situation he is into in a fresh perspective. Furthermore the screens inside the virtual tour are navigable also. Just by looking at them the viewer is transferred inside them, experiencing environments that exist only digitally. Immerged into videos and surrounded by sounds the real and the virtual come closer, making it difficult to rely on your senses.
Credits
Direction/ screenplay/ art direction/ photography /production / programming /sound / : Maria Mavropoulou
Greece, 2019
No duration ( a visitor needs an average of 15 minutes to explore the virtual space)
Color
Filmography
The virtual tour “Family Portraits” is Maria Mavropoulou’s first VR film.
With a background in fine art & photography this film/ virtual installation is her first attempt to create a three dimensional experience out of still photographs.
exhibitions
2019 / 60th Thessaloniki International Film Festival, VR section, Warehouse 1, Thessaloniki, Greece.
2019 / For ever more images?, curated by Eduardo Cadava, Yorgos Karailias, Yorgos Prinos, Pasqua Vorgia, Onassis cultural centre, Athens, Greece.
awards
2019 / Special Mention award by the jury for the Vr project ‘Family Portraits” at the 60th Thessaloniki International Film Festival
Bio
Maria Mavropoulou was born in 1989 and she lives and works in Athens, Greece. She completed her MFA studies in 2018, at the Athens School of Fine Arts, from where she got her BA in 2014. She has studied painting and sculpture, although her main medium is photography. Characteristic of her work is that the resulting images are at the boundary line between plausibility or not, potentiality and non-potentiality, random and constructed. By playing with the perception of viewers she questions the role and power of photography in an era that is dominated by it.
Since 2014 she is member of the collective of artists Depression Era that inhabit the urban and social landscapes of the crisis in Greece.Her work has been presented in exhibitions in Greece and abroad and publicized in multiple magazines.
Maria Mavropoulou also works as a freelance photographer specializing in architecture and interior photography and she is a contributing photographer for the New York Times.
For more information about the exhibitions she has participated please follow the link below https://www.mariamavropoulou.com/bio/
For more information about publications of her work please follow the link below https://www.mariamavropoulou.com/press
www.mariamavropoulou.com www.depressionera.gr
contact info
tel. +30 6944930963