Repository

Fantastic Shredder v2.0

4 - 8 minutes Virtual Reality Experience

Created By Weidi Zhang

2019

Introduce Repository:

Our digital footprints in the vast data universe are duplicatable, transferrable and mutable. Deletion has become much harder than throwing a piece of paper into a shredder, which was first invented over a hundred years ago. Photos, videos, geographical tag or just simple texts living on social media platforms as the virtual presence of digitized human memories strengthen the power of machine computation and analysis while underlying the control from us.

When we try to preserve or delete our own stories in the digital landscape, do we still have the authorship of them?

Are they in a constant shift of meaning and representation?

Repository is a virtual reality experience created around the issue and question of data authorship and data oblivion. It builds a world of data in motion merging the structure of a server farm (A place physically store data) with a paper shredder (A machine deconstruct data). Repository gradually transforms from a surreal bank safely stores memories into a space filled with floating shreds of letters and characters through assembling and fragmenting varies conversations borrowed from Twitter posts in 2019. Its non-linear narrativity, interactive experimental sound and surreal aesthetic provide a conceptualization of an alternative model of human-machine interaction, and questions whether we have the right to be forgotten, at the same time as the right to be remembered?

VR Experience Teaser

User Interaction

The duration of this Virtual Reality experience is 4 - 8 minutes. Each audience could participate in this immersive audio-visual experience by wearing a VR headset and using a controller to navigate the space. During the first two minutes of this virtual experience, the audience will be navigated to fly through the space and after that the audience could use controllers to explore the space with diverse sounds and visuals, interacting with objects, and affecting their appearance, sounds, and behaviors, which will result in an ever-changing fluid space. There are also lots of invisible anywhere doors to transfer audience in the space. The audience will wander in the space, read the visualization of twitter posts from strangers, curious about the symbols, and structures, and engage in the interaction.