Street Art Talk in VR
Life Extension for Public Art
5Pointz was a Taj Mahal of Street Art. It’s gone now. Developers pay more than artists. Buildings are platforms and we dance to the owner’s tune.
Some of the art of 5Pointz was recorded as high resolution 360 degree images by the Google Street View camera and by individual’s who created their own images and uploaded them to the Street View database. It’s easy to find those images and use them with software that can recreate the place in VR.
I produced a simple reconstruction of 5Pointz using JPG images on the AltspaceVR platform in 2022. Now 5Pointz and AltspaceVR are both gone. Platforms are ephemeral, like Street Art itself.
This week, the Street Art in VR concept came back to life, on VRChat, the world’s largest social VR platform. VRChat did not make it easy. It demanded that I learn at least the rudiments of Unity, a game engine that I did not particularly want to learn about.
Like it or not, now that I can recreate public art on-location in VR with 3D modeling software, I am not so subject to the whims of a platform. Unity is a standard all platforms support at some level. I have exchanged social VR platform dependency for commercial software dependency.
All I want to do is find great public art, show it ‘on-location,’ and talk about it with lots of different people. That’s my whole idea.
The platform enables me to do it but it also determines how I do it at a very deep level. AltspaceVR, for example, was organized as a platform around scheduled events anyone could see in an Everywhere-Menu. The VRChat platform has none of this. Neither ‘scheduled’ nor ‘event’ has any meaning or support; instead, the operating principle is ‘Group’ and the goal is for you and your friends to go off to your own worlds and have fun together.
This silo-style value proposition has drawn about 50,000 fervent monthly users for years. It is also why VR is still a niche area. By comparison, top videogames like Fortnite and Roblox average over 200 million monthly users.
Reimagining Street Art in VR
VRChat is an on-going show. It doesn’t mind events, it just doesn’t think that way. It also doesn’t mind updating and change.
I still like the beat of a weekly frequency so my plan for VRChat, which is underway, is to select a new Street Art of the Week every Sunday. One piece, in a large photosphere, set inside a world.
Smates, the Belgian artist, painted this hyperrealistic, ‘Underwater Dog,’ from a photo by this photographer. It’s gigantic, four stories tall. It feels that way in VR, just as would at 47 De Langhestraat in Mechelen. It’s a strong image, but that’s not why I selected as Street Art of the Week.
I selected it because, to me, there is considerable room for interpretation in this image, hyperrealistic as it is. Is the dog happy or fearful? How did the dog get in the water? How will it get out?
I hoped that different people would see the work of art in different ways, and they did. There were not very many people but it was a start. To have both a VRChat-style weekly flow of new street art — and a semi-scheduled event where people can talk about what they see in the “Underwater Dog” with each other — I put a sign up in the world:
Talking About Street Art, Wed, 1pm eastern/7pm CET
Street Art of the Week world is published, public, and persistent. It’s open when I’m not present. If people find it and like it and bring their friends back on Wednesdays, we will have some good discussions in the weeks to come.
My view of the Underwater Dog? I like Smates. His striking images draw me in. This one feels more like puppy-needing-help, to me, than puppy-playing-around. How about You?
Here’s the URL, if you’d like to see it on Street View.
Any great street art where you live that you’d like to share?
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.
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