Laurie Anderson's VR experience 'Chalkroom' allows you to fly through stories

Artists are creating experiences in virtual reality, and it's especially exciting to hear that multimedia pioneer Laurie Anderson has entered this space. With Taiwanese new media artist Hsin-Chien Huang, she has created "Chalkroom" (aka "La Camera Insabbiata"), an immersive virtual reality experience that lets its viewers to fly through words and stories.

Prompted by this interview with the Louisiana Museum, Open Culture writes:

The piece allows viewers the opportunity to travel not only into the space of imagination a story creates, but into the very architecture of story itself-to walk, or rather float, through its passageways as words and letters drift by like tufts of dandelion, stars, or, as Anderson puts it, like snow. "They're there to define the space and to show you a little bit about what it is," says the artist in the interview above, "But they're actually fractured languages, so it's kind of exploded things." She explains the "chalkroom" concept as resisting the "perfect, slick and shiny" aesthetic that characterizes most computer-generated images. "It has a certain tactility and made-by-hand kind of thing" this is gritty and drippy and filled with dust and dirt."

Chalkroom, she says, "is a library of stories, and no one will ever find them all." It sounds to me, at least, more intriguing than the premise of most video games, but the audience for this piece will be limited, not only to those willing to give it a chance, but to those who can experience the piece firsthand, as it were, by visiting the physical space of one of Anderson's exhibitions and strapping on the VR goggles. Once they do, she says, they will be able to fly, a disorienting experience that sends some people falling out of their chair..."

Field trip: "Chalkroom" can currently be experienced at MASS MoCA in North Adams, Massachusetts.

Thanks, Whitney!