Falling in love in virtual reality
In a tightly packed room, an excited audience eagerly waited, equipped with special three-dimensional vision glasses. As the lights dimmed, the video kicked into action, unfolding the short, simple yet intriguing story of two people whose clothes fall in love because they themselves are unable to do so, although they want to. «Downlove,» the first stereoscopic video dance in Greece, set in virtual reality and conceived by Euripides Laskaridis and Marios Sergios Eliakis, received a warm welcome when screened at the 7th Videodance Festival in Athens before the festival’s premature closure at the Vassilissis Sofias venue. In «Downlove,» well-known actors Aris Servetalis and Lina Sakka play the two avatars (virtual reality characters). Their movements, as well as those of their clothes, cleverly instrumented by Laskaridis, reveal the emotional shortcomings of the avatars. The pullover and cardigan appear to acquire a life of their own and take over, establishing the communication that the avatars cannot have. «Stereoscopy is in fact a very old method,» explained Eliakis. «It is based on the fact that each eye sees a slightly different image which, when processed by the brain, gives the perception of depth. What we see on the computer or at the cinema is in reality two-dimensional images, which use certain tricks, such as size and parallel movement, to give the illusion of depth.» Eliakis started off with theater set and costume design in London, before becoming interested in digital technology. His work «The Land Light Ignores» won first prize at the Artificial Entities section of the 2002 Medi@terra Festival and he then worked on the costumes for the 2004 Athens Olympics Opening Ceremony’s Clepsydra [Hourglass]. Currently completing a postgraduate course in digital art at the Athens School of Fine Arts, he felt drawn to the three-dimensional magic of stereoscopy. «I want everything I film from now on to be stereoscopic,» he said. «With stereoscopy you can study movement independently, but also in relation to the camera, from the beginning,» said Laskaridis. «I am not a dancer or choreographer, I am an actor with an interest in physical theater. What interested me was movement, which is why instead of dancers we worked with actors who have very good movement.» A 1997 graduate of the Karolos Koun Art Theater drama school, Laskaridis has starred in various theater productions and has also worked in cinema and television. He spent four years in New York, where he completed an MFA (Master of Fine Arts) in theater direction at the Brooklyn College and was also artistic director adviser at New York’s Greek-American Performing Arts Center. Last winter, he performed in Dimitris Papaioannou’s «2.» The initial concept that eventually led to this video was the relationship between people and their clothes. «The idea was that clothes are not just something we wear, but that they have their own existence,» said Laskaridis. «Very often we love our clothes. That is how the idea developed that the tops can come alive and love people back,» added Eliakis. With their somewhat different approaches, the two artists complemented each other in a collaborative process that led to the final result. «From the start, Marios was in charge of the technical part and I was in charge of direction, but the concept had to be something we both believed in,» explained Laskaridis. «Marios has done a lot of abstract, minimalist work, what I would call ‘quite avant-garde.’ I, on the other hand, feel the need to have a simple story that even a child can understand, to use as a framework into which I can insert avant-garde elements.» «What is important to me is not the message we wanted to convey, but what the audience received. Different people received different things from this video. That is why I believe in these simple stories, because they are in fact not specific at all and everyone can get their own message,» he added. «The audience reception was much warmer than I had expected. People came up to me and said they thought it didn’t seem like a Greek production because it was finally something that was not ‘dark.’ Everyone walks away with a positive feeling and I am very happy about that. Life is good; of course we have our bad days and relationships are very hard, but there are also other values worth looking for. Even a disfunctional relationship may have other interesting features worth exploring.» Laskaridis decided on the virtual-reality setting after a discussion with a friend who is hooked on the SIMS computer game. «This is a 30-year-old single woman who comes home at 8 in the evening and spends her three hours of free time taking care of 10 families on the computer. I found that mind-blowing. We can make a fake world and take it into our homes. If I can’t live my life the way I want to, I can sit at home and ‘live’ other people using the so-called ‘cheats.’ In reality, I do that too, I look for ‘cheats’ to make my daily life easier. That is something entirely new, like television was when it first came out. It is a phenomenon of our times. I will not judge virtual reality and label it good or bad, but what it does is make us live as though choosing from a menu. We have to realize it is part of our life and accept that; after all, most of us have logged on to online dating sites for example. But for me, such a menu is a deprivation of the imagination. In virtual reality you can only choose from a number of choices; in real life you can let your imagination run freely and picture things a different way.» How difficult is it to carry out such a project in Greece? For Laskaridis and Eliakis the problems were mostly of a practical nature. Although they received some funding from the Videodance Festival, it was by no means enough and they were lucky to have a team of skilled and efficient artists working with them for free. In Laskaridis’s opinion, the problem in Greece is the lack of organizations that could provide even a minimum of funding for art projects, forcing artists to do other things to get by, but also Greek mentality. «In the States, all productions by young people find support in the audience, even the bad ones. That motivates young people to go further. In Greece, people do not detect the good elements a show may have but talk about how much more work needs to be done. I think that is because of Greece’s long history; the weight of the past makes Greeks judge things far too seriously by comparison and makes them less willing to give young people a second chance.» Laskaridis and Eliakis’s next plan is to try and screen the video at as many festivals as possible – already they have applied to Athens’s Synch Festival (an annual event for avant-garde artistic expression) in July and are waiting for a reply. They have also been in touch with Bios. For practical purposes, because stereoscopy is hardly used, they are also planning to promote «Downlove» as a monoscopic video. «Now that the stress is over, I can say that we should not stop. We should all keep trying, no matter how hard it is,» said Laskaridis.
