Special Showcase

Beyond Reality has organized a special performance ‘Bardo’ linked to the this year’s XR selection to the festival. “Bardo” is a Tibetan word consists of “bar” meaning “between” and “do” meaning “two” or “hang” and it means an intermediate, transitional, or liminal state between dimensions.

‘Bardo’ is a multidisciplinary work which expresses various layers between real and virtual spaces and conveys the existences at the boundary between time and space. For this project, Beyond Reality and Yanghee Lee, a choreographer who questions the value of performing arts by expanding the object and concept of choreography based on Seoul and New York, had worked together to distill the essence of this collaborative project between art genres.

VR content is more than just a visual/video content that is watched through specific VR decives. New media is in a rapid pace in development by converging with traditional arts and by utilizing various technologies, namely represented as VR.

This performance, designed to provide people with an artistic experience of interacting with digital images and body, however, had made it difficult to meet the audience in person due to the COVID-19. Instead, we made it into a dance film and please enjoy the following video clips. Beyond Reality proudly presents ‘Bardo’.

Project ‘Beyond Reality’: Digital Archiving
– Digital twin, containing space

*Purpose
Creating a “virtual space” for the exhibition and archiving of virtual reality contents is an important project in preparing for the upcoming virtual festival in the near future.

Digital scan had been done on the premise of Buchaeon Art Bunker B39 in order to replace or to complement the actual exhibition & festival experience to the audience. B39 is a cultural space of the city of Bucheon which was transformed from a garbage incinerator and also the main exhibition space of ‘Beyond Reality’, the XR program section of the Bucheon International Fantastic Film Festival (BIFAN) from 2019. Through this project, ‘Beyond Reality’ will have the digital twin of the real space in virtual format and be exhibited simultaneously in both real and virtual spaces. This will provide more broadened access to the audience from all around the world. Not only limited to one-time edition, this will be utilized as an advanced medium for archiving in the digital space to enable time travel.

*Performing the project (Professor YANG Jeong-Seok/Director, Museum of the University of Suwon)

We performed the base work for reinterpretation through this project of capturing the space where the past, the present and the future coexist and transforming it into data. Through this process, I enjoyed the joy of discovering the possibility of replicating and reconstructing the time memorized in the real space to virtual space. Scanning a space is a process of creating numerous digital point data and image data for photogrammetry. In the process of combining and visualizing these data through the algorithm of a specific program, a whole new world is unintentionally created that is completely different from the world we see. It is similiar to falling into the rabbit hole which I have experienced after investigating an old building for a long time. Therefore, we decided to follow the image generated in the computational process of the algorithm program as it is visible before correcting it so that the human eye can perceive it as the same as reality.

And in the process of digital twinning, which transfers reality into a virtual space, I see something hidden behind the surface of reality through the unusually generated images. Even though it is a space of reality, it sometimes appears in the form of the past and sometimes as that of the future. Even the new future that we are creating here was piled up as one of multiple layers.