Sea, the Beyond

“Sea, the Beyond” is a VR immersive interactive piece about individual interpretation with imagination.

When it comes to interpretation, even just a common dialogue, it is a translation process from receiving, understanding, self-explaining, and delivering further subjectively. We are free with our imagination to visualize those scripted scenarios in books based on real-life experiences in our minds. Everyone is like a movie director who can generate different narratives even based on the same stories. Although there are possibilities of lost-in-translation during the process, it still can lead to a beautiful piece. Just like dreaming, our subconscious weaves our daily experiences into extremely immersive experiences that might be totally opposite to reality. VR as an innovative creative tool is suitable as an immersive interpreter to realize our imagination, a game-like fresh sensorium environment beyond time and physical limitations.

In the “Sea, the Beyond”, the artist put himself as an outsider(alien) to this Earth who knows little about natural phenomena, animals, plants, and environments. Given the task of re-building an immersive metaverse-like experience of the Earth, a series of scenes as circular falling rings with different frequencies as rain, a noise flash thunder, a chunky geometric style of birds/turtles/a whale, a point-cloud-like tree, tidy grids of lines as ground merging to become a unique-interpreted version of our living environment where “being under the water” and “being in the air” can co-exist at the same time. When experiencing the piece, the audiences might find some similarities in nature but the imagination will lead to their own fantasy world or connect to the memories in the real life. This lost-in-translation is the same as where our imagination comes from, and it is the gift of a human being that we’ve been stopped using often due to the over-reliance on visuals. Hence. what we can see is the thing(sea) but what we shall do (beyond) is imagine.