War Theater Act 1
YEAR:
2020-2023
LOCATION:
Charlotte, NC
TYPE:
virtual environment, computation, logistics
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AWARDS:
Faculty Research Grants, UNCC
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CREDITS:
Simulation/VR: Michael Allen
Early research: Cam Norris
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War Theater Act 1 is an interactive virtual exhibition that stages “nonhuman laborers” in meat processing facilities. Designed as a two-story space, this virtual environment presents a catalog of computational research that rethink industrial big boxes as combinatory relationships of particulates and motion axes and to make a case for automation and humanity. These computational experimentations on display particularly focus on air along assembly lines, which is a mixed medium with gasified byproducts that are created as a result of their contact with the sorting, cutting, sawing, and drilling machines. Depicted through thin slices of the digital air, traces of motion, fluctuations of particulates, and the virtual instability of materials that manifest the invisible intensity of the movements of the air, such violent invisible activities of air are manifested in the digital display. Wandering within these virtual interfaces, one will encounter draped grids, material failures, scattered baskets, particle storms, and so on—a visual kit of the ephemerals that participate in the vulnerable meat-processing infrastructure.