Department Of New Realities

0:04[Applause]

0:13hello earth freaks little mic adjustment obviously perfect so we're from the department of new realities and like the beautiful intro said a collective and a group within widening Kennedy Amsterdam but not always we both come from kind of a crazy suburban help America Australia a place where we had to create our own worlds essentially in our own cultures ♪

0:54yeah and I guess the the theme is that we're always interested in combining technology yeah with a consistent theme of kind of creating these fantasy worlds to escape to and some of these fantasy worlds were lowbrow video game hacking and this is a an idea of using the Unreal Engine and using it as an art medium in itself and this is probably 15 years ago when it was first coming out and not the new like way better Unreal Engine for VR but just the idea of like thinking about how you can break the pipeline of traditional development and make art out of these usual commercial engines and also thinking about intimate internet and this is this idea of you know with net art it was a there was a certain intimacy with how websites can have a soul and have a heart being this idea of coming out of the gallery space and going into this one-on-one relationship that you have with the screen and so we explored a lot of like expression forms within that that kind of idea and medium and also thinking about music video kind of content and how to weave in dose dating interfaces and kind of marrying nostalgia and interface design inside inside the medium of music videos and then thinking about kind of deeper spiritual notions about what happens in the afterlife and whether we might need to think about digital destinations and worlds that don't need our bodies yeah and making sure I guess our avatars are fit and healthy in that space and thinking about transportation of the future and potentially having kind of spar experiences as you travel in these pods through post-apocalyptic spaces we are thinking about cyborgs run runaway kids and having met avatars that are able to rock walk the runway and just kind of like really treating avatars in the hyper sensationalized way of a man and all of this is a kind of what we call apocalyptic or optical mood swings also yeah I guess I think a lot of our aesthetic has always been like sort of hyper real psychedelic sort of punk anti designed and all of these kind of like approaches mixed together to create a sort of like effect on the pixel so just say taking it out of something.

3:32That's drawing giving it something that has a feeling it has like sort of like a possessed ghost kind of a DNA about it yeah and I think everything we do we're trying to give a greediness or almost like a dirtiness to technology like taking it out of that perfection and giving it like a an imperfection to make it feel like it has a soul and so I guess we started seeing all of these realities you know some of these are dystopian some of them are positive but essentially we started seeing infinite possibilities to help redefine the futures landscape and with TP TNR the department of new realities it's we're trying to reflect what's going on with technology around us and and just see what's kind of happening and see what's happening in Silicon Valley and modern you know sort of tech products that are coming out and what we can do to give it a personality and that's a big goal of ours or just like alright let's try to take something that doesn't really have an infusion of art and adapt our pipeline so everybody is well-versed and being able to switch from doing 3d content to work with some new augmented reality headset or going back into low poly form for some kind of a hardware that's digital jewelry that needs to have some kind of basis of content and all of these kind of ideas we're always flexible so that we can we can enhance reality within within current tech culture and all of this work starts with what we call speculative fiction visions and we start trying to think about how the future could be and try to articulate this idea around certain themes like whether it's dystopia and sci-fi or if we want to go with health tech and positivity there's a lot of different angles that we can we can get inspired by it.

5:30But it's always thinking first of what's not possible currently but will what could be possible in the future and using that to drive experimentation and prototypes that help us lead in the right path as a form of direction yeah and a lot of the time we're just thinking about Instagram content or animations that we want to make that tend to kind of help direct the vision of what we're thinking about so for instance this is us trying to think about artificial intelligence in the future and whether that might be like a meditation tool for us and that kind of leading into the design and thinking behind this physical meditation pod that's actually kind of a more of a real-life version of that or playing with crypto kitties which is cryptocurrency and thinking about like a crypto kitty daycare which is inspired by a future where we have to clean out our cat litter bank accounts and keep digital assets groomed and profitable it's almost remix in cat grooming behavior with cryptocurrency ideas to spin money into something that it has like a sort of a cat like totally it said I didn't even know what you just said I don't either we remain good let's just keep going so these speculative fiction thinking kind of flies into client desires so generally we're kind of jamming on these potential futures and sometimes clients are like yeah we want that or we want a version of that. And so we're kind of constantly kind of experimenting and coming up with ways to bring in clients into our fantasy work that we're creating this is an example of an apocalyptic speculation turned into an actual client project for Corona and this is a VR game installation that we created called bitmap Banshees where you ride through like a post-apocalyptic version of Amsterdam yeah and the the the whole goal is you're riding on that bicycle and you're riding through Amsterdam and having these banshees come towards you and you're collecting carrots to overcome them and jump out of them it's basically like a sort of a there's an element of gameplay but it's also there's a certain like element of voyeurism about like what does this experience for people that are not in VR and this is an example that will show like a we're like alright let's get our clients looking at our clients act you know being in this game and getting some reactions and so this is what we're getting in terms of like responsive mood is something liking yeah and but because we were dealing with a certain level of hyper reality simulation we were dealing with using fans to create wind when you're in B are using haptic feedback to give you some sense of physical interaction.

8:47And sound and all of these in the physical act of exercising while doing it all of this hit a cue with Corona and they were like but we really love what you're doing that you're experiencing the you know when you're given experiences that touch all the senses and and is there a way to do that without without all the freaks in it. And so they're basically like you have to take the Lumbees out take out the the goth vibe which was kind of hard for us because we don't really like the beach but we basically they really wanted a super hyper real paradise that you could touch and feel that felt like a simulation of nature essentially so that was kind of our brief and it was super exciting because we were able to kind of play with haptics and actually make trick people into thinking they're actually walking through a paradise yeah and this is an important topic because if we look at what is the lack of nature due to the brain makes them nuts say yeah and it makes them crazy so we just yeah we'll show you what we made which is a you kind of follow an antagonist as she walks through the entrance of a sort of urban gritty warehouse and goes through BR and ends up in a in a paradise in in real life in the end but all set to the Nightmare on Elm Street soundtrack just for we switched ♪

10:39[Applause]

11:52so that's that's what makes the bread and butter in this organization is running these kind of a speculative vision into into client gigs but a lot of VR as a strong effect and it has a strong vibe when you're in that.

12:10So if you're in a nature simulation if you're in these kind of environments in VR you you have a sense of well-being even though it's it's in a virtual environment and so we can kind of choose like are we wanting to make something positive make something negative because these think these content approaches have a very direct effect on us and because it's so mentally demanding it has such an importance on us we want to make experiences that are considerate to a good positive vibe depending on the day again but it's today we're feeling that. And it's a yeah it's not all goth wave but for this project we took inspiration from 70's culture and thinking about how nostalgia and technology might work together in an interesting way to help people kind of tune in and drop out a little bit and be a little bit less demanding on the senses like some augmented reality and sometimes this technology can be and so we created a platform called lava which uses audio fingerprinting technology so kind of like Shazam and it detects what trigger different augmented reality sculptures and in this particular instance these sculptures were on rotating vinyl so synched with an album launch ♪

13:53cuz I know what you don't know that. There is so much to talk about it seems I am ♪

14:22sorry so we did learn something about the seventies by I've been feeling of that incorporating technology and that.

14:45That's when you're creating digital content there's something nice about being sensitive to how we actually want to use the AR or uses the new technology and in this case lying on a shag carpet listening to music looking at the AR then going back to lying on the shag carpet making out all of whatever whatever you're doing on the whole thing that the AR does not have the intention of needing a hundred percent of your of your time and your efforts and in this way.

15:12That's what we call the whole platform lava is it's a it's a certain subtlety where you can look at it step away and come back to it it still feels like a holistic experience and you know that could be useful if you have something like a fitness plan for the day and like so these kind of things are like we can also be aggressive with they are and be like look at me look at me and use this to our benefit or for a certain motivational factor those with some little guys that recreated we're thinking about like fitness and how boring it is so we thought about having these little Fitness assistants sit on your desk and remind you to work out or like remind you to move when you have a moved but then we had basically yeah another client calm down like can you put clothes on these things.

16:09And we have a friend from Montclair so we ended up thinking about a really interesting project with them that ended up being a collaboration to kind of reimagine the printed page and specifically for a lookbook for their genius collection launched a few months ago so flipping through the book triggers different content that's aligned each piece of content is aligned with one of the different designers ♪

17:09we use speculative future visions and beauty and absurdity to give technology as soul and that's in this case this is the soul of man controlling a graphics card future God and just kind of like see how gesture control these kind of like digital deities and but above all we want to use technology to enhance reality and that's why we're kind of stemming from all of like the extremes of human potential and emotion thank you thank you [Applause]