If tech leads to anxiety more often than serenity, the VR Live Mandala Experience may alter your state of mind. But you’ll need to dash to Allapattah Tuesday to partake.
Hands in the controls, VR headset strapped on, you’re ready to climb the Himalayas and enter the Temple of the Tilting Buddha.
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FILMGATE INTERACTIVE
MEDIA FESTIVAL #09
Poet's Room
Country: Korea
Medium: VR
Year: 2022
Creators: Bomsok Ku, Bryan Ku
This is the story of a man who loved literature and was a prolific poetic writer. The poet’s name was Yun Dong-ju, and he lived a tragic life which was cut far too short by an untimely death before Korea’s independence, without the chance to ever witness the moment he had wished for throughout his short life. This VR film was produced to present an understanding of the time, in which Yun Dong-ju lived, through his world of poems. His final moments may have been tragic, but the literary device of dreams can be used to vicariously fulfill his wishes and commemorate his sublime sacrifice. When the visitors open his handwritten manuscripts, his life story is narrated along with the poems. The train, headed for Gyeongseong, crossing the ocean signifies how Yun Dong-ju had left for Gyeongseong with aspirations to study literature, but could never return from the prisons of a foreign land across the sea.
Each narrated fragment of memory is a remembrance of the past, and Yun’s dream harbored in a small room reflects a precarious and realistic future. Nevertheless, the stories in Yun’s dreams progress from winter and conclude in a world of spring, and the viewers, along with Yun Dong-ju, may fly through the innumerable stars in the night sky.