Future Play­ground  is a series of booths in Shed 6 which explore digit­al artistry. There are VR videos, games and exper­i­ences along with aug­men­ted art*,  light sculp­tures, and even a music­al med­it­a­tion to try. (Sadly I didn’t have time to try SUBPAC Sound Med­it­a­tion. Every­one try­ing it looked very peace­ful.)

There are a lim­ited num­ber of head­sets or inter­act­ive places so much of the time you’ll be wan­der­ing around watch­ing people hav­ing a go. Lit­er­ally watch­ing in some of the VR cases – you can see on the screen what people are look­ing at inside their head­sets. Most of the inter­act­ives are quite short although your mileage will vary on how long you’re pre­pared to wait for each sta­tion to become free. (The chil­dren there were extremely patient until it became obvi­ous that you’d fin­ished the game when a voice would say loudly “It’s actu­ally the end”.) They’re long enough to give a taster of what the VR exper­i­ence is like and each is a dif­fer­ent take on what that exper­i­ence could be. Pearl is a music video/story set in a car; Mani­fest 99 is a mys­tery fol­low­ing char­ac­ters in a train crash; Move Stu­dio shows dan­cers and bas­ket­ballers mov­ing in space; Tree lets you exper­i­ence life as a tree (I didn’t have time to do this one either.)

The light pieces are easi­er to share with a group – Infin­ity Room uses light and sound to dis­or­i­ent and excite. Lumarca presents anim­a­tion in a string filled box and uses open source cod­ing. Exp.Inst.Wood is a high tech low-tech look­ing key­board which con­trols the sound and pro­jec­ted lights. (This is where you find out which of the afore­men­tioned chil­dren are aspir­ing DJs.)

The last one I didn’t get to try was Pop n’ Lock Dance Machine as you needed friends to do it with you. You can see the May­or give it a go though.

An inter­est­ing exhib­i­tion of some of the ways tech­no­logy is being used in art.

*Down­load theEye­Jack app before you go so that you can jump right in to Pros­thet­ic Real­ity which has pic­tures wait­ing to be anim­ated dis­played around the Shed. Details on the Fest­iv­al web­site.

  • Future Play­ground, on at Shed 6 as part of the New Zea­l­and Fest­iv­al, to 11 March 2018