Vesna Petresin: AIR 2018/19/20

How can extended media invite audiences in new worlds? What if you could immerse the audience in media rather than immersing media into the audience? How can you teach between disciplines? 

For transdisciplinary artist and thinker Vesna Petresin, collaboration, crosspollination and connection were at the heart of her time as an AIR, from working on her own artistic research project to thinking about transdisciplinary education. Media Opera: a collaborative creative experiment for Mixed Reality focused on expanding methods for concept development, scriptwriting, production, and acting and distributing the storyline – within the challenging framework of Mixed Reality. 

The experimental form of Vesna’s ‘media opera’ combines performance art, music, images, film and technology to explore audience engagement. Offering an alternative to the typical 2D-screen projection format with a seated audience, the media opera reimagines the interaction between an artwork and audience member as a surprising and highly sensory experience inspired by flow and form.

During her residency, Vesna researched the challenges of developing a new cross-discipline, immersive form and how to respond to them. She established a methodology for developing, performing and mediating a live media art format, creating a pilot artwork for a VR environment. This process was informed by critical reflection as she investigated the role of the audience within an immersive context and explored cross-disciplinary creation within live media art and its theoretical backbone. Finally, she pushed against the limits of the VR environment to liberate it from the confinement of a headset and enable it as an integrated, immersive experience. In investigating an alternative toolkit for live experience, she reimagined the audience as ‘prosumer-maker’ rather than consumer – someone who makes an consumes at the same time.

Branching out from a solo art-making perspective, Vesna’s work with the AHK student community was essential to her residency. Linking personal artistic research, collaboration with students and alumni of AHK through seminars and workshops, and tackling the technical challenges of media art, her work connected disciplines, media, techniques and methods within a collaborative creative learning experience.   

Vesna Petresin is a transdisciplinary artist and thinker. She was a Visiting Fellow at Goldsmiths and has lectured and published internationally. She has a practice as a time-architect, composing and performing with sound, light, rhythm, space, movement, text and code. Her practice explores embodiment, transformation and time, alongside the barriers between the intimate and the public sphere. Using her voice, movement, sound, image and light, she explores the concept of time in relation to body, movement, space and emotions. She has exhibited and performed at Tate Modern, ArtBasel Miami, Royal Festival Hall, Royal Academy of Arts, Venice Biennale, Cannes International Film Festival, Institute of Contemporary Arts London, Sydney Opera House, Vienna Secession, World Architecture Festival and Beijing Architecture 

Year

2018