[FishTank]

[FishTank] is an immersive VR interactive piece questioning “what is the meaning of life?”. If life is composed of a pile of sensory experiences, what does the role of VR play here? If we are living just in another virtual reality world, do we retain our own free wills?

The title, [FishTank], illustrates explicitly the VR environment the audience will experience. In a large cubic space(tank) with a skylight, there is a small floating cube and a school of fish “freely” swimming inside. Not only through observation, but the audiences can add/reduce the cubes with the original floating cube to create sculpture-like continuous artificial reefs for the fish to navigate. This landscape creation process is just like building an environment in a video game, like Minecraft. It seems like the audiences have taken the lead owning the powers to manipulate the fish species as the God/Creator here. However, from an empathetic perspective by taking the “fish” here as the metaphor of human beings, we (human beings) are all just programmed and living in this water tank (virtual world) created and manipulated by another supreme species. Eventually, what is life? Is it just another programmable virtual reality environment we are living in, just like these fish in the tank?

Besides this philosophical concept, the piece is supposed to be fun to play. The artificial cubic reefs/environment can be passed through and created continuously by all audiences experiencing this project as a collective creation. This VR experience is mainly built in Unity while the real-time data get to be sent out to PureData and Ableton-live for sound production simultaneously. Even without interactively adding/reducing cubes, it is enjoyable to immerse oneself in this VR environment to escape from the real world for a bit, just like staring at your fish in the [FishTank].