the known/the strange

Wander through the spaces of Felix and dive into virtual worlds on a contemplative journey into the known/the strange.

Illustration: Flóra Pálhegyi

Along a meditative route of immersive art, ‘the known/the strange’ invites you to zone out and turn inward. Wander through the building of Felix and find virtual reality and short films exploring the concepts of memory, desire and disorientation. Be transfixed by choir harmonies, pointillist memories, misty saunas and double realities, and let this journey of sensory experiences lead you to quiet introspection and imagination.

This program is curated by composer, filmmaker and audiovisual artist Alex Raúl.

Stories in Felix

The stories told in Felix explore past, present and future, inviting (critical) reflection and imagination. Based on the deeply held belief that the future, too, must be inclusive, we position digital culture as one of our central themes, and exhibit the works of trailblazers, artists and storytellers who make the future tangible.

In the Mist | VR

In a dim-lighted room filled with mist, blurred figures of men are sipping the desire and loneliness from each other. You seem to have entered a forbidden zone and fallen into a state between dreaming and being awake, gazing at someone and also being gazed at by them. Theatre and new media director Chou Tung-Yen once again touches on the unspeakable life experience of the gay community culture, exploring a male sauna through poetic lenses to take a peek into something that’s hidden under the desire—the love without love.

Shadowtime | VR

“You are in two worlds at the same time. Your body is in the other world, but your heart is in this one.” To exist in the virtual world is to have two bodies, four hands, two hearts. Alma, a mysterious guide to this double world, leads you through questions around the climate crisis, irreconcilable realities, and the virtual as a place to take shelter.

Read more

Shadowtime is a new word coined for our age, describing the feeling of occupying two irreconcilable times simultaneously. It is being stuck in a traffic jam on your way to work and realising that the gas in your engine is the compressed mass of prehistoric creatures. It is scrolling through your phone and remembering that the earth is changing irrevocably. In Shadowtime, these temporal incompatibilities are explored in the realm of virtual reality and simulation theory.

Ferenj | VR

In this autobiographical VR, carried along by nostalgic Ethiopian tezeta music, the user drifts through Ethiopian-American director Ainslee Robson’s personal memories of both Cleveland and Addis Ababa. The 3D images are made using photogrammetry and are composed of countless colored spheres, so that people and objects slowly become abstract as you get closer.

Read more

Floating through the pointillist reconstructions, which form, deform, and disappear, thus merging seamlessly one into another, we experience the fragmentation, elusiveness, and fluidity of both memory and Robson’s mixed-race identity.

Robson counters this in a voice-over addressed to Empress Taytu, namesake of her parents’ restaurant in Cleveland—one of the few places where she feels completely at home—and a proud symbol of Ethiopia. In that country, to her frustration, Robson is addressed as a ferenj, a foreigner. This is an experience she also wishes to share with visitors to this VR—they enter her world as a ferenj and grasp its layers to differing extents depending on their own backgrounds.

CAVES | VR

Research indicates that prehistoric cave dwellers paid special attention to the acoustic properties of caves with intricate echoes, likely using them for rituals and echo location. The immersive experience of CAVES, created by director and composer Alex Raúl, art director Bats Bronsveld, and character designer Charleton Mercelina, allows audiences to hear intricate choir harmonies recorded with 3D audio techniques, providing a glimpse into the past.

Short films

Kiss

In the aftermath of never-ending disasters and epidemics, fewer and fewer people are still surviving. They said the apocalypse has come. K walks alone in the long-abandoned gay sauna. Human body contact has become an anecdote of the last century. The decadent and damp smell permeates, and only an old tree seems to have taken root here, stretching its withered branch, seemingly longing for and yet admiring something. Director CHOU Tung-Yen uses a sci-fi fantasy to recount the loneliness of modern people trapped in times of epidemics and isolation. And he tries to depict the longings for others’ touches and the endless search for self in a near-future scenario.

Our Ark

Our Ark is an essay film on our efforts to create a virtual replica of the real world. We are backing up the planet, creating 3D models of animals, rainforests, cities and people. We are archiving as if ecological collapse could be staved off through some digital Noah’s Ark of beasts and objects.

Adolfo Bioy Casares’ 1940 novella “Invention of Morel”, features a device that can perfectly capture life — at a cost. Anything captured by the device is infinitely replayed as a hologram but destroyed in the real world. In another approach to simulation, Elon Musk has said: “The odds that we are in base reality is one in billions”. He refers to an idea popular amongst technologists and entrepreneurs: the simulation hypothesis, which argues that we live in an artificial simulation rather than in reality. Enthusiasm for this hypothesis may be explained by the nihilism of our current trajectory. This belief offers solace against paralysis: as we bring our world to ecological catastrophe, we terminate only one of infinite “simulations”. At its core Our Ark explores this conflict.