FUSION is excited to announce its role as an official media partner with Versions: The Creative Landscape of Virtual Reality, a conference co-presented by the New Museum’s incubator NEW INC and videogame arts and culture company Kill Screen. The event takes place this weekend, March 5-6, from the New Museum in New York City.
Versions will explore the recent resurgence of virtual reality (VR) as an emerging medium that is rapidly capturing the collective imagination of creative practitioners across fields. The conference will convene luminary artists, filmmakers, video game designers, journalists and researchers to discuss VR’s past, present and future.
As part of the partnership, FUSION will be livestreaming the main conference sessions, which run from 10 a.m. through 6 p.m. ET on Saturday, via YouTube. The livestreamed portion will feature moderated panel discussions and project presentations, from the New Museum theater.
On Sunday, attendees will take part in a day of hands-on workshops designed to introduce both beginner and advanced participants to cutting-edge tools and techniques for producing innovative new experiences in VR, taking place in the NEW INC offices.
Speakers at the event include filmmaker and special effects supervisor Douglas Trumbull, 5D Global Studio Creative Director Alex McDowell, Google Principal Filmmaker for VR Jessica Brillhart, USC Institute for Creative Technology’s Skip Rizzo, Georgia Tech professor Dr. Janet Murray, New Frontiers at Sundance Film Festival Chief Curator Shari Frilot, 3-D Vision’s Gene Dolgoff, New York Times Associate Editor Sam Dolnick, Filmmaker and United Nation Senior Advisor Gabo Arora, and a wide range of other speakers.
According to its organizers, Versions aims to shift the conversation around VR from one focused on tools and gadgets to a dynamic interdisciplinary discussion that will examine how this technology is being shaped and defined by artists, scientists, filmmakers, the gaming industry and more. Conversations will span VR’s proclaimed status as an “empathy machine” and how it’s being leveraged by journalists and the military; address urgent questions regarding emerging standards around ethics and practice; consider the technology’s relationship to the brain and its neurological and psychological effects; as well as how practitioners are exploiting the format’s opportunities for embodiment and immersion.
Versions is organized by Julia Kaganskiy, Director of NEW INC, the New Museum, and Jamin Warren, Founder, Kill Screen. NEW INC is the first museum-led incubator and a hotbed for cultural innovation. Extending the New Museum’s mission of supporting “New Art, New Ideas,” NEW INC brings together a cohort of 100 creative practitioners working across disciplines to examine and invent the future through applied art and design thinking. Their partner for this event, Kill Screen, is a videogame arts and culture company interested in the intersection between games, play, and other seats of culture, from art to music to design. They publish a website and a magazine as well as organize events such as their groundbreaking Arcade at the Museum of Modern Art, film festival with Rooftop Films, and programming for the New York Film Festival.
More information on the Versions conference can be found at the event’s website, at http://versions.killscreen.com.