Last week I went to Santa Fe, New Mexico, to present VR.Con.Sequence at the Art and Technology Festival Currents 2025.
I brought my own Quest 3 and was initially supplied with a laptop that should be able to run it but could not keep up. Probably due to the high resolution of the headset. Luckily there was a desktop I could use, and the experience ran smoothly. Except when it didn’t. The machine froze a few times, but nothing a hard reboot couldn’t fix.
After installing on Thursday I had some time to explore Santa Fe on Friday afternoon and went gallery hopping. Saw some great work and spoke to a number of artists. And did some sight seeing, including a visit to the New Mexico Capital Building.
One of the people I met is the originally Belgian painter William Rotsaert who painted this intriguing work based on an experience on the Brooklyn Bridge.
I really enjoyed the festival. There were a lot of great works included in the show. A list of all the works can be found on the festival website. These works are hard to capture in a photograph, so I do not have many pretty pictures.
A major part of the festival are the performances. Pictured above is the setup for Memor-ii by the brilliant marimba player Lynn Vartan. Some involved quite a bit of tech, like ALIAS2 by Mexican artists Deriva Arcana, Correo Electronico, and Xiaomi Porno. In that piece volumetric capture of a live dance performer was used as the basis for the background projection. Some had a simple but effective setup: in Hunter Whitaker-Morrow’s performance The Emissary: [prayer 1]
his (highly distorted) voice triggered the switching between two video streams which was well timed and impressive.
There was a two day seminar on Art and Technology in a Culture of Speed, with very interesting discussions on slowing down.
My own piece was a bit tucked away in the far corner but still got quite a bit of traffic. On the right you can see Melisa Yağmur Saydı experiencing the VR project. She herself had an entire wallpapered room set up with multiple screen playing somewhat crude but poignant animation reflecting on live in a city in Türkiye (she lived in Instanbul) Her installation is called CANKUŞ
There was quite a divers group of attendees who experienced my piece, ranging in age from something like fifteen to seventy five. Overall I was happy with the positive feedback. I did set up a feedback form, but so far received only four responses. Someone who put their name down as Jay commented:
“To me this game while holding the idea of the choice to destroy things, it also felt like it hinted at the real life impulsive decisions made in the world that leads to people losing their homes.”
The subtitle of the piece is “It’s no Game” but regardless, a very interesting take on the work!
The best thing about a festival like this is of course the people you meet and the conversations you have. It is not often that you get to meet so many bright people interested, or invested even, in Art and Technology.
Zuyva Sevilla was in charge of tech at the festival and was instrumental in making everything run smoothly.
I unfortunately did not snap a picture of her, but Heather Norman was also a great help.
The cool dude in the picture here (the one on the right) is the LA based artist and musician Ilia Gilbert. As part of the art collective Artific3 he co-created the interactive sound installation Synesthetica, which is fun to interact with. He also was the DJ and bass player during Sunday’s Artist party.
This post turned out to be a tad longer than anticipated. If you made it all the way down here I applaud you attention span. I did not even get to mention the sometimes problematic Generative AI that was included in the show; one of the themes was AI/Artist collaboration. Don’t get me started…
Hope to be back at Currents soon. One last thing though: it is likely that they will loose their federal funding, which makes up 20% of their budget. Consider supporting them!
(all photos except the last one are my own)