Street Art in VR — Hohou a Rongo
Whangerei — Lash Together with Peace
I’m building virtual worlds with public art that pulls me in and gets me thinking and feeling in different directions all at once. That’s the best kind to talk about. I download the art as high resolution 360 degree images from the Street View database, an unexpected gift from Google and millions of people who contribute their work.
My current social VR platform of choice is VRChat, where I can upload a weekly build in Unity, the gaming/modeling software, and produce an on-going Street Art of the Weekl! event. We’ve featured Whangerei, New Zealand for the past few weeks, full of murals created for the Street Prints Manaia, International Art Festival in 2019.
According the Festival website, Hohou a Longo is about weaving the heavens together with the land. The person in the foreground is a Tohunga, an expert, actively praying while holding a Kō, the most basic tool for cultivation, over his head. The Kō is a blade lashed to a strong stick, with a foot piece.
‘Lashing together’ is a strong phrase with emotional overtones. Here it is shown as a way to produce a tool that couldn’t be predicted from any of the parts, with the foot piece for transferring body weight representing Rongo, the God of Cultivation.
All of the images being actively connected by a human have deeper meaning in Maori culture. The tree on the left side has a circular branch pattern at the top for the living family of relatives and a mirror image in the roots at the bottom for the ancestors.
There is much more to be learned from Hohou a Rongo and I invite anyone to add background in the Comments. I am also struck by what I and others who have visited Street Art of the Week! in VR bring to the mural without any background in Maori traditions. It is clearly an act of creation and connection. People are not just beholders but actors. It’s a complicated cosmos.
After ten minutes of discussion and focus on the work of art, it is jarring to turn around and see that the large mural is a tiny part of a commercial area with parking lots and pedestrians. It’s Whangarei, New Zealand but it could be Worcester, Massachusetts. It could be any ‘developed’ section of Euro-American culture on earth.
There is almost no earth. All we can see is asphalt. Streets with lanes, lots with places clearly marked. Stuff for sale. And a big Maori mural over in one corner.
Step out of the large photosphere where I set the spawn-in point and people who come to Street Art of the Week! find themselves in a much larger dome that feels like looking over Whangerei from Coronation Scenic Park, because someone recorded and uploaded a beautiful 360 image from there too.
It’s sunny, we’re surrounded by trees and mountains and now it’s the city that looks tiny. Hanging on to the northern tip of the islands. The point of departure for most islanders leaving to travel preposterous distances around the Pacific — and for most off-islanders arriving to trade or settle.
The lush sub-tropical greenery of northern New Zealand is hinted at in the 360 image recorded in Ross Park and placed in another sphere outside the featured mural. A playground on Pohe Island just outside the city provides a different view nearby in another sphere.
By entering these micro-Whangereis, we are not learning about Whangerei in the same way we would by living there, or by visiting there. We could also learn about Whangerei by reading ‘history,’ stories told by the current ruling occupants. Or by reading ‘myth,’ stories told by the previous ruling occupants.
I recommend them all, always being aware of the perspective that is assumed. In that sense I also recommend 360 visits in VR — the way I do it, as exhibits, or the way the Wander social VR app does it, stepping along the Street View.
In Street Art of the Week! I’m trying to take a few more steps. One is to stick around for a while. We’ve been in Whangerei for three weeks and counting. We’re not just cruising through on a tour bus crossing off another place as fast as we can.
Another way I’m having fun with Street Art of the Week! is to go beyond street art. Bring in some distinctive places, non-generic places. The parking lots are generic. The mural is non-generic. Some ‘art’ is as generic as the parking lot. Ho Hou a Rongo is not. At least it looks that way to me.
I just realized as I was writing that it shouldn’t be that difficult to find someone in Whangerei who is into VR — who would love to join us live, maybe even next week. It’s at 10am every Wednesday, pacific time, where I live. That would be pretty early in Whangerei. We’ll work on it. Find out how Ho Hou a Rongo looks from there.
Tom Nickel writes about new media technologies and other topics he has little if any standing to write about. His work has not appeared in The New York Times, New Yorker Magazine, The New Republic, or the New England Journal of Medicine.
Tom holds a Black Belt in Learning and is a founding Board Member of the African VR Campus & Centre and a long-time supporter of the Khmer Magic Music Bus.
You can join a small but growing number of people like you who subscribe to his little gumballs of text for free on Sub-Stack.
